The New Me by Halle Butler Review

Office temping jobs are unfulfilling, beyond boring and deeply depressing – who knew?! Working in a call centre is worse! Whaaa….?! It’s almost like Halle Butler’s stating the bleeding obvious while having an extended moan about her own crappy life and trying to pass it all off as a literary novel! But that would mean she’s a hack and The New Me isn’t worth reading? Now who’s stating the bleeding obvious!

It’s beyond me how books like this get published to begin with. Butler’s first effort is amateurish, uninsightful and unoriginal garbage through and through. Millie (geddit – cos she’s a stand in for millennials!), like all the characters, is unpleasant and pathetic. She ping-pongs around from hating her job to desperately wanting a full time position to hating everything and everyone.

Yeah, the job market stinks and millennials probably have it tougher than the previous couple of generations, broadly speaking, in getting secure jobs, buying a house, etc. But this extended bellyache doesn’t shed any light on how or why this is, frame it imaginatively or offer up any possible solutions as to how to overcome/help cope with this. Highlighting Millie’s empty life is probably the point – assuming it has one - but what a tedious reading experience it makes!

Butler attempts a feeble plot where Karen, a jealous and rather sad secretary in the showroom, stitches Millie up, but that ends as weakly as it started and then it’s back to more moaning. There’s a pointless chapter about Millie’s downstairs neighbours complaining about the smells coming from her apartment. Why…? Oh right: padding!

If the ending is meant to make Millie a kind of cautionary thing, first, don’t literally SAY that’s what Millie is, and second, it fails anyway as it’s unclear what Butler is trying to say people should do differently. Go to grad school? Yeah, because that’s within most people’s income levels! Get married? Don’t be crazy? It’s a terrible ending to an equally terrible narrative.

Unskilled jobs can suck, not knowing what you want to do in life sucks – fine, but reading this mirthless drear over and over does not make for a good book. I’m sure there’s a decent novel to be written about millennials and the modern workplace by a talented writer but Halle Butler’s The New Me isn’t that.