A critique of late stage capitalism and a reckoning with its true cost, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is about a man who takes a job as a dream auditor to pay off an insurmountable student loan debt.
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.
