The atmosphere and prose are what kept me going, because, honestly, when I don’t care about the characters, I simply stop reading. 📖🚫

The character of Gatsby alone deserves a whole dissertation...Love him or hate him, you can’t deny he’s a unique figure. 👀

The descriptions of New York and the Midwest deeply moved me for reasons I can’t fully explain. 🥹

As a naive romantic with my own vision of America (one that perhaps never even existed) this novel allowed me to travel through it and maybe understand it a little better.🍃🍂

The theme of the corruption of the American Dream feels obvious. 🇺🇸🗽 The sexuality of some characters is deliberately never fully spelled out, which was probably pretty polarizing at the time yet still pretty refreshing to see.💕

The book also weaves in environmental concerns, gender, and class issues but all organically, without pointing fingers or sounding preachy. 🌿💰🧬

The characters are complex, unique, and believable. In its own way, I think this is philosophical in a way... It's rich with symbolism and plot twists. 📓

It’s a classic, beautifully American without being overly so. It felt sad and, at times, claustrophobic. It didn’t make me cry, but I finished it with a heavy heart. 💔

This really felt like a normal day at work (-ish). At some point, I actually had to pause and reflect: was the narrator REALLY someone I used to work with? Lol.

For those who haven’t worked in customer support or content moderation, I’m not sure how this book lands, but for me, it was strikingly realistic and relatable.. The conversations, the arguments, the ticking clock, the break times, it was like revisiting part of my past. Not gonna lie, I would often think of my colleagues as characters in a novel and...here, I realized they really were archetypes of people in these kinds of environments.

Now, I was expecting this one to be much much darker than it was. And don't get me wrong, if you really think about it, the ending is chilling. But it left me with some lingering questions (and maybe this was its point):

-Have we become so desensitized by our exposure to cruelty and violence that the ending feels… underwhelming? -Why is there little to no substantial mental health support for people working these jobs? -How does a job like that affect your relationship with others and the relationship to yourself? -How much of yourself remains after a shift, and if something remains, who are you, really? -More broadly, how do our 9-5 shapes us, regardless of the field, once the day is over?

Well, these questions stayed with me after finishing the book. Many of these themes are explored here, though often wrapped in the guise of a toxic relationship.

If the ordinary is so unsettling, maybe it's not so ordinary after all.

I’ve seen mixed reviews for this book and while personally I fall into the category of unmet expectations, my rating doesn’t reflect that. It’s a very interesting and essential story that shines a light on a dark career/lifestyle but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t bummed it didn’t seem to lead to a dramatic twist or reveal (though I’ve seen some disagree with this claim). Ultimately I enjoyed the story, the writing style was engaging and it conveys a very important message about our tolerance vs exposure to the horrors of the world, but I think I was just looking for a different kind of story, with a bit more “thriller” to it. But in the end, aren’t I proving my own point?