Temporary by Hilary Leichter
Publisher - Faber & Faber
Published - Out Now
Price - £12.99 paperback £5.99 Kindle eBook
18 boyfriends. 23 jobs. One ghost who occasionally pops in to give advice. Welcome to the world of the Temporary.
'There is nothing more personal than doing your job'. So goes the motto of the Temporary, as she takes job after job, in search of steadiness, belonging, and something to call her own. Aided by her bespoke agency and a cast of boyfriends - each allotted their own task (the handy boyfriend, the culinary boyfriend, the real estate boyfriend) - she is happy to fill in for any of us: for the Chairman of the Board, a ghost, a murderer, a mother. Even for you, and for me.
Wild, hopeful, infinitely sad and infinitely funny, Temporary is the smartest, most humane story of what it is to work and live, here and now.
One of the first questions we get asked as a child is what are you going to be when you grow up. Already the seeds are down that a person becomes a job. Through education and indeed our culture the concept of work is down into us. We must be productive to have value and be successful and be recognised as a valid member of society. In Hilary Leichter’s surreal, thoughtful and occasionally horrific Temporary we enter a world where someone seeks permanence and therefore tries to do anything to achieve it.
We follow a Temporary from a family of Temporaries who are alloyed work from their early years that can be as simple as covering for shoe-shiners to Company Execs on the day that they need to make people lose their jobs. Our Temporary tells us of a few roles that she covers for but this time they don’t go to plan and start to both affect her chances of the dream full time position and her happiness.
I was initially worried that this was going to be a more cosy tale of someone finding happiness at last but instead Temporary while very surreal I found often disquieting and knows when to pull the rug out from under me. It’s a story that challenges our society’s core belief that work gives you value and status. Our nameless narrator is her job at the time and each role she will do to the best of her ability even if it gets in the way of her own attempt at a life.
We see her early years being abandoned by her mother to do a boring routine job that must be achieved every 45 mins or everything will go wrong but no one explains it. Company execs who don’t really want to do anything but have a nice office seat and avoid decisions which then the Temporary can execute. Slowly we see the Temporary realise that they’re less valued and more a useful tool. The horror is they still carry on because you must do your job well. The worst thing the Temporary can imagine is bad feedback.
That shifting of gears is explored further when the more surreal aspects of work translate into jobs that shouldn’t be possible yet The Temporary joins. A pirate ship. They are all good people and have a laugh but then the Temporary spots the human cargo and discovers severance here is not sadly about pay. She also ends up assisting an assassin who although a kind person generally she keeps having to look away while hearing about all the people he kills daily (with some form of justification) while she plans the perfect escape route. Banks pay robbers to rob other banks even when they already own the bank is an example of the strange cruel world this all fits in. In this story we get the truth Capitalism very subtly makes good people do terrible things because we are expected to work to the best of our ability even if that is doing horrible things to other people and even fighting to get our team member’s better jobs but here with an added plank walk to worry about.
Leichter shows us Human Barnacles covering for an nearly extinct sea creature and yet revelling in having a near permanent position that also gives them a home and a role. A desperation so many of us I suspect can relate to. The story also explores our Temporary’s rare social life she has an array of compartmentalised boyfriends ranging from the Tall to the Best Cook. It’s not salacious but another example of our Temporary never committing as each Boyfriend offers something of value but she can’t commit because once you do you could lose out on everything else. But her own lengthening exercises in pursuit of work start to change the dynamics especially when they start to meet each other and do their own things. Work can make you very lonely when it’s the only thing that drives you.
Reading Temporary I felt I was moving from what seems a simple tale of a happy surreal person living their best life to someone realising they can never be truly happy and work will always require more and more from them. Leichter’s use of language and reshaping ideas into a more fantastical setting mean it’s far more satirical than you think and I found myself thinking about my ever shifting relationship to work with sone uncomfortable home truths when I too was that Temporary. Hugely impressive and well worth exploring.
