Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In Severance, the hit Apple TV show, workers in a mysterious office have split personalities. Their “outies” enjoy time away from work oblivious to the day-to-day grind, while their “innies” are trapped at their desks in perpetuity.
The MacGuffin is that Lumon, the shadowy corporation behind the severance process, has developed a brain chip that allows the workers to be switched between their alter egos.
In A New New Me, Helen Oyeyemi’s latest novel, we meet Kinga Sikora, a 40-year-old living in Prague and dealing with an unusual situation. She too has a split personality (or, more accurately, dissociative identity disorder), but hers is divided into seven alters: A to G, one for each day of the week.
It leads, as you might imagine, to a fair amount of confusion — not least when Kinga-A (Monday) discovers a man tied up in her flat. How did he get there? Is this the work of Kinga-G (Sunday)? And what does it mean?
The ensuing tale spans seven days, over which we meet the alters in turn through their diary entries, written to bring the other members of the “squad” up to speed on the salient details of each day.
Of course in literary terms, what we have is a series of unreliable narrators, each promoting their agenda and each jealous or suspicious of the intent of the others. “I thought there was safety in numbers, safety in the fact that there are six of us and one of her,” says Kinga-A. “I’m no longer confident that we have any meaningful advantage over her.”
Has Kinga-G found God? Is she trying to wrest control from the others? Or have they been caught up in a wildly far-fetched scheme by a criminal gang called the Luxury Enamel Posse, who break into homes and stuff the occupants into suitcases along with teeth and blank cheques? It’s all a bit of a mystery.
Oyeyemi is no stranger to combining the ordinary and the uncanny to disorientating effect. Her 2005 debut, The Icarus Girl, tackled doppelgängers; myths and folk-tales bled into The Opposite House (2007), Mr Fox (2011) and Boy, Snow, Bird (2014); while last year’s Parasol Against the Axe is as much about how friends on a hen do in Prague negotiate their shared past as it is about the city as a living entity.
In A New New Me, the concept of the split personality is a fascinating one. Clinically it can be a response to extreme childhood trauma — something Oyeyemi doesn’t really touch on — but as a novelistic device it offers a potentially fruitful way of examining a multitude of themes. The book circles ideas of identity, from nationality (Kinga’s just become a Czech citizen) to work — members of the “squad” are variously a professional matchmaker and the muse of a perfumer set on distilling her essence — and explores how one part of the self can readily sabotage another.
Oyeyemi also hints obliquely at the tension between online and offline personas as well as the impact of AI and algorithms, which get to know versions of us and serve back adverts and content that it assumes we’ll enjoy. It all raises the question: what of us is intrinsic and what is created or nurtured? Which self is more authentic?
As she dictates her thoughts to a transcription app late at night (“it’s hard to imagine a keener listener than AI”), Kinga-A watches “words rushing along the screen, crashing into each other, splitting, trembling for the blink of an eye as letters are substituted. Vowels spin like roulette wheels while the program waits for me to finish pronouncing a word.”
It’s a lovely image; the multiverse of meaning and possible words flitting across the screen as a visual metaphor for the multi-faceted experience of being human. But such moments are rare; instead the emphasis is on a madcap, nineteen-to-the-dozen romp through each persona.
Oyeyemi captures the inner turmoil of her protagonist(s) by piling on language. “Friends! Poppies! Countrywomen!” begins Kinga-C’s entry for Wednesday. “I ignored my soothing birdsong alarm this morning, but the curtains were open, so the sky tossed bucketfuls of tinsel on my head until there was simply no staying under the covers any more.”
Kinga is unhinged, overstimulated — and overstimulating; the wildly competing parts of her persona let loose on the page at full tilt can be exhausting. As a result, any serious or thoughtful exploration of identity and the idea of the self is severed, lost in the novel’s surreal noise.
A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi Faber £16.99, 256 pages. Published in the US in August by Riverhead $29
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
Read the full article here