The unnamed narrator of Temporary is a temp, and always has been: in the world of the book, being a temp is something you can be born into, and if you’re a temp, you start young: “My mother arranged for me my very first job, just as her mother did for her,” the narrator says (57). This first job, in a cute little house on a cute little street, “was to open the doors, then close them, every forty minutes, every day, all day long, until otherwise notified” (58). It takes the narrator a while to realize what is happening: “the house was a house for a family, and I was filling in for a ghost” (66).
If this premise seems unappealingly weird to you, you are probably not going to like this book. If this premise seems delightfully weird to you, then maybe, like me, you will love Temporary, which is about capitalism and the gig economy and loneliness and identity and how people interact/relate to each other, but is also straight-up bonkers. I love the way the book mixes hilarious realistic details/moments with settings and scenarios that are surreal or bizarre. Like: the narrator has a brief stint working as a human barnacle on a rock, after her gig on a pirate ship comes to an end. There’s a blimp that drop bombs, and a job at a “small murder business” (77). People fill in as parrots or bank robbers or the Statue of Liberty; the narrator has a temp job at a big company filling in for the Chairman of the Board. But also, the narrator says things like “my favorite boyfriend devotes himself exclusively to pumpkin spice this time of year, in his cocktails and his coffee and his attitude” (144). Or when the narrator’s boyfriends (she has a lot of them) turn the absent narrator’s closet into an office, one of them talks about throwing away stuff in the closet and notes that they “threw away an old bag stuffed with other bags, with little plastic bags balled inside the medium-sized paper bags” (104-105).
I love the structure of the book, which starts with a section called “Onboarding” and ends with a section in the form of an exit interview; in between, other named sections made up of shorter segments give us the story of the narrator’s various placements, all of which she hopes will bring her to “the steadiness” and “permanence.” (Sometimes, people who start out as temps stop being temps. Sometimes, but not always.) Details and plot points from various sections pop up in later sections in ways that never failed to surprise and delight me, and the narrative style (which is sometimes deadpan and sometimes punny) totally works for me. There are also moments of unexpected sweetness, like when the narrator is taking a jog with a ghost (don’t ask) and we get this: “I put on some sneakers and take him for a run in the park, but the dogs distract him. He tries, and fails, to pet every single one” (15). Or this, from when the narrator is working temporarily as a mom, and thinks she’ll rent movies for her kid and his friends: “They can just sit here and watch as many movies as they want. How many days are like that? It’s a good kind of day to have. I make a shopping list for all the different kinds of days I want to provide for my son, and I cross this day off the list” (160).
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