Review: Temporary by Hilary Leichter

Reviewed by S. Tremaine Nelson

Temporary
Hilary Leichter
Emily Books, March 2020.
$16.95; 208 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-56689-566-8

Brooklyn-based author Hilary Leichter has published an unusual debut novel called Temporary, which is the final title released by now defunct nonprofit publisher Emily Books, an imprint of Coffee House Press. Temporary defies any traditional descriptions about plot or character: it’s about a young woman who embarks on a metaphysical quest to find a state of being which she calls “the steadiness.” In doing so, she pursues a sequence of jobs—both physical and psychological—in search for the position that will bring her a sense of permanence in her world.

The novel opens with a powerful mnemonic flash of all the young woman’s previous jobs. “There was the marketing,” we read, “and the fundraising and also the development.” The job descriptions invite us to recognize and categorize the protagonist as a young professional living in a city where such jobs would be available, and yet there are stranger, more vague descriptions that appear side by side that serve to effectively complicate her character. We read about “assassins,” even bombs, shepherds of pamphlets, and we also learn “there was the child.”

Told mostly in the first-person, Temporary introduces its core narrative in the early chapter called “City Work.” When asked by her Earnest Boyfriend—each boyfriend has his own apt modifier—about her dream job, her deepest wish, she admits, “There are days I think I’ve achieved it, and then it’s gone. . . I worry I’ll miss it, simply overlook the symptoms of my own permanence arriving. The steadiness, they call it.” Her character describes this steadiness with physical, biological symptoms like a “prickly sweat” or an “elevated pulse,” while the narrative propels us forward onto a higher metaphorical plane. The boyfriends, too, appear and disappear from page to page, like faces in an app, swiping left or right with painful impermanence, as if human relationships, too, have fallen under the spell of this transient world.

All the temporary jobs, then, provide the narrative momentum for this search for permanence. It’s heartbreaking how quickly we see the narrator’s emptiness and eagerness of her desire—she shifts from job to job, boyfriend to boyfriend, all of whom serve as audience for her heartfelt musings, but none of which give her the permanence she wants. This capitalist culture, one of wanting and searching but never having enough, should look familiar to us, while Leichter’s attack on it builds with subtlety and succeeds in its skewering of a work-for-profit existence. Some of these jobs seem so real, so convincing, that readers might pause and second-guess their understanding of how the Temporary world might operate in contrast to the “real” world.

On a literal level, we can argue that the search for permanence is the search for a full-time job, a stereotypical business-like setting with benefits. The narrator explores life in a corporate office during one of her early placements. She sees the predictability of that life, even as she hesitates about making a final decision on whether it is stability she wants, or something more complex, something she hasn’t yet discovered. She introduces a refrain to this effect, saying, on one hand, “the surest path to permanence is to do my placements, and to do them well,” as if temporary success may lead to that more established position, the right position for her. Elsewhere, though, striking a more powerful note, we hear the narrator say, again and again: “There’s nothing more personal than doing your job,” as if suggesting that even temporary jobs serve a reflection of one’s self-image or self-worth. This micro-philosophy delivers a darkly comic read—this book is laugh-out-loud funny—but it also endears us to the narrator as we hope that she does not give into a temporary life: we want her to win her permanence.

The funniest part of the book may be the sequence where the narrator becomes a human barnacle. “You’re on our rock, sweetie,” one of her co-workers says. “You’ve been enlisted as a human barnacle by the Wildlife Preservation Initiative. Remember?” The book pulls off plenty of moments where the reader may pause and say: wait, is this a real thing? You read on, thinking, she can’t really be a barnacle, right? But the characters all speak and act like “normal humans,” except for the physical reality of their attachment to rocks in the middle of the ocean. “Barnacles have the largest dicks in the animal kingdom,” one of her co-workers says to her apropos of nothing, “in relation to their size,” he concedes. Joan, another barnacle, dreams of a promotion to be “the barnacle that rides on the back of a whale. A special kind of breed.”

The word “experimental” doesn’t quite capture what Temporary achieves in its pages; more specifically, the text creates and inhabits a psychological space: a plane of existence between real and un-real that follows its own physics and decorum. The book is pushing forward beyond realist fiction.

The challenge of Temporary may lie in the opening pages. The experience calls to mind the first few seconds of staring at a Magic Eye visual puzzle, which eludes immediate recognition, until the image starts to appear more clearly to the viewer. The quick, rapid-fire jobs can seem disorienting (and perhaps intentionally so). The “ah hah” moment of the story’s narrative procedure arrives when the narrator takes her position on a pirate ship. Her placement on the pirate ship lasts long enough that we get to know a few secondary characters and the story becomes layered, nuanced, as we stay with the narrator on the pirate ship longer than her previous placements.

Comparable recent titles include Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances and Jenny Offill’s The Department of Speculation. Leichter’s work, like Galchen’s, explores the doubling of characters who appear to be two separate versions of a single person. In Galchen’s book, the narrator believes there are two different versions of his wife (even though the reader understands this is a manifestation of the narrator’s Capgras Syndrome). In Temporary there are different versions of characters depending on which temporary employee is hired to portray them, so the narrator may work as a “Darla” only to have the previous “Darla” show up on the pirate ship, wreaking havoc and confusion, and brilliantly pushing the plot forward in an unexpected direction.

Like Temporary, Jenny Offill’s book establishes a procedure for executing short, compressed chapters that build sequentially throughout the novel, an accretion of feeling and momentum, and Temporary shares that emotional build-up via chapters that vary in length from one to more than twenty pages. Temporary’s micro-observations of the infraordinary also call to mind Georges Perec’s masterpiece of observation, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. While temping at a party, filling in for an absent mother, the narrator wryly observes her position within the society of mothers: “We volunteer to chaperone a school dance,” she says. “We read magazines and the glass of wine in my hand refills itself thanks to the magical properties of women gathered in a room.”

On February 4, 2020, Emily Books announced that Temporary would be the final title it would release before going out of business. Their mission per its website was “to make weird books by women,” and with respect to Temporary this was mission accomplished.

The book’s emotional climax takes place when the narrator is “fired” by the child she raises. The role of mother, like all the other strange jobs, is nothing more than a temp job, impermanent. And, when the boy becomes capable of living on his own, the job is done—the narrator has to move on, but for a moment the reader may hope that caring for a child would be enough to achieve permanence—it isn’t. But the continued quest, the search for “the steadiness,” is enough to make this a powerful achievement.

S. Tremaine Nelson is a fiction reader at The Paris Review and is the editor and publisher of Northwest Review. You can follow him @stremainenelson.