When this novel begins, Jonathan Abernathy is in purgatory—an empty office, a waiting room “located in a strip mall just outside the highway”—and he is desperate. Jonathan Abernathy has defaulted on his debt: “His loans, IOUs, and bills so diverse ecologists would be within their jurisdiction to classify the collection as ‘an ecosystem.’” Death, figuratively speaking, is in attendance. Throughout the novel, we never get to forget Jonathan Abernathy’s name (usually rendered as two words; rarely are we, as readers, on a first name basis with Jonathan Abernathy). We never get to forget his circumstances—that is, we are immersed in Jonathan Abernathy’s precarious world of debt and with debt’s lingering collector, death.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind isn’t just workplace literature. It is undeniably influenced by McGhee’s experience of work and inherited debt; it is anti-workplace literature, it is anti-American-dream, anti-bootstraps-to-tug-up literature. Jonathan Abernathy doesn’t just default on his loans, his rent, and his bills. He also defaults and voids his potential friendships, romances, and any relationships within which he might have to take some responsibility. Even relationships with himself. The reader isn’t allowed this grace: McGhee is craft-y, merciless. We see Jonathan Abernathy miserably failing to manage his debt; we see him as indebted, incompetent, and willfully ignorant. The reader is compelled, at every stage, to wonder: what comes first, circumstances or personhood and personality? Abernathy is skewered, trapped, unable to be anyone but Abernathy: twenty-six, a college dropout in a rented studio apartment, orphaned, unable to sit with his memories, unable to sit with others who are struggling (his neighbour, Rhoda, and her daughter, Timmy, or his immediate supervisor and colleague, Kai). The reader is compelled to consider, too, how might literature represent a social evil [1] by representing the interiority of a literary character?
McGhee will answer that the solution is this novel’s particular technique, i.e., free indirect discourse (FID), a third-person narrative style wherein the narrator takes on the voice of the character, championed by “Ms. Jane Austen and later used by folks like Mr. Joyce and Mr. Kafka.” It’s a contemporary style, quintessential to nineteenth-century realism [2], one that also contemporaneously mirrors the fragmentation of the modern individual by relativizing narrative utterances. [3] FID fits perfectly, too perfectly, into a novel where a character’s interiority allows traversal into a surreal universe. The novel is undeniably literary in this perfecting exactitude, born out of an MFA and a publishing career, with a narrative structure and style married to its constitutive plot—but it is also undeniably speculative, as speculative is often determined, with elements in the narrative world being not-yet-worldly or otherworldly.
In Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, dreams can be audited, changed, and their elements erased. In fact, it is Abernathy’s newest official job to audit dreams, to taxonomize their symbolic elements so another worker can remove these disturbances to everyday productivity. He’s a latter-day Chichikov from Gogol’s Dead Souls [4], contracted by the government instead of being hired, extracting dreams instead of souls; bumbling and over-sincere like many Russian protagonists. Abernathy, through his indebtedness, has become unceasingly unproductive (and in capitalism, disposable), and is thus set to work managing the productivity of others, personal risk be damned. It comes as no surprise, but Abernathy is pretty bad at this job—servile, self-deprecating, insecure, and self-affirming to the point of debilitating narcissism. That is, as bad as he is at relationships.
FID plays a part in such an interiorized landscape (especially because Abernathy cannot see beyond himself). It denaturalizes Abernathy’s complacency, rendering it as complicity. It narrativizes other possibilities to provide indirect exposition on other characters and settings. There are explicit depictions, roadmaps of events had Abernathy only acted differently: “Abernathy won’t see this, but …”; “Abernathy doesn’t want to … but …”; “Before Abernathy can think further on this …”; “There is a version of Abernathy’s life, maybe, where …” FID (again, by effecting distance from the protagonist and having the narrator directly address the reader) makes the possibilities and contingencies of interiority and plot transparent and easily accessible.
FID enables the novel’s surrealism. Abernathy travels through the dreams of those he knows, meets doppelgangers, shadow-selves, and in waking life, almost acts bravely. He almost acts! Action remains in the realm of this exposited possibility. The novel’s principal technique, despite its assumed literary commitment to a situated realism, makes it possible for the narrative to possess basic genre conventions, such as movements into parallel worlds of possibility and literalized dreamscapes, while retaining its realist world—as in, capitalism manages our waking lives. FID enables that realism to be made discursively contingent, with unreal incursions of phantasmagorias. Without FID, this Jonathan Abernathy could not have walked into another dream, or dream-like possibility, with or without protective gear.
Abernathy also constantly narrates himself: he too speaks of himself in third person—as perhaps we all do—while reproducing self-affirmations:
Jonathan Abernathy you are charming.
You are intelligent.
You are a very good friend.
There are layers of removal between Abernathy and the world, then, and yet Abernathy is an incredibly sympathetic (dare I say, relatable) character. He doesn’t go to therapy, but he is situated resolutely in the contemporary moment in which pop-psychological insights prop up one’s own sense of self. In this case, the character’s interiority is ironically reproduced through the character’s need for such props. Abernathy doesn’t stop at affirmations, or narrativized selfhood. Rather, he also uses other conceptual tools: “deep, slow breaths” or somatic therapeutic techniques; references to the “death of the self” or “ego death” from Jungian psychology to explain away his humiliation; and the conviction of bestselling consultant, psychiatrist, and author Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014) that “we carry our feelings in specific parts of our bodies.” Plotwise, these instances create pauses, moments in which McGhee lets Abernathy cope under capitalism. Pause. Breathe. Work. Breathe.
But these myriad, mundane, compulsively repeated events expose situations of illegally inherited debt, spurious legal contracts, the unsustainability of minimum wage labour, the exploitation inherent in all labor, the disposability of workers, the precarity of workers, wealth inequity, infrastructural hierarchies, non-infrastructural hierarchies, infrastructural collapse, credit scams, gendered labour, the burden of healthcare, rising rents and gentrification, consumerism, isolation—it’s a bad time. The idea that Abernathy can thrive in this world cannot be comfortably sustained; there’s nothing he can do other than cope. Pause. Breathe.
To cope, though, is mere paralysis—stultifying, deadening immobility. Abernathy copes by putting his emotions to work, numbing himself, managing the symptoms of what the world does to him. The way he copes, which is also how we are all encouraged to cope, entraps him (and us) in this individuated alienation, self-affirmation as self-inhibition, self-care as self-stasis.
But we’re in the realm of repeatability, and here the body keeps score—or at the least, dreams do. In writing this novel, McGhee consulted David Graeber’s Debt (2011) and Sidarta Ribeiro’s The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams (2019). Ribeiro’s work owes a debt to the Harvard Trauma Study Group, and to van der Kolk, who brought neuroscience to bear upon trauma as a “state of the body” (not, as Danielle Carr recently wrote, “a way of interpreting the past”). For van der Kolk, Ribeiro, and for the concerned Archive of Dreaming Office where Abernathy works in the novel, dreams contain the memory of violent events or real-life anxieties, becoming synaptic connections that monopolize sleeping activity. Trauma, thereafter, is understood as embodied memory. The bad dreams are its proof.
McGhee doesn’t spell this part out, but the reason why dream-interconnectedness can lead to a lucrative business entirely depends upon the now-established scientific idea that trauma (developmental, chronic, or acute) is embodied. And what is embodied can always be put to work. If it can smile, sing, stretch, and so on—it can make money. In simple Marxist terms, if there’s money to be made in extracting memory from dreams [5], the score that the body is keeping is surplus value. This is “emotional realism,” as McGhee calls it. Her novel depicts a world where interiority and interconnectedness have been subsumed by the conditions of capitalism. The only way to write about it, is to write through a quagmire of other possibilities, phantoms, alternate selves, nightmares, coping mechanisms, and, of course, conditions of labour and life.
In the novel, there’s an explanation (a classic science-fictional tendency) as to why people can move into the dreams of others.
Mycelium [systems] connect individual plants into a larger organism that can work together instead of alone … Individuals within a species are interconnected in hidden ways. Humans are not immune to this phenomenon. The main difference between mushrooms and humans is that our systems are activated as we sleep. We cannot see them. The roots that link us to one another are not visible. But in dreams, we are interwoven.
The novel makes interiority both phantasmagorical and intertextual, composing itself through other works—such as Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), or making a dream sequence out of the woman on the swing from Kafka’s “Children on the Country Road” (1912), and primarily, by continually returning to David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011). Wallace’s life (and his relationship with women) haunt this text—for example, I suspect that a pivotal dream sequence is drawn from DFW’s experience with Mary Karr in the nineties.
McGhee keeps it real. Ultimately, I’d say that the novel is both provocative and interesting. The novel does workplace horror, a particularly current niche of literature and cultural feeling, rather well, connecting precarity to paralysis and monotony to paralysis in unveiling layers. The novel casts character into type: fit the mold, fit the DSM, fit the register. Nonetheless, I’m left wondering whether the emotional landscape appears too pat, too easily mappable onto the unconscious material of dreams. Isn’t the horror how easily therapy’s tools of managing the self can become tools to manage the working body? Shouldn’t we consider whether FID only enables estrangement within a socioeconomic system that is already estranging—and what that means for literature? Where does alienation become a subjectivity sufficient to be literary? And what is the relationship between the political novel that attempts to describe the situation and the political novel that assumes the perpetuality of the situation?
And, critically: where does speculative fiction meet capitalist realism—and is that its limit case? McGhee provokes in necessary fashion, delights in sensory detail, but she renders the provocation static too soon. The world sucks; we live it. Pause. Breathe. Work. Ad infinitum. Where’s the literature in that politics? Where’s the reinvention in that?
Endnotes
[1] For McGhee, the evil is capitalism—and her conception of it is robust. In the novel, capitalism is exploitation. The economic system sustains by reproducing and perpetuating through violence on bodies it deems disposable. It is also to say that all bodies are, ultimately, disposable. Some, whether by birth into a racial and economic group, or by downward mobility, are disposed of quicker than the others. The issue I do take with McGhee’s critique of capitalism, is that it is deterministic, exclusively dictating the contours of our world and the relations it produces, which are all exploitative (rather than being productive in excessive, unmanageable ways). But I’m not really trying to extract a pedantic definition from a novel, and so we must leave it here … perhaps as an indulgent aside. [return]
[2]Franco Moretti, The Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez (London: Verso), 1996. [return]
[3] Timothy Bewes, Free-Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (New York: Columbia University Press), 2022. [return]
[4] My attention was drawn to this reference through McGhee’s essay in The Paris Review where she begins with her experience of reading Gogol and surreal literature. [return]
[5]There’s an actual forbidden storeroom to keep boxed-up dream metadata in the novel. The components of dreams are explicitly extracted. [return]
[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Marguerite Kenner and Alasdair Stuart during our annual Kickstarter.]