Halle Butler’s Jillian is a dark novel delivered in a witty, incisive voice. At times, it resembles a more considered, more satisfying season of Girls, which may speak to its timeliness.
Young Megan works a dead-end job for a gastroenterologist. She hates her life and everyone in it. Her friends seem to leap ahead into vaguely art-related careers. Megan makes fun of them to her long-suffering boyfriend, delivering her narcissism in incendiary asides. Yet, most of Megan’s dissatisfaction is projected onto Jillian, a 35-year-old woman, whose failure is, at first, reflected in the audacity of her dead-end age. Nearly phobic of becoming like Jillian, Megan complains Jillian is “seeping into her”.
As a single mother, Jillian’s class-related challenges are compounded by misguided Oprah-like optimism. She’s easy to laugh at, making Jillian a guilty pleasure, dark enough to make a reader reflective on their own desire to laugh.
“Jillian sat at her desk practicing visualizations, as had been suggested to her by a few members of her church group. When someone opened the door, she thought “Action!” and then her face would become bright and her voice would flow easily out of her mouth and she could say, “Oh, hi, how are you?” as if she had no real problems of her own.”
Butler uses point-of-view shifts to blend the women’s lives by proximity. Often they don’t share scenes, despite sharing space on the page. The effect is that both women seem blind, and willfully self-destructive, while running in distinctly different social circles. It might be tragic, if it weren’t also funny. As with, Megan’s internal monologue at a party.
“Infinity’s moment sounded like the jargon of a pedophile, and the phrase repulsed Megan but she couldn’t stop thinking it. […] Like “infinity’s moment” would be what the pedophile would call his orgasm.”
Butler laces humor into the frustrations of the invisible middle-class. Megan needs to endlessly critique, making herself known in pointless ways. Jillian plans for better days, only to fail financially. By the end of the novel, Megan and Jillian’s lives are so entwined you don’t care which woman you’re following.
Shifting in point-of-view extends to friends, tangential characters like a police officer and a doctor, to raccoons watching from a neighboring house. Reading the musings of raccoons adds a level of absurdity, which unmoors the novel’s darkness, forcing us to take the characters less seriously. They are, after all, loathsome.
Jillian and Megan undo their lives, socially and financially, ending up stuck in a flat place. Megan loses her social connections. Jillian unhinges her financial stability, dramatized in a scene where Jillian grinds her teeth in frustration, curled fetal on her bed. Much of this novel is about stasis. Frustrated ambition and thwarted class mobility lace these women’s lives, as they willfully burn them down.
If you’re expecting epiphanies, you’ll be disappointed in Jillian. For these characters, stasis may hold more truth than transformation. Perhaps, the unsolvable messiness in Jillian is indicative of a contemporary culture of twenty-somethings understandably frustrated by career, money, and marriage. In Jillian, there’s no redemption, only an adjustment of perspective, if not for the characters, for the reader who witnesses the painful (if absurd) state of these women’s lives.
Jillian
By Halle Butler
Curbside Splendor Publishing
February 2015
ISBN 978-1940430294