merrybee91's Book Journey

Yesteryear has left me with such conflicted feelings. This book is timely and topical and feels like it has its finger on the pulse. It's incredibly easy to relate Natalie to any number of fundie influencers, or even to people that we may know in our own communities.

Still, something about this book felt too easy, too predetermined to be truly interesting. Is a satire successful when it accurately creates a caricature of the worst type of person, or only when it provokes uncomfortable feelings of thought and self-reflection?

I understand that satire often functions to introduce people to a topic rather than to deepen a topic for those already well in the know, that the personas of its characters are intentionally exaggerated and inflated in order to point out absurdity to those who haven't taken the time to think deeply about it themselves.

However, I can't help but feel disappointed because it feels like Yesteryear's attempt to focus on the widest audience leaves its more politically engaged readers with nothing to chew on.

I felt feral reading the first few chapters with how much historical and sociocultural significance there was to dig into, but as the book went on, it felt like Burke took to hammering the same point home rather than expanding upon it in any meaningful way.

Natalie's character development is certainly obviously satirical, but as far as commentary on tradwives goes, Burke isn't providing anything new to the conversation. It's likely that anyone who is chronically online enough to even know the term tradwife understands that it's a huge performance and that many of them don't believe the bullshit they hawk.

For anyone with knowledge about the history of white supremacy and Christian patriarchy, all of the revelations of Natalie's character will feel painfully obvious: the grift of idealized American exceptionalism, Christofascist groups weaponizing a mythologized past to buy themselves a future where they consolidate authoritarian power, white women cozying up to patriarchal leaders for some semblance of power over others.

The most interesting part about these people is not how absurdly hypocritical or unlikeable they are, but how uncomfortable it is to imagine them as fully-realized, complex human beings. Sure, Natalie's arc is successful at showing the extremes that people will go to in order to lie to themselves, the delusions that people create in order to avoid reflection and growth. Natalie's mean-spirited, insecure thought spirals are entertaining, but lack depth as the book tries to reach toward larger meaning.

Yesteryear's most compelling moments lie in the subtlety between the noise. Natalie's reckless ambition representing the "girlboss" version of Doug's patriarchal power grab, Shannon becoming her perfect mirror, Natalie's successes being the result of men. There are so many of these little moments left to ambiguity, and for me, ambiguity is where the fun of reading a book like Yesteryear really begins.

When Burke backs away from the page and allows Natalie to be uncomfortably sympathetic, her character becomes much more engaging. As we see the depths of despair that created the performance we find so unlikeable: depictions of postpartum depression, the isolation of being a woman in a community where women constantly police and surveil each other, the generational trauma of mothers training daughters and daughters training sisters. In these softer moments, Natalie starts to really come to life.

This book is almost suffocatingly about performance, the cost of performance and how we all (yes, even we) play into it. There were so many ways this examination could have gone, especially as it relates to white womanhood and questions of gender, race, and class.

Unfortunately, I never felt like it went anywhere. There was a sense that Burke was afraid to let Natalie get too sympathetic, and the more compelling aspects of the story are relegated to background noise in favor of a thriller-esque plot and the constant return to how bad Natalie is as a person and how much we really should not feel anything but the desire to mock her and hate her. It's not that Natalie needed to be more likeable or relatable, but that her character relies upon being monstrous, which ultimately defangs its political critique.

There is a heavy-handedness that comes through in Burke's approach as the novel continually preempts the reader's interpretation of its ideas. Every time the model is explicitly explained, either by Natalie constantly reminding the reader that she is performing, or by the people around her pointing out her contradictions, it reduces the space in which we can play with her character as a truly complex idea.

Because of Yesteryear's delivery, the more interesting systemic structures behind people like Natalie get obfuscated in favor of watching a trainwreck. Questions of race and class are certainly present, but never beyond a few lines of acknowledgment, and the book constantly returns to the level of the individual.

In focusing so intensely on Natalie's psychological state, it risks recreating the same spectacle that the book is critiquing. The message comes away reading that tradwives are individual "bad apples" who are simply narcissists or whatever else the internet wants to diagnose them as, rather than women who are incentivized by systems of power to climb to the top, who make constrained choices within systems that oppress them even as they oppress others.

Of course Natalie is individually responsible for the things that happen to her to some degree, but the extremity of her behavior increasingly becomes due to her pathology rather than larger structures that made her behavior profitable and powerful. Essentially, the question becomes focused on how Natalie became so insane, rather than questioning what kind of society makes this behavior appear rational and desirable to some, and what place we all may have in upholding it even as we denounce the behavior of the delusional tradwives in question.

Yesteryear is willing to say a lot of things that sound radical at the level of individual critique. It is willing to make Natalie awful, to depict abuse, extremism, hierarchy, control, manipulation. But depicting a lot of bad things isn't the same as analyzing the relationships between them. The psychological aspect of the novel isn't necessarily inferior, but Yesteryear spends so much time presenting the ingredients of a systemic critique that it creates an expectation that it's going to do more with them, and never delivers.

By the end, it made sense to me why this book got picked up to be a movie, because it left me with the same feeling that so many blockbuster films do: entertaining, but ultimately too afraid to be truly subversive to be anything but shallow.