Yesterday’s Review by Caro Claire Burke – The Downfall of an All-American Business Wife | imaginary

CWill Caro Clare Burke’s Yesterday be the first great commercial novel? This was my hope: finally, a literary response to the turbulent social trend of women dressing up as “traditional Christian values”—procreation and obedience to one’s husband—in front of a large following on social media. I’m Not Immune to the Hype Yesterday it was promoted to the skies, triggering huge auctions for the rights, and landing a movie deal with Anne Hathaway.

You have to admit that the premise — an Instagram merchant wakes up in what appears to be actual pioneering days, and finds that the traditional wife is not as trendy as her social media reenactment suggested — is genius. As one of the “angry women” that our heroine Natalie so belittles, I was looking forward to some gentle schadenfreude.

Natalie is a “good Christian woman” with an angry core, or as she describes herself, “an American dream girl obsessed with this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies.” She knows exactly what she’s doing, because “America hates women. What a relief it is to remember.” Her caustic, sometimes playful voice – on the night she lost her virginity to her new husband, she says, “I felt like I needed to throw a dishtowel over his penis and wait an hour to let it rise” – means the novel moves along quickly. Intelligent, ruthlessly ambitious, and cruel at best toward her children, she’s a kind of Maga Becky Sharp, or Amy Dunne from Gone Girl if she wore a dress. Yesterday, the story of how she built a strong following of millions of people, only to meet her downfall. “I wanted all the aesthetics of antiquity and all the modern conveniences,” says Natalie. In other words, a “time machine,” but of course the year 1855 is not at all what you imagined.

Burke is good at exploring how children cannot consent to social media exposure and where this leads to child neglect. There are also some interesting thoughts on religion and performance – “Who is our Lord and Savior, if not Him?” creative Audience member in our lives? The brief passages in “1855” lack detail; One description of endless washing that caused her fingers to “crack and bleed” is excellent, but I wanted more. This part of the plot is more compelling than the larger space devoted to how she created her Instagram account. Have you really traveled through time? Is this a terrible reality TV show? A message from God? Or has she lost her mind?

Solving this puzzle becomes the main drive of the novel, at the expense of deeper interests. Natalie is a mother several times over but Burke fails to make her a convincing mother. I’m always interested in the things a novelist chooses to do without. Here, Burke almost completely abandons the female body, an odd choice for a novel about a woman who gives birth to multiple children as part of a pro-natalist agenda. The descriptions of pregnancy and childbirth are shallow and hackneyed (“My body has to split open for the baby to leave”), and the rationale for Natalie’s increasing insistence on giving birth without treatment is completely unexplored. Breastfeeding is just that: there is no shredding, no let down, and no labeling of any kind. Natalie’s postpartum difficulties in bonding with her children were overcome.

It is unfortunate, as is Burke’s choice to remove politics almost entirely from the narrative. There are allusions to the homophobia, misogyny, and racism underpinning the movement (“Some women no longer knew they were women. Some men no longer knew they were men… The birth rate was falling… The white race was becoming extinct”) but this narrative largely fails to meet the political moment. Perhaps this is a deliberate ploy to reach more American readers, but to Europeans it seems like a strange omission.

An unpardonable sin, however, is the way Yesteryear’s film uses birth injury and the child’s disability as a plot point. In addition to being shockingly flippant, the treatment shows a disappointing lack of curiosity on the part of the writer about how these events shape both mother and child: it feels cynical and uninvestigated. In her attempt to create an intelligent plot twist, Burke lets her characters’ humanity fall by the wayside. Maybe this is what happens when your novel is prepped by Hollywood producers and executives from its first draft. If Burke, undoubtedly talented, had been left alone to explore some of these questions in more depth, we might have had a very different book. As it stands, the story of the child’s disability seems unfilmable, at least in a way that’s not entirely terrible. For a book with such promise, “Last Year” is a true lesson in not letting an interesting premise get in the way of a good story.

Yesterday by Caro Clare Burke is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support The Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.