The New Me by Halle Butler

The New Me is a book that has been on my periphery since it first came out. The cover, title, and summary were relatively intriguing as they gave me some very strong Ottessa Moshfegh/The Bell Jar vibes. Still, it wasn’t anywhere close the top of my TBR until I saw that Halle Butler is going to introduce a new edition of The Yellow Paper.

The New Me shares much in common with My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Pizza Girl, Luster, Severance (and many others): we a rather nondescript main character, thirty-year-old Millie, who is leading an unfulfilling and rather meandering existence. She is a temp worker who doesn’t really know what she wants to do or what she likes. Her latest assignment finds her working as a receptionist. The job is boring and Millie spends most of her shifts screening calls. Her mostly female colleagues are depicted as gossipy and self-centred. Karen, her sort of superior, hates Millie and decides that she wants her out. Millie’s first person narration is often interrupted with short snippets following Karen, other female colleagues, and at one point her downstairs neighbours. These segments detract from Millie’s narration as they don’t really add a lot to her story. They simply portrayed people being or acting in horrible way all the while believing they are right or good.
I did find Millie’s dark, and occasionally caustic, humour to be fairly entertaining. Yet, while Butler succeeds in satirising the modern work place and female friendships, her novel did feel a bit basic. It doesn’t take much to poke fun at women like Karen or Millie’s other colleagues. And part of me wishes that there had been some variations in the female dynamics (all female friendships in this book are the same: one of them whinges about life/work/whatever being unfair, the other one listens while internally whinging about having to put with her ‘friend’s’ whinging).
At the end of the day I probably wouldn’t recommend this book to a lot of readers (this type of story has been already been told…and dare I say better?). Still, it definitely had its moments now and again and I do think that Butler is a writer to watch out for.
Hilary Leichter’s Temporary is not only a far more entertaining novel (in my personal opinion) but it manages to capture the gig economy in a way that The New Me doesn’t.

my rating: ★★★☆☆

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