An apocalypse is hardly the time for a quarter life crisis, right? ....Right?
There is no war in Ba Sing Se and there are no Black women at Delphi Enterprises, the Google-esque mega-company at the center of Andrew DeYoung's 2022 novel, The Temps.
While it was the absence of Black women in DeYoung's dystopian thriller that I noticed first, that unsurprising observation did not bar me from becoming engulfed in a Gen Z rendition of Lord of the Flies crammed into an overwhelming building, instead of an island, overlooking a bucolic setting of greenery soon to be covered in corpses.
As chaotic as it was, it was the first fiction book I had read in months, maybe even all year. At 258 pages, I finished it in an afternoon.
On Jacob Elliot's first day at the temp job he hoped would get him out of his mother's basement now three years post-grad, the world as he knows it essentially ends before lunch. A yellow-tinted gas of some sort descends upon the idyllic corporate campus at the very start of a company-wide outdoor all-hands, sending every single employee of Delphi Enterprises into a fit of primal rage, violence, and certain death resembling a mixture of I AM LEGEND and Birdbox – everyone, of course, except the temporary employees who watch it all unfold from within the oasis of cubicles and purified air.
Saved by the very red badges they collectively felt shame and anguish over, the temps – the book following Jacob, Lauren, Swati, and Dominic (the only Black character) – celebrate their deliverance from the bloodied fate of their boomer bosses, who now lay decomposing just outside the impregnable glass walls of the fortress of an office complex. Just before communication with the outside world is severed, our characters learn that whatever had gotten the full-time, black badge employees, had been deployed all over the world, sending the entire planet into the same bloodied fate.
A bunch of underpaid twentysomethings stuck in a massive office complex, spared from a violent death but faced with the seduction of power as they figure out what to do while civilization crumbles all around them. What could go wrong?
Several things, but let's begin with what goes right.
DeYoung first won me over with his characterizations. With a limited cast in a premise that, while interesting, is rooted in a core story that is all too familiar, he makes use of this literary foundation to present characters to us and to each other in ways that – as a twentysomething professional myself – feel almost comically relatable. He does this by alternating between characters, offering one the mic before very gently handing it to another, to express observations, assumptions, realities, and reactions as people perceive themselves and others in both the context of their past (pre-gas) and their present (post-gas). To hear insecurities from them, to see them come to life, to experience the fear and the coping mechanisms as we're learning where they came from, I've never felt as entrenched into a cast's conscious as artfully as this. It feels personal, but not invasive, connective, but not biased. The reader is left with enough room to make their own call for whether they like them or not.
Undergirding the more visible threat of the fatal gas, is the more subtle reality that is pulled from the very nightmares of twentysomethings everywhere. A running theme of self-worth permeates throughout the book from the perspective of every main character; the idea of settling for less even though you deserve more because you aren’t even sure of your own worth. The deep fear that the degree your parents, your advisors, the society around told you would save you, give you meaning, give you worth will turn out to be useless and mark you too as useless in a world that sees people purely for their utility. The anguish of passions unpursued in favor of practicality and the frustrations of finding your way on your own, not because you have to, but because your pride demands it. While the apocalypse raged outside, it was the revelation unfolding on the inside of evey main character that they had indeed attached their worth to their work and now, untethered and forced to see themselves in truth, they were vulnerable to the deepest of human inclinations. DeYoung captures the realities of so many real life people in their twenties fighting to make sense of the professional world that is unlike anything our parents had ever seen. He paints that uncertainty as the chaos; that betrayal from society as the hardest blow of all.
Where DeYoung lost me was in his pacing, which is unfortunate because for a great deal of the book, I felt it moved quite well! The first 75% of the book felt like an urgent, but comfortable walk, with the exception of perhaps a few paragraphs here and there, where it either turned to an awkwardly slow drag or the kind of whiplash that just isn't suited for this book. Nevertheless, once it reached the climax, my frustration deepened. Any new characters introduced towards the end lacked the grace and nuance even the most minor characters were offered in the opening chapter, perhaps a consequence of rushed writing or perhaps an acknowledgment of the new desperation and hyper-focus on survival. As the pace quickened, the perspective shifts grew less meaningful and felt like they were only a shell of what they once were chapters before.
DeYoung's novel was fascinating and I enjoyed it. There was deep commentary on the human condition, the role of community in catastrophe, and how the inner battle will always determine the outcome of the outer one, even if you're fighting against uncertainty, powerlessness, and dread. Defeat begins in the mind and heart. So too does victory. And it is following these temp workers – data entry specialists, video game testers, mail sorters, and catering staff – that we are invited to witness them working to name their external opponent (capitalism, their college major, pride, the CEO, corporate greed, the previous generation and their insistence on passing down a broken world, family secrets, their ex-boyfriend turned housemate that was sleeping around with other people in the house???) while wrestling with the adversaries within: fear, self-doubt, self-pity.
The way I feel about this book is similar to how I feel about Game of Thrones. Did I like the ending? No. Does the beginning and middle make it worth the read? Absolutely.
7.8/10
Thalia, 25, is finally getting back into her fiction bag and is welcoming novel recommendations, if you have any!
