Alexandra Kleeman’s brilliant and disturbing debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, is a fine heir to the tradition inaugurated by Poe, though others will undoubtedly compare her to Pynchon ... a powerful allegory of our civilization’s many maladies, artfully and elegantly articulated, by one of the young wise women of our generation.
In many ways, the world Kleeman has created is an anachronism, a particular extremity of late ’90s–early ’00s broadcast consumerism unburdened from the technological and demographic forces that would destroy it. Hers is a haunting landscape filled with the ghosts of a television-centric society that the internet has not yet punctured ... Kleeman illuminates a formless world with her remarkable talent for describing the qualities of light or taste or boredom with grace, humor, suspense, and even terror. Her prose brims with intelligence and precision.
The insidious and satiric dystopian elements of Kleeman’s story are inventive and will appeal to readers of Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem for a Dream, Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story ... Given A’s intellectual paralysis, limited range of emotions, limited topics of reflection, and overwhelming and profoundly uninteresting narcissism, the novel’s nearly 200 pages of blank affect, paranoid rambling, and banal questioning of a tenuous romantic relationship make for challenging and intermittently aggravating reading ... Thankfully, in the third and final section, Kleeman drops A in a weird, lively, and marginally coherent breakneck plot.
This frequently impressive debut has some of George Saunders’s loony satire and some of Don DeLillo’s bone-deep paranoia ... but Ms. Kleeman has a singular, off-kilter style, and a distinct vision of the absurd horrors that can come with being trapped in a body. Only in its last third, when consumer society’s subtexts become too literal, does the book lose some of its mysterious potency.
In her debut novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, [Kleeman] writes like a gonzo journalist embedded in skin, discovering things like hair and saliva and eyeballs for the very first time ... Body Like Mine begins as a navel gaze, a searing inner catalog of mushy biology, and becomes a takedown — chilly in its precision — of beauty standards, face creams, junk food, reality TV, love, hunger, closeness, human connection. And Kleeman owns all of it. Her voice is brutal and fragile at the same time. Her eye for the absurdity of normalness is so sharp that the book puts you into a bubble of weird you won't be able to shake off for hours.
Kleeman reported on 'fruitarians' for n+1 last year, and she’s good at capturing the beatific zeal of the orthorexic. Her genius in A Body Like Mine is to extrapolate new varieties of magical nutrition ... In the book’s final third, A descends into the bowels of the cult, and her story becomes more mechanical as Kleeman goes through the motions of a conspiracy plot ... Much more effectively unsettling are the quietly unhinged antics of B; the bland, blank imperturbability of C; and the phantasmagoric sensory detail that Kleeman imagines ... one of the best books I’ve read about what it feels like to have a body: the mystery of its unseen innards, the ongoing project of its appearance, the meaty fact of its movement through the world.
Touching on body image, mass media, consumerist religiosity, and the tortured relationships between ourselves, our bodies, our food, and each other, Kleeman’s haunting, dazzlingly-written novel pulls you inexorably into another world, where the rules are different yet painfully familiar.
The processing in You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine resembles the kind you experience in a dream; a working out of puzzles at a level just below that of awareness ... Ultimately no one goes anywhere in You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. It’s not even clear if the people we meet have a separate identity or if they are all facets of the same personality. This is a journey from A back to A again. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I enjoyed You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and so will you if you approach it with the right expectations. Think about a book which digs beneath the surface to our subliminal panic as we wait for a lover to call, count the hours we’ve wasted on banal entertainment, or gaze at the list of ingredients on the side of a package of Twinkies and you’ll go into this ready.
...[a] strange, entertaining yet occasionally maddening debut ... Kleeman is a deft, assured writer, confident in the weirdness of her vision and the sharpness of her sentences. But sometimes her plotting lets her down, and in the latter half the novel drifts around rather aimlessly. At its best You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine is a clever satire on the naval-gazing horrors of contemporary life ... Kleeman is brilliant on the cognitive dissonance of the beauty industry, which tells young women both that they are beautiful as they are, and that they need to improve themselves with salves and lotions ... It’s striking stuff, but although You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine contains plenty to chew over, I hope Kleeman’s next novel will be a bit meatier.
