Temporary

I’ve written about this book a bunch already, but I can’t stop recommending it, so I am just going to plagiarize myself. From Alma’s Favorite Books for Spring 2020, I wrote: The protagonist of Temporary is nameless, and she is going from one temporary job to another. She’s a temp, filling in for mundane jobs, but the power of Leichter’s novel is that the jobs get increasingly strange: She’s filling in for chairman of a board, then on a pirate ship, then an assassin’s assistant, and so on. Kirkus writes it’s a “whimsically surreal fable of late-stage capitalism,” and I am inclined to agree; Leichter is satirizing how much of our identities are wrapped in our work, and the failures of the gig economy. It’s absurd, funny, and hits just a bit too close to home, like all the best satires do.

What I loved about Temporary was how downright weird it was. It felt like a natural extension of the world we’re living in — and of how by stretching things to the absurd (for example, our narrator has 18 boyfriends who all end up living together), we can reflect on how late-stage capitalism has changed our world forever. Also, I’m obsessed with this line from the New York Times Book Review, by Parul Seghal: “Temporary reads like a comic and mournful Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror.”

In an interview, Leichter said, “I forgot who said this, it’s a great quote that I’m about to mangle, but there’s this idea that a good book doesn’t answer questions, it asks new, better questions. I was thinking about that a lot as I was writing. Is the answer to all this just to get a permanent job? Or is it that she would be temporary … permanently? And then the question became, What does it actually mean to be permanent?” Permanent isn’t just the opposite of temporary, and so, “That became much more interesting to me because it showed a path for humanity that’s scary and interesting, and maybe not what the narrator expected in the first place. It’s true of so many quests, narratives, or fairytales where you get three wishes and the thing that you’re granted is not what you anticipated.”

Rating: ★★★★★

Get it here: https://amzn.to/2UnJai6 or find it at your local indie: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781566895668