DISCONTENT, by Beatriz Serrano; translated by Mara Faye Lethem
In the office fiction boom of late, one meets many a woebegone employee, stuck in a mailroom or otherwise marooned at the bottom of the corporate ladder. There’s the occasional Bartleby in chinos, the itinerant intern, the underpaid and the unmentored.
But in “Discontent,” the wry and incisive first novel from Beatriz Serrano, 32-year-old Marisa isn’t a lowly paper-pusher, she’s a manager. It’s a new view into the psyche of the disillusioned work force, or perhaps it’s just the same view with better benefits. What does it look like when the intern class becomes the boss?
A “creative” at the Spanish advertising agency where she has worked for four years, Marisa plagiarizes ideas for her clients, pops Ativan all day long and teeters on the brink of self-destruction. She lives in a well-appointed apartment in the country’s capital and buys expensive groceries; the prices make her mother gasp. (“That’s outrageous! Madrid, my goodness. …”)
She has a no-strings relationship with Pablo, her handsome neighbor. Things could be much worse, and yet, she’s miserable. She’s doing the very least. It’s not just that she hates her job specifically (she does); Marisa hates work in general. “The truth is I don’t know how to do anything and I don’t know how I got here,” she tells us. Ah, adulthood!
“Discontent,” translated by Mara Faye Lethem, could easily have been titled “Disconnect.” Marisa deflects and quips, and it’s all very funny. “My office is full of plastic cups,” she says. “I often throw them in the bin at night and then take the bag out myself, to make sure no one thinks I hate dolphins.”
But the constant sardonic winking belies real pain and breathtaking solitude. Rita, a workplace friend — her one and only — has died suddenly, maybe by suicide, and it turns out she may not have considered Marisa a friend at all. An old college pal named Elena has changed her physical appearance through so many surgical interventions that when they run into each other, Marisa barely recognizes her.
Marisa, too, doesn’t recognize herself. A sequence of preening and self-care (“I felt totally gorgeous; clean and perfumed, exfoliated, smooth, without a single extra hair”) ends with Pablo commenting on her haggard appearance. There’s a disconnect between people, and a disconnect between what is real and what is perceived. Her most serious and committed relationship is with “the catacombs of YouTube,” where she loses herself to every kind of video. Like Ativan, YouTube is a tranquilizer; it leaves her numb, detached and, briefly, content.
The novel is set during a heat wave in Madrid at the end of August, when cubicles are empty and the temperature climbs to 100 degrees. “I only come into the office to lower my air-conditioning bill,” Marisa says, and even then, she ditches work one day to visit the Prado, namely, the Hieronymus Bosch triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights.”
Her take on Bosch sounds less satanic and more like an argument for a four-day workweek. To her, the titular garden is “a diverse and kind place, free of guilt and pain, where humans and animals coexist with nature and devote themselves in body, mind and soul to the exploration of pleasures.” In other words, paradise, or a world without jobs.
Marisa’s summer culminates in a team-building retreat, where she is scheduled to deliver a motivational talk to her colleagues and explain what it is a creative does, anyway. It would be a shame to spoil her half-baked presentation, which takes a diabolical and poisonous turn, but let’s just say: By the end of the book, everyone has had a taste of the company Kool-Aid.
From there, the plot spirals off into a kind of fever dream, and I wasn’t always sure if we were still within the bounds of reality. There’s an entire section titled “OOTO,” a choral call and response in which increasingly alarming emails are met with Marisa’s autoresponder. Each “Hello! I’m out of the office and mostly offline until Monday September 6th” builds into an unbearable crescendo of politesse, or perhaps an anthem for leaving one’s desk eternally.
In the third and final section of the book, “In Itinere,” a hypothetical scenario from an earlier chapter is made literal. It’s a terrible and violent crash down to earth, but for Marisa, it might be a kind of happy ending. She is a woman on the verge of a corporate breakdown, but despite her self-awareness, her higher salary and a modicum of influence, she still doesn’t believe she has anything like real power.
“You can’t change the world; you can only try to keep the world from changing you,” she says at one point. It’s a bleak forecast. And who is that “you”? Is it me, is it us? Surely someone must be in charge! Whether she succeeds or not, Marisa does make a pitch-black attempt at “progress.” In the final frame of this book’s triptych, she takes a cue from Bosch — and gives them hell.
DISCONTENT | By Beatriz Serrano | Vintage | 192 pp. | Paperback, $17
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