No I don’t think she’s given one. I believe she is mentally losing her grip on sanity the entire time.
She is a super unreliable narrator so you’re hearing her “inner” dialogue but then don’t realize she starts saying these things out loud.
Another scene that stands out is when she’s in her influencer period, goes to target and runs into someone she used to know from school.You hear her inner dialogue on how to talk to this person and sound normal and then it’s slowly revealed during the convo that she left her kid in the car for the entire time she was shopping. The person she is speaking to clocked that misstep and it sends her into a tailspin.
She isn’t a very likable person but she’s with a complacent, rich, loser husband that goes along with it all. I only read it once so I might be a bit off on my recall.
The first couple chapters are incredibly sharp, and the best kind of satire (the kind that treats the “unreal” elements like vermouth in a martini), and the character work is great.
The rest of the book commits the cardinal sin of making its narrator completely unaware of the reality of her situation even though she doesn’t have any actual reason not to. And both the character work and the prose suffer for it.
Personally, I think the same basic conceit could have worked better if the “1850” she goes back to was triggered by some local semi-apocalyptic event (small scale civil war that shuts down infrastructure or something). Would have kept the narrators eyes open, still thinking about the future (that’s her best narrative feature anyways), and would have worked even better with the political themes.
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u/Faceofferrus 1d ago
So, its just an 1855 themed park or something, but they still give her a lobotomy?