Most of us have worked a terrible job or three in our lives. You might be stuck at one right now. The tension and angst are palpable, threatening to poison your very soul. You aren’t incentivized to care about the long-term success of where you work, but you know you’re supposed to do excellent work in the short term because it helps your long-term job prospects.
This is the mythological trade-off that lies at the festering heart of late capitalism. If you can bust your ass working for someone else for days, months, and years on end, you might eventually navigate the rampaging seas of institutional racism, misogyny, and plain ol’ bureaucratic incompetence with enough skill whereby you can move your way up the ladder or into another job where you might be incrementally happier. Or at least make enough money to paper over the ever-deepening cracks in your soul.
Yet, for all of the fraught financial, social, and economical situations that come with working a shitty job, most of us can come up with a multitude of memorable stories from those workplaces. These are the tales that veterans of the retail, customer service, food service, and clerical professions swap with abandon. We use them to connect with each other during a long shift at work. We conjure them as a way to blow off steam when that shift is over. We lift them up as shields to ward off encroaching management who want to appear approachable and relatable to the people under them.
But most of all, we need them to stay sane. To remind us that we as the workers aren’t fucked up, much less the fuck-ups. It’s the job – the system – that’s fucked up.
Thus, we tell stories of wacky hijinks at our jobs as a way to convince ourselves and each other that we have worth and value in a system that regularly chews us up and spits us out. The stories are our therapy sessions because we certainly don’t have the time, money, resources, or insurance to seek out professional help. If we can regale at least one sympathetic ear with the latest outlandish escapade from our workaday existence, then we’ll find enough energy and fortitude to head back to that job the next day.
And this is the world, attitude, raison d’être that Hilary Leichter brings to life in the pages of Temporary. Released in March 2020 by Coffee House Press and Emily Books, the reader is swept headlong into the fantastical world of the unnamed protagonist. She’s the most recent entry into a long line of professional temps – women who float from job to job at the behest of their temp agency. Her legacy can be traced all the way back to the First Temp, and their shared goal is to do the job they’re asked to do capably enough that someday they’ll be asked to become a permanent employee.
Yet, as we see across 181 pages, making the trek from dutiful temp to full-time benefits-havin’ permanent employee is fraught with danger, despair, and high drama. No job is as it seems. Each decision could be a trap. Certain coworkers have agendas despite their friendly facades. Her coterie of boyfriends give her conflicting advice and eventually use her empty apartment as their collective man cave
And whether it’s each new temporary employer or Farren, the all-powerful placement advisor at the temp agency, The Temp is viewed solely as a cog in a machine far greater, grander, and increasingly more convoluted than she could imagine.
The result is an utter lack of agency, an overwhelming sensation of crushing powerlessness. You know – the same thing most of us feel at our own workaday jobs at any given moment.
Yet, what saves this excellent book from falling headlong into its own navel as the protagonist works perpetually with no end in sight is Leichter’s whip-smart brand of wacky whimsy. In lesser hands, Temporary could have drowned in self-important bloviating and convoluted literary devices hoping to make some grand allegorical gesture. Instead, the reader is treated to page after page of running jokes, resplendent puns, and nutty, yet indelible characters.
It’s amazing what happens when an author relies upon a compelling idea told in a (mostly) straightforward manner. The reader enjoys a fantastic and fantastical story crafted with sublime execution to delirious effect. For example, let’s traipse through a list of the jobs held by The Temp:
- Ghost
- Chairman of the Board
- Carrier of the Chairman of the Board’s Ashes
- Pirate
- Barnacle
- Assassin’s Assistant
- Shoe Organizer
- Bomber
- Pamphleteer
- Witch’s Assistant
Through it all, she simply wants stability, whether that’s from her job, her relationships, from Farren. She wants to know that she has value and worth – that she matters. All of this is externalized because we are taught by society and capitalism that we can only gauge our relative importance through the value we generate for others.
The Temp clamors for this acceptance, which means she follows the rules and refuses to upset any apple carts. Because if she does, Farren won’t give her the best temp jobs, and this would upset her chances at long-term security even further.
Over and over again, Leichter subtly suggests to us that maybe our value as humans shouldn’t come from how others see us and certainly not from the economic benefits we generate for others. The Temp only finds resolution by accepting who she is and pursuing what matters to her. When she stops morphing her body, career, interests, and hobbies to reflect those of her current employer, future employers, and collection of boyfriends, then she’s able to enter into the next stage of her life.
Temporary is a frenetic, yet nuanced study of late capitalism wrapped in layers of kooky characters, silly situations, and daft dialogue. Placed alongside Trisha Low’s Socialist Realism, Coffee House Press has delivered a stunning one-two punch of breathtaking literature.
So, the next time you’re trading tall tales with your friends and colleagues about life in the trenches of terrible jobs and the burden of working in a system that doesn’t want the best for you, remember The Temp. Tell a story in her honor, one of the really ridiculous ones, and then laugh together in solidarity as you work toward a better future for yourselves.