A phrase I think about sometimes—maybe too often—is three simple words: “Earn a living.” They’re so common, these words. A statement of fact. You have to earn a living. You have to make money that you can exchange for necessities and goods. But why earn? Why “a living”? Did you ask for that living? How can you earn what you had no choice in acquiring?
Jonathan Abernathy is having a hard time earning a living, in large part because he is drowning in a sea of debt. His debt is so plentiful, Molly McGhee writes on only the second page of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, that “ecologists would be within their jurisdiction to classify the collection as ‘an ecosystem.’” He lives in a tiny basement apartment and has a simple enough desire: “Jonathan Abernathy would like to be told what to do in exchange for money.”
But when people appear in his dreams and tell him to go to a nondescript office to apply for a job that will help him with his debts, Jonathan Abernathy has no real idea what the hell he is in for.
Sometimes it is hard to write a book review because you kind of want to write a manifesto instead. I would both like to write you a manifesto about work and novels and novels about work, and I would like to borrow a turn of phrase from Jesse Ball, who wrote in Autoportrait, “The best speech about books is just the injunction: read this one.”
Read this one.
Buy the Book
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is the kind of debut novel for which the word “audacious” was created. A story about work, and the absurdity of work, it is told by an unexpected narrator, and told in such a way that you know the end on the first page but you still have no idea what’s coming. People like to describe novels like this as a critiques of capitalism, and this is true, but it’s also too vague. This kind of novel is about what work will ask of you, and what you will give it, and whether it is possible to succeed at work without selling your soul and selling out the people around you.
The job that Jonathan Abernathy obtains is that of dream auditor. At night, he makes his way into the dreaming world of the working and points out things that seem messy and unproductive and possibly distressing to the dreamers. Things that need tidying up. Employers sign their workers up for this service, if you can call it that, without their consent, because if anyone knew what happens to a person when their dreams are vacuumed up, they would never sign up for it, not in a million years.
Outside of dreams, Abernathy hangs out with Rhoda, who has her own set of troubles that includes an ex-husband and a heavy secret. He tries to impress his supervisor, the unflappable but also troubled Kai. And he tries to be good at his job, which gets very weird fairly quickly. The things in people’s heads are intimate, peculiar. You’ve had dreams, presumably; would you want someone to see them? Someone to pick out the things that your mind returns to, and to sweep those things away?
McGhee lets the dreams that Abernathy visits have a peculiar, time-warping logic that feeds into the real world (such as it is). The plot takes place as much in dreams as in the waking world, which is entirely appropriate for a book that is partly about the dream of getting free of debt. Abernathy is a lonely orphan with seemingly no friends other than Rhoda, who is edgy and tense next to his anxious simplicity. Abernathy is also, sometimes, hard to like, yet terribly sympathetic. He is in over his head, no matter how many affirmations he recites to himself. (“Jonathan Abernathy you are kind,” is one such affirmation. “You are fine” is the last one.)
But despite knowing Abernathy’s fate, and despite the heaviness that comes with people’s darkest, most painful nightmares, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is also funny. It’s a sharp kind of funny, one that comes in Abernathy’s near-deluded affirmations, in odd mistakes and lists and characters who seem to all have personalities that are entirely at odds with one another. There is very little camaraderie among the employees of the dream-cleaning Archive. There are troubled teens and smug supervisors and one guy with really great hair. Most people are not there because they want to be. They do, though, need to earn that living.
McGhee understands that work is weird. Work makes you learn a language that doesn’t make sense outside of work; there’s a reason so many of us can still quote Office Space, all these years later. Work demands that you have priorities that are not your own; it often requires you to treat people in ways you may not wish to treat or be treated. Work creates itself: Everyone needs to work, so more jobs have to exist. I think all the time about Douglas Adams’ B Ark, with its middlemen and telephone sanitizers. The work in Jonathan Abernathy exists to make other people do more work, their minds less troubled by their non-work life. It is related to the workplace in Severance, where people who work on the severed floor literally leave their personal lives at home, their work selves and personal selves severed by technology.
Severance is about how capitalism demands that we become other people in order to serve the needs of work—how we have to leave whole parts of ourselves at the office door. Jonathan Abernathy goes a step further, asking if it is possible to succeed without crushing other people. And McGhee poses this question with a great deal of understanding: Sometimes, it really seems like you don’t have a choice. As Abernathy advances in the ranks of his new employment, it becomes impossible—even for him, with his debt-created blinders, his desperation—to ignore what it is the dream auditors and cleaners are doing, and what it does to people. But what else can he do? How is he supposed to live?
I have loved a lot of work novels over the years, and eventually, they usually begin to feel dated. I’m not sure I could read Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs again, though I used to be able to quote it. Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End lingers in my psyche for a lot of reasons, but it is set in a work-world that many, many people have never experienced. If I read it again, how unfamiliar will it seem?
It is hard to imagine a world in which MgGhee’s novel could feel dated. People have outlandish, terrible amounts of debt. Compensation rises fitfully and our tech overlords are frothing at the mouth with the gleeful anticipation of replacing even the most human of tasks and creations with jumped-up chatbots and automation. But we’re not nearing one of those utopian futures where people can just chill and make art because manual labor and dangerous jobs have been taken over by robots. We’re going in the opposite direction, the one where a few billionaires relax on their yachts while most people try to scrape together enough to make rent, hoping all the while that their health insurance—if they have it—is up to whatever the future brings. Who has time left to do much else?
McGhee took this moment—along with her own experience with work, and with mounds of debt—and transformed it via her sharp mind, powerful imagination, and exacting, inventive, crisp prose. All the ugly realities I just summed up are rebuilt, reshaped, reinvented into a glorious, satisfying, heartbreaking novel. Jonathan Abernathy never had a chance. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind ought to have all the chances, and all the readers. It is a masterfully written, pointed and polished novel, and it’s also, somehow, a primal scream. Maybe it’s not our untidy dreams we need to wake up from. Maybe it’s really this misshapen, untenable reality.
Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is published by Astra House.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Bluesky.
