A novella by a fairly new sci-fi/fantasy author whose debut short story collection I read earlier this year and liked. Features two twenty-somethings precariously employed in low-wage retail jobs in a big box store – a sort of low-rent Ikea knock-off – who just broke up a few days before. A customer wanders into one of those wormholes that, they learn, sometimes randomly appear in this chain’s stores, and, well, it’s company policy in such situations to send the two most junior sales associates out into the multiverse to track them down. Sweet, simple, and weird. It effectively captures some important aspects that seem to be common to a broad cross-section of working- and (ostensibly) middle-class young adulthood today, which I recognize from encountering them regularly on social media but that are much different than my own experience was way back when – a certain turbulence and precarity with no end in sight, dissatisfaction combined with few options, a clear recognition of “the system” as the problem with little sense that things could be otherwise, modes of engagement with self and identity and with emotional and relational life that are quite culturally different than 25 years ago in ways I can’t completely pin down, and more. I haven’t seen the lived texture of North American capitalist decline captured in fiction in quite this way very much, and it is done well here. It also worked well the way the matter-of-fact acceptance of the arbitrary and the absurd that is required to work corporate retail (or really any of a million other precarious, low-wage jobs) was mirrored in the main characters’ ways of relating to the otherworldly dangers and delights that they were unwillingly thrust into. I also really liked the sweet, nuanced portrayal of the two main characters dealing with their still-raw feelings about their break-up and clumsily, painfully figuring out if they can really be friends now. Good stuff, and an author I intend to keep my eye on.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.