(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Is it possible for a story to be both crushingly hopeless and full of hope all at the same time?
They may seem to be diametrically opposed states, but as many of us know, it is possible to feel as if life is slipping through our fingers at the same time as we hope we can catch it all before it disappears and make something new and good with it.
In the wondrously weird but all to grounded story at the heart of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by the empathetically imaginative writer, Molly McGhee, hope springs eternal in the heart of the eponymous protagonist at the same time as everyone around him seems determined to stomp it down into small and fatally useless pieces.
And there is a lot arrayed against Jonathan Abernathy, whose parents left a lot to be desired, whose staggeringly huge amounts of debt transferred to him upon their death, and who is unable to escape the cycle of servitude that grips so many people in a society where more and more people are enslaved by the tattered vestiges of the American Dream rather than empowered by its mythos.
A thinly-disguised allegory for the economic slavery of the modern American state, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind not only eviscerates the idea that there is hope in the capitalist model but skewers it completely, making it all too clear that there is little to be gained by offering your soul up to your employer.
‘We,’ he says, pointing to himself and Kai, “are tasked with helping people stay at work. We help them do more work. No matter how stupid, trivial, pointless, low paying that work may be — bottom lines need saving. That’s where we come in.’
The man can’t see her, but Kai rolls her eyes.
So many of the people around Jonathan, like Rhoda, his single mum neighbour and even Kelly, his seemingly successful landlord, who lives above his uninspiringly small and bleak basement studio apartment, are struggling to make something of this life.
The odds are stacked well and truly against everyone, but it seems Jonathan most of all who can’t catch a break even when he is offered the literal job of his dreams where he is a Dream Auditor, charged by a secretive government organisation with going into white collar worker nighttime dreaming and removing all the negativity and hopelessness.
The result? A newly happy and recharged workforce, stripped of the terrors and the darkness that besets them – ironically much of it caused by the very system that manipulates it away from them and strips away part of who they are as it does so – and ready to give their all to their ever richer 1% bosses.
It’s surprisingly dangerous work, but what choice does Jonathan have when he’s summoned to a boringly unimaginative strip mall shop in which lie archives full of scraped away dreams and much of what makes these newly-positive-ivised slaves of the capitalist dream who they are.
In the boxes of the archives sit all the dark and terrible things no one willingly entertains in their waking hours, all of them so toxically terrifying that they have great power to inflict terrible damage, to leach away the very essence of who a person is and to make them forget very important, very human things.
(courtesy official author site)
But Jonathan, desperate to impress, and eager to land a job that will wipe his debts free – that’s the spin anyway but if something looks too good to be true, it often is, right? And so it is here, sadly – takes it with reluctant gusto, terrified by the fellow workers like Kai, and yet intrigued by them too.
They seem to have it all together, coming in after he is done identifying what is wrong and troubling in someone’s dreams and cleaning it all up; they work with a dispassionate insensitivity that stands in stark contrast to Jonathan’s innate humanity which somehow persists even in the face of so much that seeks to crush and destroy it.
That’s the remarkable thing about Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind which is vivaciously alive and full of kindness and hope because that’s who Jonathan can’t help but be, and yet which exposes that his mission to make something of his life, financially and romantically, is ultimately doomed to terrible faiure.
No one really escapes the grip of the organisation for which Jonathan ends up working, and while he can quite literally do it all in his sleep, the cost is exhaustion, no fulfillment of the grand promises made to him of freedom and hope, and a messy blurring of the lines between sleep and consciousness to the point where reality begins to look like a very suspect thing indeed.
The rain has stopped. Abernathy steps out, The air is heavy with water. He just needs a second, he tells himself. He just needs to clear his head.
What’s fascinating about the trippy narrative surrounds of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is just how vividly alive it all is.
Sure, much of the world Jonathan inhabits is darkly nightmarish, less dreaming exuberance than night terrors and horror, and there is a great deal of cruelty in the dog-eat dog-world he inhabits, but Jonathan wants to LIVE.
HE REALLY WANTS TO LIVE.
He won’t of course, not in the way he wants to, but he aspires to, and rather than treat other people like expendable nothings like so many of the people around him, Jonathan tries to be kind and caring, even as he is weighed down by so much trauma, pain and loss and the negative psychological effects they engender and which sabotage the very best of intentions he seems to have in surprising supply.
He doesn’t always succeed in caring for others as he wants to but he tries, and one of the loveliest things about this readably bizarre novel, is how human Jonathan is and remains through some quite terrible experiences indeed.
He is proof that the human spirit can prevail, at least in not being crushed underfoot, but it’s highly arguable that it garners Jonathan next to nothing by the end of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind which is funny and strange, odd and yet quite insightfully grounded, and which damns the worlds we have created while saluting the capacity we all still carry to not be swept completely under by the very creations of our own hands.