This week, as I ran around New York, I was reading Marie Ndiaye’s The Witch, a feminist fairy tale with a very funny premise: What if you were a woman who was a witch but you kind of sucked at it? And the most you could think to do with your powers was marry a pretty terrible guy and move to the suburbs? 

The Witch opens with Lucie initiating her 13-year-old twin daughters into their witchhood. Lucie can see the future. But only a little bit of it: inconsequential flashes that tell her nothing. And when she exercises her powers, she weeps blood.

 
Lucie’s daughters are seemingly indifferent to their mother’s power and treat her with a cold distance. Her husband, Pierrot, hates any mention of the supernatural, and his contempt for it turns into contempt for Lucie. Her neighbor in her bleak subdivision, Isabelle, is a crass woman who forces Lucie to constantly try and see what might happen to her son in the future. (Because this is a French novel, we are meant to understand that Isabel is a villain because of the many descriptions of how chubby and badly dressed she is.) Lucie’s mother could be “the greatest witch” Lucie and her family have ever known—she is more powerful than Lucie, able to shape-shift, change the weather, and transform humans into animals—yet she refuses to use her powers and chooses instead to work as a secretary for an insurance broker, separating from Lucie’s father and dating a hopelessly boring man. 

 

 

In the world of The Witch, which is one full of miracles, the women characters still yearn for marriage and bourgeois respectability. Lucie becomes consumed with the fantasy of reconciling her mother and father. Even in this world, the supremacy of the nuclear family is unquestioned and its dissolution spells ruin for the women involved. The only ones who seem to escape this fate are Lucie’s daughters; she recognizes them as great witches in their own right and sees them as unfeeling but powerful. 

It makes sense that this story is ultimately a fairy tale. This is a novel of second-wave feminism, which requires the stark black-and-white roles of male oppressor and oppressed female to work its sometimes dated logic. What is magic but a subversion of expectations, a change in where you thought the story might go, an upending of convention?

 

Another feminist fable that people are excited about is the new novel Yesteryear, which has an immediately intriguing premise. Natalie Heller Mills, a successful tradwife influencer, wakes up one morning to find herself seemingly transported back to 1855, forced to actually live a “traditional” lifestyle. Buoyed by a viral tweet that announced Anne Hathaway had already optioned the rights, the book quickly became a reference point for discourse. Yesteryear is by the writer and podcaster Caro Clarie Burke, and it’s written in the silky, lilting style of MFA-polished prose. That’s not a knock; this is writing that moves quickly, assuredly along, which means that the metaphors are often to be expected. (Natalie compares running her career, marriage, and family to “breastfeeding three babies, seducing three lovers at once.”)

The opening pages of Yesteryear echo Gillian Flynn’s infamous “cool girl” passage in Gone Girl. As we enter Natalie’s psyche, we learn that Natalie is contemptuous and übersuccessful, and her remote farm in Idaho is specifically designed to hide every modern convenience. Her husband is the son of a famous conservative senator, and she makes bank running a successful social-media and merchandise empire, posting videos where she makes bread from scratch and plays with her ranch’s chickens. At one point early in the novel, her eldest daughter, Clementine, asks, “Mom, what’s a tradwife?” and Natalie’s narration stops. She literally thinks, “Record scratch.” I was reminded of the moment in last year’s Todd Haynes movie, May/December, when the camera zooms in quickly on Julianne Moore opening a refrigerator and saying, “We don’t have enough hot dogs.” It’s a flourish underlying a creative project’s sensibilities, a place where the audience (or in Yesteryear’s case, a reader) is told exactly what this narrative is (for May/December, high camp; for Yesteryear, camp for people who are impatient with subtext) and can then decide whether it wants to keep going.

 

Most of Natalie’s inner life, we learn, is roiled with contempt: for the “angry women” who hate-watch her videos and call her out for her ultraconservative politics and whose disdainful engagement make her famous; for her seemingly feckless husband, Caleb, a dullard who she despises for his lack of ambition; and, predictably, for the women who help run her empire—her nannies and her producer, a 20-something named Shannon who will become involved in one of Natalie’s scandals. 

Natalie is a roaring screech of a character, a decidedly unlikeable protagonist who is also deeply unreliable. This is refreshing in a thriller space, but it makes for a sometimes uneven read. And Natalie herself remains undefined. The most important—and interesting—thing about this character is her faith. She rails against “feminist” bogeywomen because she believes they have no faith, that their whole identity is based on contrarianism, that they have never fought for anything. The irony, of course, is that this is Natalie’s inner life as well. But this isn’t a particularly stinging revelation because the book does not define Natalie’s religious identity, outside of quoting from Bible passages. Was Natalie raised Baptist? Mormon? Pentecostal? All of these faiths are deeply conservative, but in pretty different ways, and though they may join forces politically to great triumph in this country, culturally they have different meanings. So it does matter which faith Natalie was raised under and which she practices as an adult. And as a deeply religious and also deeply performative character, she would probably think it does too. The book, however, does not. 

I often felt as though I was reading montages, the narrative equivalent of a fancam of Natalie’s best villain moments—understandable for a book about an influencer. And because Natalie’s only strong emotional note is contempt, it makes it hard, as a reader, to feel much for these characters. Mostly, as I read, I was aware of the distinct hum of the narrative engine, moving everyone into their correct place. The twist the narrative is building toward means that there are constant tells throughout the buildup—details that seem just slightly off or that fall flat. But because the story is saddled with making its way directly to the twist, these details read less as clues or signals of the greater narrative and more as part of the cartoonish nature of the plot. This also means that the emotional centers of this book—Natalie’s wise, defiant daughters Clementine and Mary—read less like triumphant survivors coming into personhood and self-actualization under the reign of a truly awful Mommie Dearest and more like paper dolls playing their expected roles in a vaguely feminist fairy tale. 

 

The big conclusions that Yesteryear comes to—that educated, middle-class white women largely hate themselves and feel forced to perform domesticity and motherhood—are not groundbreaking ones. They are, arguably, what people have been writing novels about since novels were invented. Novels are a product of the modern age and so have always grappled with the questions of modernity: What can you actually believe in in this broken world? Is anything authentic under capitalism? Is even yearning for authenticity a misguided impulse? 

Yesteryear isn’t ultimately concerned with any of these questions. The narrative twist means that any critiques of the structures and systems that make a Natalie Mills possible buckle under the psychological thriller that the book becomes. It truly does come down to what’s in a woman’s mind. Yesteryear works best when you don’t think too much about it and sit back and enjoy the ride. 

 

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is Shannon Sanders. She is the author of the short-story collection Company and the novel The Great Whenever, out this spring.

Shannon Sanders: “As a writer with a day job, I take my inspiration wherever I can find it. Behind my D.C.-area office building is a hidden spot of beauty: a large pond situated in the middle of a walking track. Walking the perimeter of that pond on my lunch breaks, I’ve thought often about the similarly sized pond on the farm my extended family owns near Memphis. I’ve been fortunate to visit that farm often in my life, often surrounded by dozens of relatives, and I’m always aware of the dynamic history present all around and within us. My great-grandfather Jeff purchased the farm in the early 20th century and raised his children there, within driving distance of Memphis’s historic Auction Square—a tourist attraction today, but something entirely different to our ancestors. Jeff and his family attended Mayes Hill Church, organized decades earlier by descendants of the enslaved people who’d lived on plantations nearby. My lunchtime walks are a constant reminder of the nearness of the past, an idea that’s central to my worldview and to The Great Wherever.”