Book Review
A New New Me
By Helen Oyeyemi
Riverhead: 224 pages, $29
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Helen Oyeyemi’s books are getting weirder — and I mean that in the best way.
“A New New Me,” her eighth novel, follows Kinga, a 40-year-old Polish woman who, on the Monday we meet her, becomes a Czech passport holder after having recently attained citizenship. She spends her morning crunching instant coffee granules, repeating Snoop Dogg’s daily affirmations, which she’s translated into Czech, and trying on outfits.
After her appointment to pick up her passport — during which she has an odd encounter with a woman named Milica who insists on becoming her friend — Kinga goes to work. She’s a matchmaker employed by a big bank that founded her department in response to Czechia’s Fidelity Awards, given to couples who’ve been together for 50 years or more (in reality, these were floated by the Czech senate but never came to be). At work, Kinga and her work wife Eva compare their personalized news alerts: Eva receives updates about the winner of three gold medals at the European rabbit jumping championships while Kinga’s phone tells her about the Luxury Enamel Posse, a group that invades people’s homes and folds residents into a suitcase along with loose teeth and blank checks.
So much whimsy barely 20 pages into a book could be overwhelming, but Oyeyemi is such a confident writer, her details always specific and alive, that you know you’re in good hands even if you’re not entirely sure what material those hands are made of, where they’re taking you, or how much they’ll jiggle and jostle you along the way.
In addition to getting weirder, Helen Oyeyemi’s novels have been getting funnier over the years, and her new-newest follows that trend.
(Kateřina Janišová)
After the first chapter, we never meet that particular Kinga who opens the book again. This is because there are seven — or potentially eight, depending on how you count — Kingas inhabiting a single mind and body: Kinga-Alojzia is in charge of Mondays, Kinga-Blažena of Tuesdays, Kinga-Casimira of Wednesdays and so on until Kinga-Genovéva, whose realm is Sunday, before the cycle starts all over again.
In a sense, “A New New Me” is the closest the British author has gotten to writing a thriller, because on Monday evening, Kinga-A finds a man tied up in her pantry and she has no idea how or why or who put him there. He does look somewhat familiar to her — and to some of the other Kingas as well — but she can’t pin him down. Kinga-A’s suspicion is that one of the other Kingas is plotting to get rid of the rest of them, and that this man is playing a part in that. Is he connected to the Luxury Enamel Posse? To Milica? Is he a secret lover? A friend? A stranger conning them all? These possibilities and more are explored over the course of the week, as each Kinga writes or records her day’s diary entry.
But how reliable are they? Kinga-A gives an overview of the others on Monday, but Kinga-B immediately refutes her summaries on Tuesday, and the other Kingas try to make peace, claim indifference, or express their own frustrations in turn, so that by the time we get to Sunday, we’ve read conflicting versions of some key moments in the Kingas’ life, and learned that some of them might be deliberately lying to the others. None of them are able to access the others’ days, but they were all, it seems, more or less present when they were part of their shared OG Kinga — before, that is, she asked Kingas A through G to take over and live her life full time.
Kinga, in other words, seems to have dissociative identity disorder (or DID, previously known as multiple personality disorder), a serious mental illness that begins in childhood and is linked to severe trauma. It’s also a disorder that has gained a lot of attention in recent years due to social media making people who live with it more visible.
Yet Oyeyemi’s novel doesn’t deal with her trauma. Similarly, the Kingas aren’t interested in the process of “integrating” into a single unified self (a common — though not universally desired — therapeutic goal); they’ve found a psychiatrist, Dr. Holý, who is perfectly happy to treat them as they are. Readers do learn that there have been alternate Kingas since childhood, and that their dad is a criminal who went to prison at some point when Kinga was young (only one of the Kingas writes to him). After that, Kinga mostly lived with her grandparents — who seem to have been loving and present — in the Polish countryside, while her brother, Benek, and her mum traveled for Benek’s acting career, an aspiration he had since he was a little kid and which all the Kingas helped support and facilitate in one way or another.
What is “A New New Me” about, then? As in all Oyeyemi’s writing: the chaotic and unpredictable nature of storytelling. What are stories? Where do they come from? How and why do we tell them? Communicating with other people is a constant act of storytelling, after all: We share anecdotes, we narrate our joys and fears and troubles to one another, we agree on the shared story of our reality (or we don’t), we curate our reality differently depending on who we share it with. It follows, then, that communicating with the self, or aspects of ourselves, is just as much about understanding, interpreting and framing our own experiences through narrative.
There’s a lot happening in the background of “A New New Me,” whose main plotline swirls up and around unpredictably like self-serve fro-yo. The most prominent and evocative of these background shadow plays is the relationship between Kinga and her brother, Benek, who we never actually meet, but whose life’s trajectory and career were made possible by Kinga’s childhood sacrifices. It’s fitting and somehow ominous that Benek is an actor — he gets to try on other characters for a living and yet can always return to himself, whereas Kinga actually lives as a series of recurring but separate “characters,” which is to say, her different selves. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this mystery brother haunting the novel, but it’s intriguing.
In addition to getting weirder, Oyeyemi’s novels have been getting funnier over the years, and her new-newest follows that trend. Its humor shows up in the quirks of the Kingas’ personalities (“I’ll just lounge around sending gourmet tourists spiraling by creating Tripadvisor listings and rave reviews for restaurants that don’t exist.”), in their jobs (one of them is a perfumer’s muse; another creates tourist experiences involving manufacturing a crisis and having the client save the day) or simply in the whimsical nature of the world they inhabit (see Luxury Enamel Posse above). “A New New Me” is thoroughly enjoyable and is very likely to reward repeat readings.
I’m off to start it over again myself.
Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”