... brisk, wildly imaginative ... you can hear an old note, a note I’ve missed in American fiction, and am surprised to have noticed myself missing—for so long it seemed dominant to the point of imperishability. The violent, surreal, often cartoonish scenarios delivered deadpan that draw attention to the freakishness of ordinary life—from writers like Donald Barthelme, Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus ... This novel could have easily sagged into dogma, but Leichter keeps the narrative crisp, swift and sardonic. Temporary reads like a comic and mournful Alice in Wonderland set in the gig economy, an eerily precise portrait of ourselves in a cracked mirror.
...this book is taking a long hard look at work, the way a job can commodify us and strip us of our humanity, and it does it while being uproariously funny ... I would walk through neighborhoods handselling this book if that was an option ... Is Temporary the Great Late Capitalist Novel? I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks ... What Leichter is getting at in her wonderful, slippery, surreal book is the structure of work ... By taking her Temp to extremes, Leichter is able to puncture the utter absurdity of work itself ... By the end, Temporary has wrestled with all of these questions, but in such fun and surprising ways that you might not even notice how emotional you’re getting until after you’ve punched out of the book.
... weird, dreamy ... A batty, playful satire, Temporary twists the jargon and anxieties of a millennial gig economy into a dreamscape of spires and scaffolding through which we swing as our narrator seeks out her steadiness ... Time and space do not apply in Leichter’s world, and her fabulist ability to transport her narrator from murder shack to bomb-dropping blimp situates her among writers whose work some might label magic realism, slipstream or even surrealist ... But it would be reductive to pin Leichter or any one of these writers to a particular genre; the delight of reading their work is inextricable from the ecstatic cartwheel sensation of wondering, what is this? Temporary telegraphs this feeling exactly—the childlike knot of enchantment and pleasant disorientation of a spell properly cast. Leichter’s work also feels as if it mimics the strangeness of internet teleportation—the zooming, swooping quality of entering and exiting worlds with little more than a click—without replicating its didacticism or alienating effect ... In the trippy, shape-shifting architecture of Temporary, we come to discover that the landscape around us is constructed on shaky foundations, but also that there’s comfort in uncanny in-betweenness.
Leichter has a great sense for prose ... this novel’s tone can rapidly turn absurd ... The narrator’s movement from assignment to assignment takes on the feeling of dream logic, but there’s a sense of morality and ethics below it all ... This blend of incisive satire and bizarre imagery would have been enough on its own to make this book memorable. But there are other elements to the novel that give it an even greater resonance: the narrator’s occasional flashbacks to her youth, in which she spent time with her mother, for instance ... It’s like little else you’ll read, but its emotional resonance is all too familiar.
Leichter displays a wonderful command of language. Every image jumps out with startling clarity. Even the mundane pops on the page, brought sharply, oddly, into focus by the eager eyes of our narrator. And the writing proves just as innovative with sound—adding a twinge to everything written that makes the strangeness of it all that much more apparent and intriguing. Leichter has taken the world of jobs and hurdles we know too well, and put it on the page for us in a way that makes it new. It is a strange, hilarious, and fantastical book about work, about our dreams and all the related burdens that burrow into our hearts.
Temporary is like that friend you really like because she talks a lot. She’s a great time and drops nuggets of wisdom with the same facility as she does a joke. She takes herself seriously enough, but at the same time, you know that, first and foremost, she actually just really wants to have fun ... one can’t help but wonder where our protagonist really is and what is really going on. What position is she really holding in each of the quests? Does it matter? ... Leichter never answers any of these questions. Instead, she gives answers to questions she wrote herself in the last chapter ... It left me partially unsatisfied. I was curious about these questions, and I found no way to connect the backstory of the gods and the temporaries (that showed up rather late in the book) to the story of a woman who just wanted stability and normalcy. And despite this, I couldn’t deny that along this journey, I laughed at the absurdities of each event, felt our heroine’s frustrations, understood when she threw herself into a jog that lasted for days, was dazed when she floated from a blimp, through moral clouds, and into a burrow in the ground. Somehow not answering any of the questions that the book raises throughout the narrative is a question raised itself.
... a refreshingly whimsical debut that explores the agonies of millennial life under late capitalism with the kind of surrealist humor that will offer anxious minds a reprieve from our calamitous news cycle ... A lesser writer might have chosen to describe the temp’s meandering as a path to her fulfillment, but Leichter smartly uses fantastical ideas to communicate the drudgery of professional impermanence ... Leichter’s dry wit is masterful, but her novel suffers from the occasional tonal inconsistency ... It seems as if Leichter wants to pair fairy-tale strangeness with real-world consequences, and the effect often feels more chaotic than appropriately eerie ... Still, as a book about the brutality of the work world, Temporary is a great success. Leichter has managed to blend the oddball and the existential into a tale of millennial woe that’s both dreadful and hilarious at once. This book should be recommended reading for workers — and essential reading for nonessential workers — everywhere.
...delirious and deeply humane satire ... Temporary has the manic, goofing energy of a lounge act. Its target isn’t only corporate drudgery or amoral profiteering but also the precarious state that makes people feel desperately lucky to even get a shot at the terrible jobs. Being a novelist is also an insecure racket, and like her endlessly accommodating temp, Ms. Leichter works hard to keep the audience amused ... But behind the painted-on smile is the melancholy of impermanence.
... an unashamedly absurdist novel ... a book that commits wholeheartedly to the surreal environment it has created. It’s a risky endeavour, especially with longer fiction where there’s always the danger that over the course of several chapters the absurd premise, initially subversive, funny, and eye-opening, will wear thin. Leichter does not have this problem. Partly that’s because Temporary is a short book, clocking in at just over 200 pages. Partly it’s because Leichter doesn’t just rely on the ridiculous nature of each set-piece to drive the story – within these mini-worlds, whether swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, or working for an assassin, our narrator faces all manner of obstacles and threats. The main reason why Temporary works so well as an absurdist novel is that the subject matter – this massive shift since the 2008 financial crisis from permanent to part-time and casual work – lends itself to being ridiculed ... lovely mythological interludes ... a terrific novel that, horrible pandemic aside, speaks to the current moment, speaks to the uncertainty many of us face, speaks to the drawbacks of an uncaring free-market, and does so with a wonderfully witty sense of the absurd.
...a dizzying first novel ... Leichter paints a bleak portrait of a spreadsheet-capitalist, productivity-centric, personhood-agnostic dystopia, one similar enough to ours that we can understand how it works ... But allegorical simplification keeps Leichter’s work quite light on its feet. Though there’s little joy in the book, there is absurdity ... What Leichter provides for her readers in terms of her social landscape is not a bracing shot of clarity, but a recognition of the mess. Temporary seeks not to understand how we got here, but to capture the wooziness that, it’s true, we can’t understand how we got here. It’s a field report on how it feels to be stuck inside intractable inequality, to never get your feet on sturdy ground, to live in a loop ... Leichter’s novel is emotionally convincing not just because of its narrative, but because of the linguistic dislocation that proves its premise. Language flips like it’s about to fall off the edge of the world ... We’re steeped in a world characterized by shift, begging for something sturdy to grab hold of. And so, when the book takes its few moments to soften and show its narrator’s yearning for stability...it shakes loose something similar in ourselves and hits the hardest.
In the tradition of satirists from Jonathan Swift to Helen DeWitt, Leichter builds a world that’s absurd, but familiar enough to give pause. Weighty questions underlie the wackiness as the temp’s misadventures roll towards a resolution.
Temporary is for anyone who has collected thousands of data points for social media analytics without being invited to the debrief meeting and doesn’t make enough money to pay half the rent on their city apartment ... readers come to see the inescapability of capitalism, and that perhaps the key to steadiness is with us all along, revealing itself when we aren’t looking.
At once hilarious, surreal, and serious, Leichter’s first novel reveals truths about capitalist society while exploring the meaning of doing one’s work well, despite how ridiculous or temporary it might be. This will be enjoyed by fans of Jen George and Helen Ellis.
...[a] fever dream of a novel ... This book is a potent and ethereal look at late capitalism for the young professional. Perfect for fans of Severance...by Ling Ma.
...[a] whimsically surreal fable of late-stage capitalism ...The novel, playful bordering on twee, is not especially subtle in its commentary—a cohesive identity? in this economy?—but it’s clever and strange and, in the end, unexpectedly hopeful, less a biting gig-economy satire than a wistful 21st-century myth ... A dreamy meditation on how we construct who we are.
Leichter’s funny, absurdist debut cleverly explores a capitalist society taken to a dreamlike extreme ... Though consistently zany, there are moments of profundity ... Leichter’s cutting, hilarious critique of the American dream will appeal to fans of Italo Calvino.
