The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 11, 2015

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a strange and puzzling book. I like books that are strange and puzzling unless they seem pointless. Winning prose, an enticing story, good humor, and a sympathetic protagonist sustained my interest in The Beautiful Bureaucrat even when I worried that the story -- a surrealistic fantasy -- might ultimately go nowhere.

After 19 months of unemployment, Josephine, wife of Joseph, takes a job inputting data from dusty gray files into a database. She does not understand the purpose of the data and her boss does not think she needs to know. Josephine's job is mysterious and meaningless in a Kafkaesque way. She sits behind a closed door in a windowless office in a building full of similar offices, all apparently occupied by employees who resemble Josephine in their averageness. Hallways are empty; workers eat at their desks; vending machines in break rooms are rumored but difficult to find. When Josephine tells Joseph that she is becoming a bureaucrat, he advises her to eat more vegetables.

Josephine is guardedly relieved to be befriended by Trishiffany, another bureaucrat, but relief is replaced by anxiety as Josephine begins to understand the meaning of the data she is inputting. The purpose of the database, however, is unclear for much of the novel, as are many other things in Josephine's life -- like how do "attempted delivery" notices end up on her apartment door every time (roughly once a week) she and her husband move to a new sublet? And why does everyone in Josephine's workplace look more-or-less like Josephine? Readers who expect a novel to answer all the questions it raises might be disappointed with The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Not everything becomes clear at the end.

Much of the story unfolds in Josephine's thoughts as she tries to make sense of her job, of her work environment, of her husband, of the assessment she receives from the waitress who reads her palm, of the childhood experiences that failed to prepare her to meet the mysteries of adult life. Near the end, I thought Helen Phillips might have written herself into an inescapable corner, but the story resolves rather neatly. Its meaning is open to interpretation, which might bother readers who crave the certainty of concrete stories that spell everything out, but the novel is not so wildly uncertain as to be empty of meaning.

It turns out that the story does have a point: bureaucracy is a matter of life and death. Or: life's problems can be solved with a little Wite-Out. They are funny, absurdist points but they might also be serious if taken as metaphors. Whether you want to do that is up to you. I wouldn't call this a novel of great depth, but it is a work of great charm.

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