ME, MYSELF, AND I

Helen Oyeyemi's novel of cognitive dissonance.

- BY KATY WALDMAN

The protagonist of "A New New Me" has an odd affliction: there are seven of her.

Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we're twitchy with regret and self-loathing, advertisers blare, "New Year, new you," urging us to jettison our failures and start fresh. In fiction, self-reinvention is a perennial theme, often shadowed by the suspicion that it can't be done. Lately, novelists have put a political spin on the idea, counterposing hopeful acts of individual self-fashioning to the immovable weight of circumstance. Halle Butler’s “The New Me” (2019), a millennial office satire, finds its temp heroine, Millie, trying to life-hack her way out of loneliness and professional drift—buy a plant, whiten her teeth, make friends, think positive. The trouble, Butler suggests, is that Millie can't begin anew until the world does. It’s a vision steeped in the gloom Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism”: fiction that strains to imagine another world, only to collapse back into the one we know. The deck is stacked; Millie is doomed.

Now comes “A New New Me” (Riverhead), Helen Oyeyemi’s ninth novel, its title a knowing wink at Millie’s futile self-optimization. Our protagonist, Kinga, forty and single, grinds away at a corporate job. We meet her on a Monday: “up at six,” “crunching on instant coffee granules and repeating Snoop Dogg’s daily affirmations.” By week's end, she’s exhausted, subsisting on delivery apps and barely able to move herself from bed to bath. But Oyeyemi, unlike her fatalist predecessors, conjures alternate realities. She swaps the dead-eyed liturgy of capitalist drudgery for something stranger—magic. Kinga suffers from a peculiar affliction: there are seven of her. Each takes charge of a day of the week, leaving voice memos and diary entries for the others; their texts and transcripts form the book.