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What did I feel after reading Caro Claire Burke’s debut novel Yesteryear? Bewildered, disappointed, agape, wowed, sad, confused, curious and… entertained. And I absolutely tore through this book in three days—is binge reading a thing?
The novel’s premise is the one that everyone is talking about: an ascendant social media farm-trad-wife named Natalie (picture an Anne Hathaway version of Hannah Neeleman’s Ballerina Farm merged with a puritan Rebecca Jackson of @jacksonandjesus) wakes up and finds herself in 1855. And finds that things are much harder in 1855.
But the story is as much about Natalie's journey as it is 19th-century life. And it’s as much about all of that as it is about the vicious, addictive, self-important, self-consuming social media circus that is omnipresent today. As Natalie remarks: “People aren’t so different from pigs, apparently. Once they learn a rotten thing can be eaten, they will eat it, and then they will become addicted to it. They will let it drive them mad.”
In Natalie’s case, her online ascendance is driven by a bearded online wacko who talks about her on his show:
“That bearded man? He was the first person to smell the rot of our farm and label it a delicacy. Those homesteading folks over at Yesteryear Ranch, with the tired young mother and the grinning doltish cowboy? They were, as it turned out, not rotten at all, but a perfectly fermented vision of America.”
As Natalie’s numbers and ambition rise, any sense of her core moral values fades away. She becomes unrecognizable from the Harvard freshman she was earlier in life who was aghast at the feckless chatter and dearth of character of her classmates. Back then she captured the torture of living in a moral wasteland (in one of the best lines I’ve read in the past ten years): “It felt like I was being waterboarded to death by modernity.” As she considers her plight amidst crippling loneliness, she comes to terms with the teenage independence she thought she so desperately desired: “An excruciating thing to admit: I missed being around women who were nice.”
Nice people. Over the ensuing decades, her desire for recognition amidst a cascading series of bad decisions buries this idea of and desire for kindness in her life. It won’t be until much later (and maybe too late) that her mother resurrects it as she admonishes her: “You think kindness is some silly frivolous side virtue, when it is in fact the whole damn thing!”
My wife and I were discussing just what this book was about. I posited that perhaps it was about the self-annihilating nature of social media today that I referred to earlier. But every novel doesn’t need to be social commentary either, and perhaps instead Burke just started writing a clever story and it turns out to be one that gives a terrifying vision of what a life looks like with a paucity of kindness and compassion.
Key Quotes
That bearded man? He was the first person to smell the rot of our farm and label it a delicacy. Those homesteading folks over at Yesteryear Ranch, with the tired young mother and the grinning doltish cowboy? They were, as it turned out, not rotten at all, but a perfectly fermented vision of America.”
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