A NEW NEW ME, by Helen Oyeyemi
Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction revels in the nimbleness of the human mind, its torrid relationships with language, its capacity for expansion and its ability to change, like a fish that can switch sexes if necessary.
She imbues her books with wit, delight and an endearing matter-of-factness in the face of the world’s absurdity and cruelty. This complex harmony is essential to Oyeyemi’s success: Her gentle but firm rejection of traditional boundaries would risk disorienting the reader if her voice were any less full-throated or enchanting.
The premise of her latest novel, “A New New Me,” seems simple enough: If we accept, à la Whitman, that we each contain multitudes, what might happen if we divided among the multitudes the labor of being ourselves? In this case, Kinga, a Polish woman living in Prague, splits into seven different Kingas, one for each day of the week. But we learn at once that this arrangement, which might have facilitated rest and gradual self-improvement, is riddled with tensions and disruptions that threaten the Kingas’ ability to coexist.
Kinga-A kicks us off with the story of a suspicious new friend, a description of her job as a matchmaker who works exclusively with the lonely employees of a “well-known bank,” and a sense of the thrill of being granted Czech citizenship after years of living in the country. When she gets home, she finds a strange man bound and gagged in her pantry.
We might be perfectly content following this Kinga in a tale about what does and does not belong (together), not to mention the fate of the strange man, but this Kinga goes to sleep for six days at the end of her chapter. Also, Kinga-A isn’t writing her story for us (as a matter of fact, she isn’t writing at all, but rather dictating). She’s writing for the other Kingas, beginning with Kinga-B, who will wake up next. Eventually, she’ll get to Kinga-F, who will ride out a wild plot concocted by the suspicious friend, propose a radical change to the Kingas’ structure of selves and oversee a climax worthy of Lewis Carroll.
Oyeyemi’s work is always partly inspired by other writers, and it is the absurdists who come to the fore here. “A New New Me” is in conversation with, among others, the great 20th-century satirists of the Czech Republic and Poland, like Bohumil Hrabal (1914-97) and Witold Gombrowicz (1904-69).
For much of his life, Gombrowicz was a Polish exile in Argentina whose understanding of selfhood was one of foreignness and fragmentation. His first novel, “Ferdydurke” (1938), opens with the narrator in bed feeling “something that I would call a sense of inner, intermolecular mockery and derision, an inbred superlaugh of my bodily parts and the analogous parts of my spirit, all running wild.” Likewise, Oyeyemi’s Kingas compete and thwart one another throughout the novel, with mockery, curiosity and mistrust.
“A New New Me” ends with the suggestion of coming violence and a breakdown of society that might mirror the splintering of Kinga’s selves. But Oyeyemi’s fictional Central Europe can’t be divided into an “us” and a “them” any more than Kinga’s selves are able to sustain their mutual isolation. This is not a realm of clear oppositions — of, say, 20th-century totalitarianism and the many Czech and Polish writers who fought against it, or the realm of Russia right now in Ukraine. Instead, Oyeyemi ultimately asks the (now sadly provocative) question: Aren’t we all actually in the same boat?
Some of the Kingas seem to think so. As Kinga-D tells the man Kinga-A found tied up in their apartment: “You’re just like the other Kingas, you’re just like everybody, walking out into a pea soup fog every day with a plan to arrive at some dock named Tomorrow.” Perhaps what unites us is chaos and uncertainty, a pea soup fog of bodies and languages in which we lose track even of ourselves.
A NEW NEW ME | By Helen Oyeyemi | Riverhead | 207 pp. | $29
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