YESTERYEAR, by Caro Claire Burke
I once recognized a little girl at a New York playground and felt oddly star-struck. I’d been following her mother, a sunnily gorgeous Mormon mommy blogger, since the 8- or 9-year-old was in utero, tuning in almost every day to their charmed, cheerful nuclear family life: “Mama,” “Papa” and their five “littles” in a city apartment. In person, however, the dissonance hit: The girl, and her mother in the distance, were strangers to me.
The chasm between social media and reality runs deep and dark in Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel, “Yesteryear,” which crawls into the psyche of a tradwife influencer so maddening and mesmerizing that Anne Hathaway has already signed on to play her in the movie adaptation.
“Sometimes it actually made me sick,” Natalie Heller Mills narrates, “how perfect my life was, and how good I was at living it.” Note her use of the past tense.
According to the internet, Natalie is an ethereal mother of five with a sixth on the way, twirling around Yesteryear Ranch, the “sweet little farm” in Idaho where she grows organic vegetables, frolics with her chickens (a.k.a. “the ladies”) and flirts with her cowboy husband, Caleb Mills. Millions of followers are gripped by their Laura Ingalls Wilder cosplay, including white nationalist vloggers who view her as the “true American dream.”
Natalie is so obsessed with living in the past that she fluffs her famed sourdough starter in a kitchen that she and Caleb have reverse-renovated to conceal all modern appliances. If you happen to spy the two nannies raising her children (Natalie hardly knows baby Junebug), the producer editing her content, her simmering annoyance with Caleb or the pesticides tucked into her zucchini crop, no you didn’t!
Yes, “Offline Natalie” reveals herself as fantastically deranged from the start. A self-anointed “flawless Christian woman,” she seethes with righteous anger and c-words. Scandal swirls just below the surface like a petticoat under her prairie dress, and one morning, as her life is unraveling, Natalie wakes up, shivering, in 1805. The new old house is, in fact, a portal to yesteryear, and she is finally forced into the role of hardy pioneer woman she pretends to be online — minus the cashmere and child care behind the scenes.
Burke spoon-feeds the irony to the reader, repeatedly recalling that Natalie asked her contractor to build her a “time machine,” but she doesn’t need to: The premise is already an ingenious, exquisite, be-careful-what-you-wish-for.
And in Burke’s biting prose, Natalie is an electric antiheroine. “Being a mother and a wife and an influencer,” she muses, is “like breastfeeding three babies simultaneously.” As for her precious chickens, “I liked to stroke their silky necks, let them peck softly at the feed in my cupped palms.” And then: “We’d be killing them soon.”
Her bitterness burns like the lye soap on her fingers as she scrubs laundry the old-fashioned way, but “Yesteryear” doesn’t revel in her downfall or dunk on tradwives at large. The meatiest, most revelatory swath of the novel is the origin story of how Natalie went from Harvard freshman to @YesteryearRanch, her identity flattened into an Instagram handle.
In college she laments the lack of faith among her female peers, “floating forward through the world, held up by absolutely nothing,” flocking to frat houses “where they would, if they were lucky, revel in 10 to 30 minutes of verbal abuse with the object of their affections,” and fancy themselves liberated. Burke lures us into Natalie’s worldview so wholly, we can hardly disagree.
The novel approaches feminism — “that nasty witch” — with ambivalence. Natalie is skeptical of her roommate Reena’s idea of “living the dream”: a high-paying corporate career among “men who screwed the small handful of women in the office nonstop, personally and professionally,” leaving no time for marriage or children until both become uphill battles.
But Natalie doesn’t fare much better herself: Though she’s the mastermind behind their family-cum-empire (which includes a line of cookware and preserves akin to Meghan Markle’s As Ever), she’s still at the mercy of Caleb and his cunning career-politician father, Doug Mills. She wonders “what might happen if my husband ever paused and thought about the governing law of his own starry universe: His wife might as well have been a farm dog, for all the rights she had.” It’s a conclusion that belongs in 1805, but is all too relevant in the present: For women, the system rewards neither path.
Inconveniently for her public image, Natalie is a doggedly ambitious operator who comes to find the traditional roles of wife and mother — once the almighty purpose she sought as the antidote to the Ivy League status quo — alien to her. When her first child is born, she “gazed up at the sky and prayed furiously for death.” (Caleb is the nurturer in the family.) Burke doesn’t need to spell it out here, either: Natalie, Madonna of Instagram, “should’ve been born a man.”
As the two timelines collapse and “Yesteryear” draws to a dizzying conclusion (I didn’t see the twist coming, though in retrospect, the clues were there all along), Natalie begins to choke on her righteous affirmations. “Sometimes it makes me sick, how perfect my — and how good I —.” She can’t lie anymore, not even to save herself.
YESTERYEAR | By Caro Claire Burke | Knopf | 394 pp. | $27
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