Luminous, acerbic and devastating ... Abernathy’s story will be familiar to many American readers who came of age in a post-2008 economy on the decline ... McGhee brilliantly articulates the neuroses of a young person trying to survive in a system rigged against him ... McGhee’s canny, often bittersweetly hilarious prose reads as if George Saunders infiltrated the Severance writers’ room ... Given its gripping plot and out-of-the-box conceit, it seems likely that a large readership — and hopefully Hollywood — will find its way to McGhee’s novel. My only words of advice to that audience: Discuss this book with your friends! Listen to its message! Build the emotional and intellectual connections that will ultimately disrupt capital’s attempts to keep us isolated. And whatever you do, don’t end up like Jonathan Abernathy.
Has the murky air of a swamp — a feeling that one could sink with her characters right through the novel’s soil. Maybe this is why the narrative proceeds with a light step, bound to the surface of what Abernathy sees and knows, which isn’t much ... By the end the novel feels like a dream that cannot be forgotten. Abernathy is too sweet, too small, too alone for us not to worry about him being swallowed by this nefarious business. He fumbles; he yearns. Like all of us, he is too human for the logic of this nightmare world.
Fierce ... This dystopian drama is a shout of millennial protest and a bleak workplace satire ... The novel grows richer as McGhee digs deeper, showing the disturbing links between Abernathy’s work and his waking world – as well as the life of the woman he begins to love.
Sparkling ... The unreality of the setting is expertly used to suggest the inhumanity of many accepted norms, and the narrative unfurls into a superlative state-of-the-nation novel like no other. Full of astoundingly resonant and eminently quotable points about labor, capital, and depression, this wondrous literary creation brilliantly captures the excessive demands of contemporary work.
cGhee’s wry humor, tenderness, and razor-sharp writing keeps it from veering into nihilism and infuses it with a real, if melancholy, kind of hope. Upton Sinclair meets modern workplace satire—with a lot of heart.
