The New Me feels like a definitive work of millennial literature, a cross between “Seasonal Associate”—Heike Geissler’s autobiographical novel about working in an Amazon warehouse—and the sort of Tumblr account that would go viral before getting its author fired ... Butler is most acute in her descriptions of how this late-capitalist nightmare affects the lives of women who occupy a certain stratum in American life ... It’s the ordinariness—the familiarity—that makes Butler’s work so wretchedly riveting. As I read The New Me, I started to feel like one of her characters, a woman who could spend a whole day saying nothing but 'Thanks!' in public and 'Fuck you!' in private, perhaps in the shower, perhaps to everyone she’s ever met. I was on edge, alive to the possibility that I was useless and despicable. There’s pleasure in her work, but it’s the sick, obsessive pleasure of looking under a bandage at a wound.
In her short, satirical and cautionary second novel, The New Me, Halle Butler explores self-improvement at its absolute, impractical, soul-crushing worst ... Masterfully cringe-inducing and unsparingly critical, The New Me extends Butler’s interrogation of those subjects, making the reader squirm and laugh out loud simultaneously ... The point of view consists primarily of first-person, present tense chapters from Millie’s perspective, but Butler intersperses a few close third-person, past-tense chapters from the perspectives of those around her. This fluctuating structure creates an effect that is layered and dynamic, deliberately distancing and cinematic at some points and almost claustrophobically intimate at others ... wit and insight keep the pages turning, and while Millie is well beyond concerns over being likeable, Butler has created in her a Bartleby the Scrivener-esque character who is nevertheless engaging in her refusals ... The New Me is an unapologetic and effulgent bummer of a book.
The tonal spectrum of this novel is narrow, but deep, running from desperate optimism to despair and back again, all set in the gory mundanity of an office ... It’s not that Millie’s delusional; her dejection is depressingly realistic.
Butler has proved herself to be a capable chronicler of thirtysomething anxiety, depression, and life-happiness negotiation ... Millie, a 30-year-old office temp struggles to compromise between her dreams of economic security and the low-grade depression she’d have to live with to achieve such a goal. Struggling with this compromise causes Millie’s own depression to show through, and Butler’s nuanced handling of that is what makes her one of the more enriching protagonists to read about this year.
The New Me is a depressing novel ... It is also bleakly funny ... Millie is from the now well-established school of the privileged antiheroine ... When the reader starts to feel compassion for Millie, it feels like a literary feat. That place of tension between the expectations of privilege and the colourless reality of life in an advanced service economy is fertile territory for art and comedy. Capitalism makes people behave odiously, the office becoming a backdrop for petty acts of psychopathy, revenge and narcissism, but opting out, or trying to, comes at a price. It’s the only reality we know. And that is a depressing thought.
... it is only fitting that a wry new novel about a professionally unsatisfied 30-year-old bad feminist is written by one of America’s brightest millennial authors ... Butler delivers a delightfully sarcastic account of American office culture and beautifully captures the universality of our most hidden inner monologues. Despite the mess that protagonist Millie has made of her young life, readers will desire her friendship and devour this concise novel by one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
Butler captures the way a person can feel grateful for—and terrified to lose—a poorly-compensated job that is an obvious, miserable, nerve-fraying waste of life ... Millie is surprisingly apolitical for a woman with a spiritually vacant low-wage job, a penchant for rage, hours to burn, and an Internet connection ... Millie is as cynical as a Ferrante narrator without the superhuman perception; as vicious as a Thomas Bernhard character without the rigorous self-awareness ... Without the pathos of real precariousness—she has plenty of escape routes—Millie sometimes reads like the sort of millennial caricature trotted out by Fox News anchors and boomer opinion writers: self-absorbed and entitled, lazy and undirected. There are moments when The New Me almost passes for satire—but the book confirms Millie’s point of view a little too often for this to be the case ... It feels, in a way, like a shortcut, a way to evoke a sense of generational fatigue without getting into the details, and to suggest political heft without mentioning politics.
... depressing and hilarious, cynical and side-splitting. Butler’s observations of character, dialogue and social class are barbed and relatable ... Just as in life, Butler entertainingly, bleakly, makes the case that it’s easy to lose direction when there are no signposts.
... incisive ... In short chapters, readers are treated to insights into the lives of the other women at Lisa Hopper, especially Karen, who has different plans for Millie’s future than what Millie is expecting. Though Millie’s mundane and self-destructive despondence sometimes feels all too familiar, Butler has nonetheless created an disquieting heroine with an indelible voice. Butler is a sharp and observant writer, who takes to task the tragicomedy of modern capitalism.
Though Millie’s mundane and self-destructive despondence sometimes feels all too familiar, Butler has nonetheless created an disquieting heroine with an indelible voice. Butler is a sharp and observant writer, who takes to task the tragicomedy of modern capitalism.
