The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips
My rating: 3/5 cats
to pull off a book like this successfully, it needs to either be very strong in concept or very strong in character, and i don’t think this book did either particularly well. it’s not that you can’t hang a book on a series of striking images, but you can’t do that and also make me like it.
as far as the concept goes; i’ve read variations of this theme in many different works from kafka and orwell and melville in the “work is soul-killing and bureaucracy surreal” aspect to jonathan carroll in this book’s big reveal. if i hadn’t encountered it before, maybe my mind would have been more blown, but one does not listen to leonard cohen and then get super-impressed by ryan adams.
and the characters – i don’t need to like the characters, but i need them to have character. this was too slippery. joseph has no defining characteristics to speak of, which makes the love story element between joseph and josephine hard to care about, even if you aren’t already annoyed with their matchy names.
i was enjoying the wordplay element of this book, because i am someone whose brain naturally anagrams words like i’m constantly playing a solo round of boggle. but THEN i got irritated when it became clear that the only reason it existed at all in the book was to pull of this clunky little fizzle of a zinger that made me wince.
How had she never noticed?
how indeed, schindler??
this review is much crankier than i’d intended going into it. i did not hate this book. i liked bunches of the writing while i was reading it, but flipping through it again now, months later, all i’m seeing is the stuff i didn’t like. maybe because i’m older now, and so naturally more cranky, or maybe it is because i am myself now unemployed, and so am resentful of the workplace novel in general.
who can say??
luckily for you, this got a starred review in kirkus, called out in huffpost’s most anticipated books of summer, and it’s one of the “big” books at BEA.
so i am definitely the one who is wrong here. which is super. rupes. purse. reups. persu. usper.
