Helen Oyeyemi's Novel of Cognitive Dissonance

Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we're twitchy with regret and self-loathing, advertisers blare, "New Year, new you," urging us to jettison our failures and start fresh. In fiction, self-reinvention is a perennial theme, often shadowed by the suspicion that it can't be done.

Lately, novelists have put a political spin on the idea, counterposing hopeful acts of individual self-fashioning to the immovable weight of circumstance. Halle Butler's "The New Me" (2019), a millennial office satire, finds its temp heroine, Millie, trying to life-hack her way out of loneliness and professional drift—buy a plant, whiten her teeth, make friends, think positive.

The trouble, Butler suggests, is that Millie can't begin anew until the world does. It's a vision steeped in the gloom Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism": fiction that strains to imagine another world, only to collapse back into the one we know.

Helen Oyeyemi's ninth novel, its title a knowing wink at Millie's futile self-optimization, introduces us to Kinga, forty and single, grinding away at a corporate job. We meet her on a Monday: "up at six," "crunching on instant coffee granules and repeating Snoop Dogg's daily affirmations."

But Oyeyemi, unlike her fatalist predecessors, conjures alternate realities. She swaps the dead-eyed liturgy of capitalist drudgery for something stranger—magic.

Kinga suffers from a peculiar affliction: there are seven of her. Each takes charge of a day of the week, leaving voice memos and diary entries for the others; their texts and transcripts form the book.

Kinga-A is the striver, mainlining Snoop Dogg with her morning coffee. Kinga-B works at the same company, a bank, but with less zeal; Kinga-C, whose job is as vague as it is improbable, impersonates antique dealers and window washers.

On "maintenance" Thursday, Kinga-D glides through appointments set by her predecessors. Fridays and Saturdays are given over to pleasure and partying, the boundaries between Kingas softening as the week winds down. Sabbath Kinga is an enigma—each Sunday she claims to stay in bed and catch up on TV, though the fitness tracker on the Kingas' shared phone intimates clandestine trips to who knows where.

Helen Oyeyemi, the British Nigerian novelist who published her début at twenty, is an original—a writer whose style is equal parts mischievous, moony, and tart. Her books occupy the borderlands of realism and fable, where the plausible brushes up against the impossible, and the laws of narrative logic are bent just enough to let in the surreal.

The Kingas squabble, kibbitz, and conspire, their volatile intimacy echoing the female frenemyships found in Oyeyemi's earlier work, especially "Parasol Against the Axe" (2024), about three women reconnecting at a bachelorette party.

Kinga begins in a kind of psychological solidarity: romantically alone but squadded up inside her head. There's loneliness in the diary entries, but never a whiff of real despair.

The plot engine revs, gently, when a dark-haired man appears tied up in her pantry. He's Jarda, possibly someone's secret boyfriend, possibly the scion of a crime family.

He joins a supporting cast who float through the narrative, speaking episodically about betrayal, first love, ambition. The Kingas themselves trade fragments of family lore and piece together partial memories.

Some anecdotes spiral forward—a ransom scheme emerges, bit by bit—but others contradict or undercut one another, while still more seem to exist purely as motifs.

One gets the sense that to grasp why any story appears where it does would be to understand the book completely. Across her nine novels, Oyeyemi has shown a restless fascination with proliferation, complexity, indeterminacy, and paradox. Her framing devices keep sprouting new limbs.

Her title "A New New Me" seems to glitch or stutter, but the book's contents shimmer with the same strangeness. Everyday routines are dusted with improbability: a typical meal is "pale-amber-tinted broths and avocados sliced in half and covered in wildflowers."

Even the day job is askew—Kingas A and B work in the bank's matchmaking department, engineering meetups for personal-finance-focused singles.

Oyeyemi's prose is propelled by a subtle animism; her sentences sometimes seem to contain the whole book in miniature. At one point, a Kinga notices trees "full of tattered buds that had leapt for the light too early; I tried not to look, but they were everywhere, bright half lives crawling along the shadowy branches."

Each of the Kingas sports her defining trait like a gemstone embedded in her forehead—uptight, cynical, intuitive, and so on—and it's easy to fall for the almost fairy-tale logic of their distinctions.

But the Kingas are unreliable narrators; are their characterizations to be trusted? The voices can blur; sometimes, there's the faint sense of an uninvited presence among them.

Much of the novel's initial pleasure comes from its intramural politics. Oyeyemi often seems to go further, endorsing a relativism so deep that even provisional consensus is out of reach.

Oyeyemi is drawn to complication as an end in itself. She's compared stories to viruses—always mutating, always spawning new forms—in a vision that echoes William S. Burroughs' idea of the Word as "an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself."

Her books, with their Borgesian labyrinths and witchy symmetries, sometimes flirt with nonsense. Meanings proliferate, then blur.

Yet in "A New New Me," the virus has achieved self-awareness. There's always been a flighty, avoidant streak in Oyeyemi's fiction, as if she forever wants to be telling a different story than the one she's begun.

This novel is, in a way, about that very impulse: the lure of perpetual upgrades to the point that self-help is indistinguishable from self-erasure. It's bloatware masquerading as betterment.

Yet Oyeyemi doesn't mourn the loss of unity or push for resolution. Is Kinga better off as one or seven? The book is agnostic.

Some novels insist on being read as prescriptions for living; Oyeyemi's simply depicts a process: one splinter of a soul briefly gains control of a body, and goes out to be engulfed by the world.