In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own.
... 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.
