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There’s a pivotal moment late in Halle Butler’s novel The New Me when the book’s narrator receives some devastating news: she’s being fired from a job she desperately needs. If you haven’t read the book, it’s not a spoiler to know she gets fired—we’re basically told it’s coming on page fifteen, and watching the how and why of it as it develops and percolates is one of the book’s delightful, horrible pleasures.
Anyway, the narrator, Millie, has spent this whole time working as a temp for one of those high-end design boutiques that inhabit the Merchandise Mart. She’s been answering intermittent phone calls and shredding the occasional document and absently browsing the internet during the long intervals between actual work tasks. Really the thing she does most at this place is endure daily soul-crushing micro-indignities from her co-workers, who think so little of Millie that they demonstrate to her how to turn on a computer, and how to use a paper clip, and demand that her bathroom break coincides with her lunch break—it’s that kind of job, spiritually degrading, essentially inhuman.
But despite the indignities, despite the tedium, despite a workplace full of passive-aggressive jerks whom Millie regularly dismantles in her mind (another of the novel’s delightful, horrible pleasures), still she’s hoping to land this job full-time. She’s trying to go “temp-to-perm,” as it’s called. She needs the money, of course. Plus she believes that getting full-time employment—even miserable full-time employment—is the essential Step One in a path toward total life reinvention and spiritual wholeness. “I could have friends if I had more money. I could be easier to get along with if I had more stability,” she thinks, deciding that getting this job is the essential ingredient that will make her a better person, the “New Me” of the book’s title: “If I were a better person, I wouldn’t have to be so judgmental all the time. I could be free of it. Gym membership, Instacart.”
And by this moment late in the book, she’s convinced herself—via a kind of confirmation bias and self-deception that’s similar to certain specious think-only-good-thoughts manifestation practices—that this job is hers, that the offer is imminent, and she’s already begun spending money as if she has the job, and so when she gets a phone call informing her that not only will she not be going “perm,” but also she’s being immediately fired and then ghosted by her own temp agency, well, it’s a bit of gut punch. And the place where she gets this news is the Kinzie Street Bridge.
I tend to think of a novel as a series of about a million idiosyncratic choices made by an author, and sometimes I enjoy trying to guess at why a certain choice was made. For example: Why set this scene at a place as particular as the Kinzie Street Bridge? It’s one of the very few times in the book where an actual Chicago place is name-checked, so it calls attention to itself. Perhaps Butler’s using the bridge here because the scene occurs in winter, and the bridge would feel colder than the surrounding city, with the wind whipping off the water, up through the bridge’s open metal grates, making Millie feel even more vulnerable and exposed and miserable in this dramatic moment. Or maybe it’s because when a character gets really horrible news on a bridge, a reader’s mind just naturally goes right to “Don’t jump!”, and so it was a way for Butler to engage our sympathy and worry. Maybe.
But here’s my favorite personal guess: Anyone familiar with recentish Chicago lore knows that the Kinzie Street Bridge was the place where, in 2004, a Dave Matthews Band tour bus dumped about 800 pounds of human waste, pouring it through the grates of the bridge, intending it for the Chicago River below, but what actually happened was that it fell right onto the unfortunate, unsuspecting heads of tourists, who were taking an ill-timed architecture cruise.
And I think it’s just a perfect authorial choice that when poor Millie gets the worst news possible, it’s on a spot associated with getting epically shit on.
Much has been made about Butler’s generational cohort being epically shit on. The “Unluckiest Generation” is what millennials have been called—their childhoods defined by 9/11 and active shooter drills, their prime working years upended by historic recessions, over-burdened by rent and student debt, unable to get ahead. Indeed, an essay in The New Yorker described The New Me as a “definitive work of millennial literature” for its portrayal of precarious disposable gig-economy type employment. Which, yeah, okay, I suppose that makes sense: Halle Butler is like the poet laureate of shitty jobs (sometimes literally—her first novel, Jillian, centers on the seething resentments in a colonoscopy clinic).
But I also tend to think that balkanizing literature into generational factions isn’t entirely helpful, or even accurate. I mean, I can imagine many of my twentysomething Gen Z friends seeing a lot of their own early work lives reflected here. And I’m a proudly cynical Gen Xer who was constantly nodding my head. (I once had a temp job at a headhunter agency where my one task for an entire summer was alphabetizing about ten-thousand manila files’ worth of paper resumes. I’ve also washed dishes at a Godfather’s Pizza. I’ve also attended faculty senate meetings. And honestly I couldn’t tell you now which of these three tasks was the worst.)
What you miss if you think this book is only about the work lives of millennials is the way it’s actually about all of us, the way the world makes us all live now, a way that feels disconnected from meaning, disconnected from each other, and, often, disconnected even from ourselves. This, for me, is Butler’s great gift, dramatizing that terrible modern paradox: how a hyperconnected world leaves us feeling so disconnected, adrift, empty, alone.
It explains why, for example, there’s very little Chicago in this Chicago novel. The Chicago of The New Me is not the big-shouldered Chicago of industrial physical things. Nor is it the city of neighborhoods, as it is in the hands of so many other Chicago writers: think Nelson Algren’s Bucktown, Gwendolyn Brooks’s Bronzeville, Ann Napolitano’s Pilsen, Sandra Cisneros’s Humboldt Park. The book does not take you on a whirlwind tour of Chicago landmarks like Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife (or, frankly, my own work, the planting of Chicago Easter eggs being one of my favorite pet maneuvers). The Chicago of The New Me is more of a placeless Chicago, postindustrial, globalized, filled with the same stuff every other city has. It’s a book where more of the action happens over email or on google than in real physical locations, which makes me think that Butler, in choosing not to depict too much place, is illustrating in another way that feeling of disconnect, that feeling of cutoffedness from your own environment, that feeling you might get walking down a block that once held charm and individual character but has since been transformed into generic franchised homogeneity: it is literally no longer worth mentioning. Better just to scroll on your phone.
And yet, I also find this book a very deeply Chicago novel. Partly because of where Millie works, which turns out to be the satellite branch of a company whose HQ is in New York, and so one of her common and hilarious tasks is transferring phone calls from people who’ve mistakenly dialed the Chicago office when they meant to reach the “real” office, which makes Millie’s position feel even more useless and also seems like a nod toward Chicago’s “second city” anxiety-pride.
But even more than that, I think so much of Millie’s confusion and anger and resentment boils down on a fundamental level to her feeling betrayed by a world that, as it turns out, does not really value certain traits that I associate deeply with the Midwest—diligence, effort, frugality, stoicism—those Midwestern Protestant Work Ethic things that Millie inhaled growing up, as Butler did, in middle Illinois. In one of the book’s more heartbreaking moments, Millie fantasizes about going back in time to her small Midwestern town when she’s thirteen years old and making very different decisions, changes she thinks would make her current life better. But she doesn’t fantasize about, like, following her dreams or something; no, all she really wants to do is change her expectations of the world: “Bring them way down.”
It’s another of the “disconnects” that the book is interrogating: the decoupling of work and reward. That the complex of corporatization and financialization and brutal low-road efficiency and whatever else we mean when we use the phrase “late-stage capitalism” has effectively rendered moot that old connection between hard work and a good life. Success now feels either impossible, or like a lottery—and perhaps you know someone who happened to buy crypto early, or whose parlay hit big, or who jumped into a meme stock at exactly the right time, or, hell, just bought a house more than ten years ago, and now they’re sitting on generational wealth whereas you, like Millie, went to college and worked hard and yet feel like you’re getting nowhere. Whatever kind of bitterness bubbles up when you think about all of this, that’s the feeling that is haunting Millie.
“It should be easier to feel good,” she says in what could easily be the book’s thesis statement: that the world offers us so much stuff, but none of it makes us feel how we want to feel. There’s a quiet moment in the middle of the book that felt so true to me, when Millie sees out of the corner of her eye that a new email has arrived, and she’s zapped by that immediate lizard-brain thrill—Someone has written to me! Someone cares!—only to have that nice feeling tamped down a second later by her “knowing deep inside that it will be something about Thank You Points, shelving units from the Container Store, Mint letting me know I’ve spent money.”
Yes, that’s what the world sometimes feels like, especially at your lowest: you crave human warmth; you get spam.
There’s one more subtle authorial choice that I’d like to point out and applaud. At the beginning of the book, we meet Millie as she’s on her morning commute, doing that thing that’s familiar to anyone who regularly rides a subway at rush hour: her space is being invaded, the people around her are rude and inconsiderate, and she’s in a tiny silent struggle to maintain just a little personal sovereignty and dignity when the subway offers neither. Then late in the book, after that phone call on the bridge, she decamps from Chicago and makes her way home, back to her parents, where she’s hoping to find some peace and relief, but when she sees her mom for the first time, her mom’s face shows the unmistakable grimace of disappointment and worry, and the location where the two of them meet is, of course, a Subway.
Like, as in, the sandwich shop.
And I love the symmetry of that, these bookended subways, both filled with their respective overpowering smells, their respective letdowns, their respective barrenness. It’s one of those moments where it feels like Halle Butler is gently shaking us once again, like a concerned friend, asking us to wake up, saying: Doesn’t this bother you? Isn’t it awful that something as monumental as your very life is contained by things that are so mundane and bleak? Shouldn’t you be outraged at the gap between the dumb stuff the world offers and the grace you actually deserve?
We all need care and connection and compassion and love, but sometimes, these days, it seems like all we can get is a Subway in Bloomington-Normal.
FICTION
The New Me
By Halle Butler
Penguin Books
Published March 5, 2019
