Temporary by Hilary Leichter

The feeling of ending was the feeling of a new season. My complexion changed, and birthmarks that had gone into permanent hibernation once again rose to the surface. I was suddenly famished. The house unfolded around me like a paper swan laid flat and the spring air came rushing across my shoulders, and I knew the job was complete. I know this isn't how houses work, but this is how it felt, and it's the only way the memory exists for me now. I packed my leather planner, soon to overflow with meetings, interviews, endless interviews. I collected the envelope of payment from the mailbox at the end of the driveway, closed the front door one final time, and went off to claim my palimpsest career.

The narrator of Hilary Leichter's Temporary is just that, a temp. She fills in for all sorts of jobs: Chairman of the Board, pirate, bank robber, murderer, pamphlet-deliverer, human barnacle. In this strange world, as perhaps in ours, to be a temp is to live in a strange kind of limbo where your existence is never your own. Our narrator's mother was a temp, also, and took her daughter to her first job, opening and closing the doors of a strange house on a particular schedule--an eerie job that turns out to be filling in for a ghost. The narrator yearns to be made a "permanent," that is, to find a permanent job, and thus a permanent identity, a permanent self, something that perhaps happens to temps, but only rarely. Even her love life has a kind of indeterminate status; while she's out filling in for pirates and murderers, all of her various boyfriends (the tallest boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the favorite boyfriend) are convening in her house and growing closer. To choose from them, we perceive, would be the kind of thing that a permanent can do.

Temporary is a kind of book that you recognize well enough once you see its basic design: take one of the metaphors or cliches that underline our lives and elevate them to literalness. It's the same basic logic, though a very different book, as Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, and it succeeds for the same reason that Whitehead doesn't, because it throws itself into the schtick with gusto, and runs gleefully away from any question of realism or internal consistency. Leichter's workscape is a caricature universe, but the image of labor is a very real one. It captures our gig economy world, where so much labor is temporary, and where the promise of a good, steady, and permanent job--the kind my grandfather had from the time he graduated on the G.I. Bill to his retirement--has become entirely elusive. It's funny, I don't think temps exist anymore, or if they do, the cultural niche they occupy in the cubicle world (Ryan on The Office, for example) has become much muted. But we're all temps now. (Except, not me--I'm union.) More than this, Leichter builds upon the literalized metaphor to illuminate how destabilizing the constant ebb and flow of life's changes can be, and how difficult it can be to establish anything that feels like steadiness and reliability, in work or love, or anything else.

Temporary is 180 pages long; still, sometimes, it felt to me like she was stretching the idea a little too thin. But I wouldn't want to let that detract from the whirlwind imagination it took to make it work to the extent it does, and how what might have been a one-note idea is constantly refreshed and renewed. I loved the moment, for example, when a fellow temp on the pirate ship takes captive a woman who turns out to be the one for whom she's filling in. The violent reaction from the temp shows just how cutthroat you might turn out to be when face-to-face with your own life's competition. I liked the man filling in for the parrot, and I liked how the narrator is accompanied by the ghost of the Chairman of the Board, whose ashes she's been tasked with keeping talisman-like around her neck. Some of the jokes land flat, but most of them just land. And in the end, it made me feel how powerfully precarious life in this modern world can be, and how there is a small voice in the back of all our minds reminding us how easily we might be replaced.

Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

Stephanie listened to their Terrace Stories and wondered which parts were true. The truth was overrated, she realized. Knowing that certain parts were fiction, this was what filled her body with an unexpected warmth. It was love, to recognize the inventions and inconsistencies that make a person whole.

Usually, it's a good book that breaks my review streak. Bad reviews, of course, are notoriously fun to write, and mid reviews can be a little dull but have a predictable structure ("Here's what happened, here's what's good, here's what's not"). But reviewing a really good book, that's harder. Because you want to capture what spoke to you about a particular work, knowing that you won't be able to, that in fact you might actually turn people off if you get it wrong. But I'm reviewing Terrace Story anyway, because it's one of the best books I've read this year, even if I'm not sure I can say why.

Terrace Story is a novel, not a collection of short stories, but structurally, it's broken up into four sections, three of which--Terrace, Folly, and Fortress--can almost, if not quite, be read as standalone pieces. The final section, Cantilever, wraps up the story chronologically, but what is that story? There are spoilers below, mostly for the first section.

The first section, Terrace, is about a young couple, Annie and Edward, and their toddler, Rose. The young family rents a tiny apartment and all is rainbows and butterflies, at first. One day, Stephanie, a friend of Annie's from work, visits, and opens a door that leads to a large, beautiful terrace that, somehow, neither Annie nor Edward had noticed before. They go outside, share some maybe true, maybe not tales they call "terrace stories", etc. But when she leaves, the terrace goes with her--the door leads, once again, to a closet. So, like anyone in too small a space would do, Annie and Edward invite Stephanie over more and more often, integrating her more and more deeply into their family. All is well until one day Edward tells a story about a perfect date that never happened, a story that invents a new origin for Rose's name, a date that, Annie is sure, he went on with Stephanie. In a linear sense, they both know this is impossible, but somehow Stephanie begins filling more and more spaces in their lives, especially in her growing closeness to Rose. It culminates in Stephanie slowly, but unknowingly, taking over Annie's job. On the day Annie is fired, she invites Stephanie over for reasons she doesn't quite understand. And this time, while Annie is preparing food in the kitchen, Stephanie walks out to the terrace with Edward and Rosie, and closes the door from the outside, leaving Annie alone with only the closet.

Terrace sets the stage for the rest of the book so discussing what happens is needed but it's a shame in a way. Because the world Leichter has built up to this point doesn't feel like one where a woman would, through no fault of her own, lose her family in an instant. And Annie's story, in some ways, repeats throughout the novel: women in situations they didn't create or ask for being visited by tragedy, loss, and loneliness for reasons they can't--and won't--understand.

Folly tells the story of Annie's parents, George and Lydia, as they attend a funeral--for someone neither of them can remember--which leads to another funeral which leads to affairs, distance, heartbreak, etc. I won't go into a lot of detail except to say that the portrait of marital dissolution in this section really struck me as truthful, building the eventual infidelities gradually so there's never a moment where a character is forced into a crisis--it's just a slow process of distance from one person and closeness to another.

Fortress is when I realized that, like Leichter's excellent first novel Temporary, Terrace Story is really a story of space. Here we learn about Stephanie's power which is, maybe you've guessed, the ability to create space at will. I wondered throughout the first section if Stephanie knew she was creating the terrace, and as it turns out, she did. As a child, she tries to hide her power but it seeps out--a nightmare rearranges her house, a playground trip leads to zoning violations, and when her parents realize what's happening, they do the worst possible thing: they get scared. So when Stephanie's toddler sister walks into the road and is hit by a car while Stephanie is watching, her parents whisper and wonder, did she do it, make the sidewalk wider, the road narrower? At college, she makes a friend, her first friend, Will, who, without going into detail, is on my permanent literary shitlist for being one of those guys who thinks they know everything and can't keep a secret.

The last section, Cantilever, is set in the future, once earth is nearly uninhabitable, and draws the various threads in the first three stories together. Rosie, the now-grown baby from Terrace, runs intake for new residents of what first seems like a space station but turns out to be more of a, uh, spacetime station. Parts of this section confused me but the last few pages paid off in a way I didn't see coming.

While it's never stated explicitly, I think Leichter, throughout the book, is playing a bit of a physics game with the reader. The stories are connected through a couple laws of physics: namely that space and time are the same thing, and that matter can never be created or destroyed. Stephanie sees her power as the ability to create space where there was no space before; but throughout there are nods to a darker idea: namely that Stephanie isn't creating space so much as taking it from somewhere else, that the time-in-space she spends with Will, with Annie, with Edward, represents a loss to someplace, or someone, else. Death haunts all the stories (maybe it haunts all stories, eh?) in the form of dead children, funerals, extinctions--crows are long extinct in the otherwise seemingly ordinary first part, and Lydia is an extinction scientist/writer(?)--and eventually, the Earth itself.

And yet, Leichter finds a way to eke out hope for her characters. When I finished the last section, I was unsure if I liked the ending which is (tonal spoiler, is that a thing?) really lovely and almost optimistic, but it's aged well in my mind: maybe there is a happier ending out there, but god knows if we'll ever find it.