Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we\u2019re twitchy with regret and self-loathing, advertisers blare, \u201cNew Year, new you,\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s \u201cThe New Me\u201d (2019), a millennial office satire, finds its temp heroine, Millie, trying to life-hack her way out of loneliness and professional drift\u2014buy a plant, whiten her teeth, make friends, think positive. The trouble, Butler suggests, is that Millie can\u2019t begin anew until the world does. It\u2019s a vision steeped in the gloom Mark Fisher called \u201ccapitalist realism\u201d: fiction that strains to imagine another world, only to collapse back into the one we know. The deck is stacked; Millie is doomed.<\/p>\n
Now comes \u201cA New New Me\u201d (Riverhead), Helen Oyeyemi\u2019s ninth novel, its title a knowing wink at Millie\u2019s futile self-optimization. Our protagonist, Kinga, forty and single, grinds away at a corporate job. We meet her on a Monday: \u201cup at six,\u201d \u201ccrunching on instant coffee granules and repeating Snoop Dogg\u2019s daily affirmations.\u201d By week\u2019s end, she\u2019s 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\u2014magic. 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.<\/p>\n
Kinga-A is the striver, mainlining Snoop Dogg with her morning coffee. Kinga-B works at the same company, a bank, but with less zeal; Kinga-C, whose job is as vague as it is improbable, impersonates antique dealers and window washers. On \u201cmaintenance\u201d Thursday, Kinga-D glides through appointments set by her predecessors. Fridays and Saturdays are given over to pleasure and partying, the boundaries between Kingas softening as the week winds down. Sabbath Kinga is an enigma\u2014each Sunday she claims to stay in bed and catch up on TV, though the fitness tracker on the Kingas\u2019 shared phone intimates clandestine trips to who knows where.<\/p>\n
Helen Oyeyemi, the British Nigerian novelist who published her d\u00e9but at twenty, is an original\u2014a writer whose style is equal parts mischievous, moony, and tart. Her books occupy the borderlands of realism and fable, where the plausible brushes up against the impossible, and the laws of narrative logic are bent just enough to let in the surreal. If the self-help cant of the title seems to glitch or stutter, the book\u2019s contents shimmer with the same strangeness. Everyday routines are dusted with improbability: a typical meal is \u201cpale-amber-tinted broths and avocados sliced in half and covered in wildflowers.\u201d Even the day job is askew\u2014Kingas A and B work in the bank\u2019s matchmaking department, engineering meetups for personal-finance-focussed singles. Oyeyemi\u2019s prose is propelled by a subtle animism; her sentences sometimes seem to contain the whole book in miniature. At one point, a Kinga notices trees \u201cfull of tattered buds that had leapt for the light too early; I tried not to look, but they were everywhere, bright half lives crawling along the shadowy branches.\u201d<\/p>\n
Each of the Kingas sports her defining trait like a gemstone embedded in her forehead\u2014uptight, cynical, intuitive, and so on\u2014and it\u2019s easy to fall for the almost fairy-tale logic of their distinctions. But the Kingas are unreliable narrators; are their characterizations to be trusted? The voices can blur; sometimes, there\u2019s the faint sense of an uninvited presence among them. At one point, Kinga-F pauses over a line she\u2019s written: \u201cIs this really how I think about the things I see?\u201d she wonders. \u201cIt feels borrowed. But I can\u2019t think who would\u2019ve lent it to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Much of the novel\u2019s initial pleasure comes from its intramural politics. The Kingas squabble, kibbitz, and conspire, their volatile intimacy echoing the female frenemyships found in Oyeyemi\u2019s earlier work, especially \u201cParasol Against the Axe\u201d (2024), about three women reconnecting at a bachelorette party. Kinga begins in a kind of psychological solidarity: romantically alone but squadded up inside her head. There\u2019s loneliness in the diary entries, but never a whiff of real despair. The plot engine revs, gently, when a dark-haired man appears tied up in her pantry. He\u2019s Jarda, possibly someone\u2019s secret boyfriend, possibly the scion of a crime family. He joins a supporting cast who float through the narrative, speaking episodically about betrayal, first love, ambition. The Kingas themselves trade fragments of family lore and piece together partial memories. Some anecdotes spiral forward\u2014a ransom scheme emerges, bit by bit\u2014but others contradict or undercut one another, while still more seem to exist purely as motifs. One gets the sense that to grasp why any story appears where it does would be to understand the book completely.<\/p>\n
Across her nine novels, Oyeyemi has shown a restless fascination with proliferation, complexity, indeterminacy, and paradox. Her framing devices keep sprouting new limbs. In \u201cGingerbread\u201d (2019), one of her metaphors for art is a sweet loaf that\u2019s ruinous and sulfuric and tastes of revenge. A woman who eats it declares her life \u201cdestroyed forever\u201d\u2014then thanks the baker.<\/p>\n
Oyeyemi\u2019s novels are less punishing than that loaf, but just as likely to scramble the senses. Genres and registers collide: her prose offers, in a single page, poetic candor, sly wit, dad jokes, and contemporary therapyspeak. The call sheet for a scene might include the moon goddess Selene, Ariana Grande, and Hedy Lamarr. At once overstuffed and evasive, Oyeyemi\u2019s fiction is full of texts that shift shape for each reader, proposing that fiction is inherently confounding. \u201cWhat I write is made up, but it\u2019s also very, very made up,\u201d she once said. \u201cIt\u2019s not trying to reconcile its contradictions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Kingas in \u201cA New New Me\u201d seem engineered to multiply and sharpen contradictions. Friday\u2019s Kinga tells us that a man\u2019s features are \u201cvery, very ordinary, and his eyes are alight with a cheerful \u2018let\u2019s fix it\u2019 rationality\u201d; for Saturday\u2019s Kinga, the same man has a \u201cface full of restless crests and curlicues,\u201d as if \u201csummoned out of a shower of sparks in order to contradict all orthodoxies.\u201d Oyeyemi\u2019s point, perhaps, is that every perspective is hopelessly partial. In these epistemologically treacherous conditions, the Kingas model how to proceed with curiosity and humility: \u201cMaybe you see gentleness where I see joylessness,\u201d one Kinga muses, debating their shared therapist. Yet Oyeyemi sometimes seems to go further, endorsing a relativism so deep that even provisional consensus is out of reach.<\/p>\n
Oyeyemi is drawn to complication as an end in itself. She\u2019s compared stories to viruses\u2014always mutating, always spawning new forms\u2014in a vision that echoes William\u00a0S. Burroughs\u2019s idea of the Word as \u201can organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself.\u201d Her books, with their Borgesian labyrinths and witchy symmetries, sometimes flirt with nonsense. Meanings proliferate, then blur. A perfumer claims that \u201cfragrance has the power to delineate\u201d; another passage insists his scents are so immersive they \u201cprevent you from making\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. distinctions.\u201d Which is it? Or do Oyeyemi\u2019s words inevitably breed their own opposites, spinning fictions in which nothing is reliably true or false?<\/p>\n
Yet in \u201cA New New Me,\u201d the virus has achieved self-awareness. There\u2019s always been a flighty, avoidant streak in Oyeyemi\u2019s fiction, as if she forever wants to be telling a different story than the one she\u2019s begun.This novel is, in a way, about that very impulse: the lure of complexity as a means of escape. About halfway through the book, Oyeyemi delivers the septet\u2019s origin story. OG Kinga, as her variants call her, grew up sidelined and overlooked: her father went to prison when she was twelve, her brother floated through life on charm, and she was an outcast at school and made to feel inferior at home. At twenty-nine, OG Kinga attends her high-school reunion, primed to rub her beauty and success in her former classmates\u2019 faces. Perplexingly, they remember her fondly, as a friend. The gap between her self-image and their perception leaves her so rattled that she relinquishes control. \u201cGuys,\u201d she says to her inner chorus, \u201cwould you mind just being me? What have I been doing it for?\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the book\u2019s stories are later questioned or contradicted by other narrators. But, uncharacteristically, the provenance of this scene goes unchallenged. OG Kinga thought she was one thing; her classmates saw her as something else. The pain shatters her, and she splinters into an array of alters. The moment is oddly moving, in part because it seems to reach back and challenge Oyeyemi\u2019s usual strategy. Here the great proliferator tries, fleetingly, to fix the point of departure for all her novel\u2019s swirling forms. But, as OG Kinga retreats into the clamor of her seven selves, her one-woman circus looks less like a performance than like a defense\u2014a way to make herself too many to pin down, and too many to wound.<\/p>\n
Oyeyemi\u2019s characters are often fleeing from stories\u2014sometimes literally, as when Jarda\u2019s mother bolts for Czechia after a friend foists a manuscript on her, or when a journalist in \u201cParasol Against the Axe\u201d skips out to Prague after a letter from a disgruntled reader. But to run from stories is also to run from yourself, a pattern clearer nowhere than in \u201cA New New Me,\u201d a book whose title radiates neurotic self-multiplication. Selves propagate in Oyeyemi\u2019s fiction: as dolls, doppelg\u00e4ngers, a changeling with double pupils. Identities, like words, replicate virally. And, as the OG Kinga scene suggests, this proliferation isn\u2019t always creative\u2014it can flow from a kind of death drive. What\u2019s at stake isn\u2019t the familiar \u201cdeath of the author\u201d but a subtler vanishing act: you\u2019re spun through so many stories that you never get to exist at all.<\/p>\n
If Butler\u2019s \u201cThe New Me\u201d lampooned the self-improvement industry, Oyeyemi\u2019s \u201cA New New Me\u201d pushes the logic of perpetual upgrades to the point that self-help is indistinguishable from self-erasure. It\u2019s bloatware masquerading as betterment. Yet Oyeyemi doesn\u2019t mourn the loss of unity or push for resolution. Is Kinga better off as one or seven? The book is agnostic. Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi\u2019s simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we\u2019re…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88,1766,62539],"class_list":{"0":"post-91696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-textbelowcenterfullbleednocontributor"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}