It wouldn't be fair to spoil what happens...but it's both bizarre and painfully human. The Beautiful Bureaucrat isn't a thriller, exactly, but it reads like one — there's not a wasted word in the book, and it's nearly impossible to put down. Phillips is a master at evoking claustrophobic spaces, whether it's Josephine's unbearably tiny, windowless office, or the efficiency apartment she shares with her husband. It's a deeply tense book, but never a manipulative one. It's also quite funny. Phillips' sense of humor is bizarre, dark but not oppressive ... Perhaps the best part of The Beautiful Bureaucrat is the relationship between Josephine and Joseph. For writers inspired by Kafka (and Phillips, though an extremely original author, clearly is here), characters too often become stand-ins for ideas, or deliberately vague placeholders used to illustrate how society can dehumanize us. But the couple's relationship is utterly believable; they fight and laugh and make love the way people who care about each other really do. It's not for a second sentimental or treacly; it's just astoundingly real. And that's the most remarkable thing about The Beautiful Bureaucrat — it works just as well as a love story as it does a sui generis thriller. That's not to say it's a book you can easily label. Of course there are echoes of Kafka, but they're tempered by Phillips' exuberance, her humor, and her very real sense of joyful defiance. It's a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented.

...[a] riveting, drolly surreal debut novel ... Phillips’s thrillerlike pacing and selection of detail as the novel unfolds is highly skilled ... Phillips makes much of the attendant Judeo-Christian symbology ... However, I often felt the symbols were trying too hard ... The characters, too, can feel generic, even cutesy at times ... Though this is a parabolic novel — working within the tradition of symbolic figures and situations — some less excitable verbs would have served the author’s style, as would the upending of readers’ expectations. What if the nameless, faceless boss were the one who smelled like candy, the pink-suited blonde the one with bad breath? ... Style aside, what makes The Beautiful Bureaucrat a unique contribution to the body of existential literature is its trajectory, as the story telescopes in two directions, both outward to pose macro questions about God and the universe, and inward to pose intimate inquiries about marriage and fidelity ... Readers on either side of the abortion debate (and animal rights advocates) will find rich discussion material in the startling, enigmatic ending. Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn’t afraid to ask the deepest questions. What is the balance of power and powerlessness between two people who love each other? Do individual souls matter? Can we create, should we destroy, and can we always tell the difference?

Institution and person are exchangeable terms here; life and self literally disappear into office-gray carpet and concrete. You might be tempted to utter beneath your breath, like a sacred passcode, the name Kafka, but I caution you against it. The Beautiful Bureaucrat revels in its playful and dark take on contemporary life, where everything — reality, love, relationships, the mundane — is out of proportion, and yet never loses sight of its commitment to the brazen, and perhaps stupid, curiosity of the human ... Phillips’s dazzling handle of narrative form...weaves the urgency of a thriller into an otherwise tried-and-tired marriage plot in the key of literary modernism ... Phillips’s vital prose struggles against its animations of the terrifying drabness of AZ/ZA, a tension that elevates The Beautiful Bureaucrat into a form unto itself. We get the sense that the language itself is hungry to know what it is discovering, while also afraid of what it will find, just like our heroine. At times, The Beautiful Bureaucrat behaves more like a fable dressed up in the length of the short novel, or a long novella, further hidden behind the veneer of the psychological novel, but rooted in an allegory that questions its own veracity. This is The Beautiful Bureaucrat‘s ultimate strength: a work that is honest about the fear and risk of being alive in a world increasingly dominated by algebraic functions and Excel spreadsheets that go beyond data. But The Beautiful Bureaucrat doesn’t succumb to an easy cynical apathy or patronizing, avuncular consolation. To be alive in one’s body brings with it the anxiety of knowing one will die, but the beauty and terror of life is in not knowing when. To be caught between states, between forms, and between languages opens up our selves to the world, and all the risks that come with it, and what a terrifying, but exhilarating, world it is.

In her fourth book, the US author Helen Phillips creates a sarcastic fable that we realise, in the end, is not very fantastical at all ... Phillips writes particularly well about tedium ... The circumstances of Josephine’s working life are horrible and they canker everything else ... Phillips does not seek to dispel this alienation, or to propose an alternative; she casts her characters into the general mire and invites us to observe their suffering. At times, I longed for Josephine and Trishiffany to understand each other, just for a fleeting moment, or for something funny to happen to alleviate the monochromatic agony. In real life, we are perhaps not uniformly beleaguered: there are moments of tenuous, desperate beauty in the midst of everything. Yet there is a grim power to this novel, and to Phillips’s remorseless scrutiny of her poor characters. The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a fascinating and gruelling portrait of extreme capitalism and the degradation of ordinary lives.

...[an] atmospheric tale ... Helen Phillips’ prose is suitably claustrophobic, trapping us within Josephine’s suffocating routine and increasingly fraught inner monologue as she’s driven to despair by her penurious home life, and a husband who keeps mysteriously disappearing. And there are a few enjoyably absurdist touches — the ethereality of birth and death reduced to the prosaic matter of paperwork. Perhaps, however, it would have been stronger as a short story; too often details are repeated, and many of its observations will be familiar to those even casually versed in dystopian fiction.

Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry, Phillips’s book evokes the menace of the mundane ... The Beautiful Bureaucrat walks a thin line between the real and the surreal ... The Beautiful Bureaucrat intentionally or not taps into contemporary anxieties around Big Data: how (and why, and by whom) the minutia of our lives is captured, and to what ends ... The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one’s own small life is swiftly headed.

Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips’ The Beautiful Bureaucrat, is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language. That’s a rare combination, recalling work such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam and Positron series, if lacking Atwood’s psychological depth ... This slim novel, which can easily be devoured in a day, doesn’t always live up to Phillips’ great ambitions ... The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel more concerned with revelation than depth. But what is most impressive here is that Phillips has taken plot-twist epiphanies that are hardly new, in either literature or Hollywood, and delivered eerie, stomach-dropping surprises even to those who may believe they have it figured out. Although the somewhat stridently self-conscious wordplay drags the pace more than its final payoff reaps, this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down.

Medical alert: if you’re already, or easily, depressed, don’t read this book. On the other hand, if you’re a fan of fabulist fiction, read it as soon as you can ... Let there be no doubt, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is not escapist fare. Indeed, it might well be described as non-escapist, even, to use a word seen often these days, dystopian ... The main character’s fight against the soul-deadening system unfolds short chapter by short chapter in the fashion of a mystery novel. And Helen Phillips does this very well. Her descriptive powers are excellent, and you find yourself admiring various clever turns of phrase. But in the end it isn’t enough to offset the essential oddness of the form. The author, I was not at all surprised to learn, is an assistant professor of creative writing. And more often than not, I find books by writers so employed to be technically fine but somehow, or in some way, lacking in soul.

This peculiar little book is a mash-up of a couple of types of novel — with some of the conspiratorial paranoia of Pynchon, some of the poignant comical darkness of Kafka and some of the interior tenderness of contemporary literary fiction ... What Helen Phillips has created is, finally, an intriguing fictional world in which love and language meet their match in routine and necessity — and who, or which, triumphs may be a reader's choice.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat nicely evokes corporate culture and mind-numbing drudge-(paper-)work, with a nicely sinister edge to things to keep readers intrigued. Josephine's domestic situation is less satisfactorily realized: for much of the novel Joseph remains largely remote and even absent, even as The Beautiful Bureaucrat ultimately reveals itself to also be a (modern ?) family romance ... Phillips engages in a great deal of wordplay, with Josephine not so much mishearing as warping what she hears ... Some of this is fun, but a little also goes a long way ... The wordplay does play into the story -- and ambiguity, and the search for order and meaning, are among the novel's main themes -- but it's a tough trick to pull off at this length and can become trying. The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a breezy, quick read with some nice touches to it, but the idea(s) behind it -- the construct -- shows too much, and it's not entirely a success.

Phillips takes situations and sentiments that will be all too familiar to many readers—a soul-crushingly dull job that callously steals our youth and beauty, the desperate yearning to be free of it, the restoring power of love and food and intimacy and of shared language and laughter—and uses them to explore bigger universal themes of life and death and the choices and compromises they demand. Intense and enigmatic, tense and tender, this novel offers no easy answers—its deeper meanings may mystify—but it grabs you up, propels you along, and leaves you gasping, grasping, and ready to read it again.

Phillips's...novel incisively depicts the corporate hell in which young drones toil in faceless buildings, sorting meaningless files according to inscrutable policies ... Phillips's black comedy of white-collar life doesn't reinvent the meaning of the word Kafkaesque, and to its credit, it doesn't try. The novel has enough horror and mordant humor to carry the reader effortlessly through its punchy send-up of entry-level institutionalization.