Just a Dream – Go Back to Sleep
by Hugh Blanton
There’s a reason great surrealists are held in such high esteem even years after their death—surrealism is a difficult genre to write in, difficult to convince a reader to stay with a story of impossible weirdness. Poe, Kafka, Kobo Abe were all masters of the genre, their books still in print and their stories still anthologized today. The father of literary surrealism, Andre Breton, said surrealism combines (or resolves) dream and reality into a super-reality—surrealism. Many are called, few are chosen. If your vision of reality is shaped by, oh let’s say, the comments section of the NPR Facebook page, your reality may not be a good point to start a surrealist story. Somebody tried it anyway.
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Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is the debut novel from Molly McGhee. The attempt here at surrealism is almost comical—a governmental organization offers to assist corporations with increased productivity by cleaning up the dreams of their employees. Yes, someone will enter the employees dreams as they sleep and vacuum out the bad parts so the employees are less stressed and more productive. Yes, literally a suction hose vacuum cleaner. The cause of all this stress seems to be taken straight from NPR or MSNBC headlines: student loan debt, childcare, healthcare, late-stage capitalism. (Even God’s pronouns are they/them.) Jonathan Abernathy is hired on as a dream auditor—his entry level job is to audit depression/anxiety in white-collar workers. And yes, he has to lay down in bed and go to sleep before entering other people’s dreams. And wear a protective spacesuit.
It’s not just that we’re getting a bad story here, the prose is equally absurd. McGhee has an MFA from no less than Columbia (she now teaches undergrads there) where if they teach would-be writers to show and not tell, she flouts it now. ‘Jonathan Abernathy does not wish to suffer.’ ‘Is he terrified? Oh. Definitely. Definitely he is terrified.’ ‘He desperately desires to be good.’ The mistake she’s making here is parading and announcing when she should be embedding and revealing. She also makes this poor stab at a romantic scene: ‘A warmth spreads through his body and he feels his hand being pulled toward her shoulder, and then her neck, where he traces a finger up the small vein that runs from her jaw to her ear and then back again. The world’s smallest traced infinity. It feels incalculable to him.’ Then there are parenthetical digressions that contain parenthetical digressions ad nauseum until we finally close with a train of multiple parentheses at the end.
The whole concept of basing a surrealist novel on dreams is flawed from the start (unless of course the author has a knack for storytelling and writing, which we’re definitely missing here). There are moments in this book where the reader is supposed to be terrified, but as long as the reader realizes this is all just a dream the reader just has to wait for the dreamer to wake up. Other plot holes include a dream auditor who goes into the dreams of his ex-wife to erase her memory (yes, by vacuuming out the memory with that suction hose) of their daughter so that he can take custody of her. The mother ostensibly goes through her days afterward not knowing what everybody is talking about when they ask her about her daughter.
Jonathan Abernathy moves up the corporate ladder, he’s promoted from auditor to officer. The promotion comes with huge pay raise, but Abernathy decides to keep his part time job serving hot dogs by the mall in a hot dog vendor costume. He doesn’t even upgrade his living conditions, remaining in the cramped rented room in the basement of his landlady’s home. As part of Abernathy’s employment agreement, his student loan payments are paused as are the payments he owes on his deceased parent’s credit card debt. Abernathy inherited his parent’s credit card debt when they died, yet another plot hole in this Swiss cheese of a story—surviving children of course do not inherit credit card debt from their parents.
McGhee has mixed up her cause and effect here; dreams do not cause depression/anxiety, depression/anxiety cause bad dreams. She also posits here that humanity shares a consciousness when we sleep, much like the mycelium that connects fungi. Perhaps in the bubble of her life there in academia, everyone does have nightmares about their student loan debt. And maybe that does cause them stress, or at least the white collar version of it that her characters here are tasked with relieving. There’s a whole other world of stress that she is likely unfamiliar with—the freight loader in a warehouse fighting to load his quota of freight in the time allocated to keep his wage job. No amount of student loan forgiveness will give him any relief.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
by Molly McGhee, 279 pages
Astra House, $27.00
THE END
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