主角之死

I gave Yesteryear a two out of five. I would have given the first half alone at least a four; yet the second half dragged everything down and the plot chewed the ground. So let's start with the first half, because oh god–what a hook! We met Natalie, the protagonist, right at the gate. The first-person narrative makes me feel like I am living inside this woman's head. She's a trad-wife influencer, top of her game, loathed by many, loved by more. And get this–the story starts from a moment of total collapse: Natalie’s influencer career is done; she is socially dead, a pariah. To make it even juicier, she's somehow woken up on what appears to be frontier farmland in the pioneer era. No electricity, no internet, no phone, no trace of modern life, hardcore 18th century. I immediately got the popcorn out: did she time travel? Is this a Truman's Show situation? A reality show? Is this linked to her downfall? Is she trapped? Who is doing this to her? On that note, we are wrapped in her flashback, where–in my opinion–makes the book quite special. Well, while it lasted. Natalie's backstory is one of the richest pieces of character building I've read in new releases. She grew up in a conservative environment–everybody went to church, everybody smiled to each other's faces and gossiped behind their backs. She was raised by her mom in a broken family, her scumbag of a dad out of the picture. Amid this mess, it really did not help to have mom obsessed with keeping up a good front, sweeping everything under the rug, maintaining appearances–at the same time, deeply faithful. Natalie, naturally, picked it up. However, what started as her mother's influence gradually became her whole identity: the hardworking good Christian girl who got out of that town through pure grit and went to Harvard on a scholarship. I feel like this pair of mother and daughter shared a belief that God will make things right if you do the right thing. Simple, yet powerful. But it gets complicated when that belief is tangled up with the love and resentment between them–then it becomes volatile. Natalie loathes her mom for being weak, for making bad decisions, for being easily swayed–she sees all her own worst qualities reflected back in her mother's eyes. Underneath all that "I'm better than everybody" energy, there's something desperate and fragile, almost childlike sobs: Mom, please look at me. I can save you from whatever trouble you're in. Just look at me. Just believe in me. It gets more twisted when her mom drifts toward her sister's liberal-minded boyfriend, a new-age pastor with progressive ideas. Fun! Natalie couldn't stomach it! She shattered. And from that point on, she became fixated on proving she's right, she's better, she's the faithful one. Every time she talks about her mom, it gives off this aching energy: Hey, you'll regret choosing her over me! It's so toxic and heartbreaking…yet it makes complete sense. It's like watching someone put a puzzle together–that satisfaction of seeing all the pieces click into place, even when the picture is ugly. That's what I mean when I say the first half works. There are a lot of trendy tags the author throws in: tradwife, influencer culture, the two-faced content creator life, the political division in America, the entanglement of politics and pop culture. I've read too many recent novels–Moderation, The Franchise, Death of the Author (not saying these are badly written tho)--where the social commentary comes off too strong and the characters just carry the message around like a billboard. But Yesteryear's first half avoids that trap entirely. The social issues surface organically from who Natalie is. She doesn't just represent the trad-wife phenomenon–she truly believes in it. She IS it. Her mindset, her environment, her life experiences led her down this road. The satire writes itself when the character is so real. And I kept flashing to the villain protagonists I've always loved. I haven't finished American Psycho yet–I am like 10 pages in–but I've read enough to know what it promises: it puts you inside a toxic personality and doesn't let you look away. Hannibal Lecter, is another example: he is a cannibal and we love getting inside his head! Also, Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter because he wanted to set sail–you don't get worse than that–and he's been getting the hero treatment for thousands of years; the recent Odyssey film hyped him up even more. Literature and film are full of toxic, morally repulsive characters (mainly men tho) who get to be fascinating protagonists. And I enjoy it; I enjoy seeing them get the full weight of narrative attention without the story becoming a public punishment–authors are not condoning what they do, but not apologizing either. So I was thrilled to see Natalie join that company. She's not a good person–I would not want to be her friend, would not want to work with her. But she is a magnificent specimen. Same way I love to hate-watch Real Housewives villains–Kenya and Ramona comes to mind–I wouldn't defend them, but their existence is precious for storytelling. TV gold. At this point, I was expecting Natalie to become like Medea, like Circe: a woman who is monstrous and powerful and compelling, whose story does not need to apologize for her. If she gets what's coming, she gets what's coming–but I want to enjoy the ride. I want to stay inside her head. The second half, however, did a 180 and just apologizes. I'd pinpoint roughly where things go wrong: when Natalie hires the assistant. From that moment, the first-person narration starts to feel like a facade. We're technically still in Natalie's head, but the focus quietly migrates to this young woman who increasingly hijacks the narrative, until it feels less like we're experiencing Natalie's life and more like we're judging her from the jury box. The mother-daughter dynamic–effectively the emotional core of the entire book–gets neutralized when her mom conveniently embraces an open-minded lifestyle. She becomes normal. Good for her, I guess. But normal is boring, and it's not what I signed up to read. She just went down without a fight. And what's even more painful is Natalie's reaction: she just cuts it off. Refuses to engage. This whole rich, volatile dynamic comes to an abrupt end. They agree to disagree. And that's that. The story goes flat. The focus shifts to the nuclear family with Caleb, the husband–who turned out to be exactly the incompetent, insecure jackass I'd predicted, wow. Of course, he feels belittled and lonely and cheats on Natalie with the assistant. Cry me a river. It is really a shame since the nuclear family subplot starts promisingly–Natalie's relationship with her older kids, especially her eldest daughter, is genuinely fascinating. But as the household keeps growing (she's a tradwife, after all), it loses focus. The tradwife facade–manifesting online about doing everything herself while hiring an army of nannies behind the scenes–becomes cliché. A missed opportunity. But I could still have lived with all of that. Then the real crime was committed: what happened to Natalie herself. Her agency–the thing that made her sparkle–drained away. It happened gradually, but by the time I noticed, it was completely gone. She stopped being the person who makes decisions and became the person who passively receives whatever the author throws at her. In the first half, even when I found her pitiful or extremely annoying, I understood her. There were sparkles. But in the second half, she became that billboard I was talking about–a character who does things because the plot requires it, because a message needs to be sent about influencer culture or religious conservatism or whatever the author felt like criticizing that chapter. She became a mouthpiece, and not a good one. Then, worse, a punching bag. She was never likeable to begin with, so without the complicated depth that made me love hating her, I'm just watching someone awful get destroyed. It's not illuminating. It's not tragic. It's hollow. [Mild spoilers ahead.] The big mystery–the frontier, the time travel, the hook that opens the entire book–resolves in a way that is deeply disappointing. The speculative element collapses into something so mundane you could cut the whole thing out and lose nothing. And what the author puts Natalie through is not just dark–it's disturbing. There is a level of physical and psychological destruction inflicted on this character that goes beyond tragedy into something that genuinely disgusted me. The book doesn't treat it as horrifying. It treats it as deserved. Natalie loses everything. And I'm supposed to be satisfied by that? I don't think what she did warrants this level of destruction. I take no pleasure in reading it. The author built one of the most convincing, psychologically rich characters I've encountered in recent fiction and then destroyed her, yet not in a meaningful way, just destroyed her. The first half asks why Natalie became who she is. What breaks her. What drives her. What she's really chasing underneath the tradwife content and the good Christian facade. The second half turns around, points at her, and laughs…while she stands there blank, not understanding what's happening to her. And I don't either. It's the difference between studying a fascinating character and squashing a fly buzzing over your food. I take no pleasure in squashing a fly; and I take no pleasure in overthrowing Natalie, regardless of how annoyed I was with her. I kept thinking about what this book could have been. A story that stayed inside its difficult protagonist the way Lolita stays inside…well, that creepy old man. Nabokov never breaks the first-person narration. Never steps outside to editorialize. Never feels the need to reassure readers that yes, we know he's complete trash, he'll get what's coming. He doesn't flinch. He left me to do the judging. Yesteryear flinched halfway through, and everything that made it extraordinary collapsed. Two out of five. One star for one of the best character introductions I've read in years. One star because I can't stop thinking about it — which, I suppose, counts for something. One last thing. My life is pretty different from Natalie's. But I know a Natalie, and we became friends. And there are bits and pieces in the first half — the complicated family dynamics, the sibling tension, having ideas that clash with your reality, feeling lost in this internet age — that I genuinely echoed with. That's what good fiction does. It makes even the most difficult character a mirror you can't look away from. Yesteryear did that for half its pages. And then it smashed the mirror.