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The heroines by eileen favorite5/19/2023 ![]() ![]() The New Me, out this month from Penguin, joins a growing list of novels that are the yin to the yang of Instagram and vlogger culture. “I should figure out why no one wants to be around me … I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.” None of that happens. “I should get some exercise, I should unclench my muscles, I should get a hobby,” she thinks. The novel is a graph of Millie’s lifewide bradycardia the needle barely moves even as she hatches plots to turn her fortunes around. Her life isn’t in disarray or free fall it’s simply a void - of friends, of love, of a career, of willpower. ![]() She’s a perfectly miserable temp at Lisa Hopper, a mass-market furniture showroom run by overconfident 20-somethings. As Millie’s boss notes, “Looking at her evoked a kind of smell.” The first thing we learn about thirty-year-old Millie, the protagonist of Halle Butler’s incisive and lean second novel, The New Me, is that her “pits are slick” and her face “smells like a bagel.” In the next scene, she stands on a crowded train during her morning commute: there’s “aimless bile” at the back of her throat and a hole in her underwear “from scratching too much.” Her apartment has a consistently bad odor: “part dirty clothing, part cooking oil, part garbage,” and then, perhaps to cover it up, “part incense.” Millie’s life wafts off the page like cartoon stink squiggles. ![]()
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