Yesteryear - minor-spoiler review

Ever so often, I get recommended a book that I wouldn’t read on my own, and end up loving it.

Yesteryear falls into this category, as well as into the growing library of books I’ve loved that explore the difficulties of motherhood (the other two being We Need To Talk About Kevin, and Lessons in Chemistry).

In this book, our narrator and main character, Natalie, is a fundamentalist Christian from a small town who marries far above her status, but far below her intelligence and ambition. She and her capital R Rich husband, Caleb, run a ranch alongside their many children. They have a lot of help (nannies, farmworkers, a producer) but none of this makes it to the millions of followers they have on Instagram.

Natalie curates their experience as a traditional-values family - the Aryan dream of a strong cowboy husband, a meek, beautiful and very fertile wife, and children who spill forth to love their parents, Jesus, and the farm they tend. Of course none of it is real. Natalie is a cynical misanthrope who obsesses over her inability to be likable outside the confines of edited video. Their home has an antique aesthetic, but with every modern amenity hidden in some or other cupboard. Caleb is utterly devoid of ambition or initiative, and the children grow up in a business, instead of a family.

This thread of the story unfolds every second chapter. The other thread begins when Natalie wakes up suddenly in a different world. The same house, the same environment, but more than a hundred-and-fifty years in the past. Suddenly the tradwife is forced to live an actual pioneer existence, beset by deadly winter, backbreaking work, and no electricity. The threads braid about each other until they meet at the climax of the story, and the mystery of the time travel unravels.

I found Natalie to be an awful, but ultimately sympathetic character. She grew up conditioned to expect things from life - a good husband who works hard to provide for his large family, the satisfaction of child rearing and romance, and the inevitability of a good life on the back of hard work. And so she works her fingers to the bone for that life, and every milestone she achieves in this pursuit, is a bitter disappointment. Happiness and fulfilment are always over the next hurdle, whether it be marriage, childbirth, getting her deadbeat husband a job, or building an idyllic life that compromises her expectations with her husband’s wants. She tries extremely hard to reach a vision for a life that was never realistic. And it makes her progressively more bitter and hateful. She cannot reconcile the big picture of the dream she never thought too hard about, with the realities that make up its details.

And often when her internal monologue is hateful, I had to admit, she has a point. She has no patience or respect for the women who follow her account to badmouth her, instead of simply ignoring her to live their own lives in a better way. I completely agree with that point of view, and it brings home to me how bizarre I find it to ‘hate-follow’ someone.

Yet, the parts of her I find relatable, or even understantable, pale in comparison to the impacts her views and actions have on the people around her. Her eldest daughter in the present day, and the one in the past, both suffer immensely under her parentage. The former hates being on camera, and is miserable without a real mother to be loved by. The latter hates having to be the mother in the absence of one who can cope with the pioneer lifestyle. She is also miserable without a real mother to be loved be. Natalie steers Caleb away from the interests he could turn into careers, because they do not fit the mould of the life she pictures - and though I find him utterly unsympathetic as a character, he did not deserve to be driven in the direction she chose for him.

This book is extremely controversial, because many people consider it to be a failed attempt at a feminist message. Many consider it to fail as a critique of social media, the manosphere, tradwife lifestyles, or nazism. I respect those opinions. If the book was a deliberate attempt to portray the problems of those concepts, then it did not dive deep enough into their agents or consequences. But for me, this book resonated hard with my own christian upbringing, and the gap year where I spent six days a week in church. It resonated with its descriptions of corporate life, and with my experience growing up with a single mother. I found the characters compelling, and the narrative excellently paced. There are as many people on this side of the fence as the other.

Part of me wonders if that controversy was by design. See, the book has deliberate and very explicit chapters discussing how the tug between being adored by some, and resented by others, is good for business. It creates an eternal dialogue around you, or positive and negative feedback, which together sell more copies of you book. This is probably a stretch, since every author wants their books to be universally loved, but it’s still an ironic situation for a book with this subject matter to be in.

I loved this book. And when Anne Hathaway makes the movie, I’ll be in line to buy my ticket.

Thank you for your time, and keep reading folks.