Well, Yesteryear is an odd duck of a book, isn’t it? It’s been a massive hit, the buzziest book of the year so far, and this because of its concept: a dislikeable tradwife influencer wakes up in 1855 and is forced to live the life she’s been mimicking on social media. Only now I’ve finished reading it, it strikes me that the key to this book is not in fact socking it to tradwives, but the fraudulence baked into every single layer of the story. Let me explain what I mean, only to do so there’ll be spoilers. I’ll signal them in advance so you can skip if you need to.
Our main protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, is a walking superiority complex. She knows the right way to live, and it’s by the precepts of her form of Christianity. You marry and have children, celebrating the traditional family and protecting it at all costs, with women taking on the substantial domestic burden and men working hard to finance it. Maintaining this life is a labor of love about which you remain positive at all times. Expressed in this way it doesn’t sound too bad, except Natalie has been indoctrinated into a version that’s rotten with inauthenticity from the start. Her mother has taught her to say that their father is no longer with them, implying he’s dead, when really the marriage has failed. So Natalie learns another rule, one that adds a draconian element to her ideology – you do not make mistakes, or if you do, they must never show. From here on in, she determinedly pitches her tent in the land of right and righteousness, which is not the trouble-free neighbourhood she expects. She just can’t get her audience to relate to her the way she wants. Be nice, her mother begs when she leaves home for college, be kind, but Natalie doesn’t have that in her. She’s fiercely competitive, which is the opposite of compassionate. And no one has been kind to her. She’s clearly not naturally the child her mother wants her to be, and she’s too odd and peculiar for her peers. She heads off into the world with no understanding of herself, a fixed and highly policed template of who she needs to be, and a lot of unprocessed rage.
At college she marries the first man who falls in love with her – well, the first person ever to appreciate her. Caleb is rich and handsome so how could it go wrong? Unfortunately it becomes apparent that he’s a work-shy drifter, with neither motivation nor purpose, and his family, heavily into politics, is even more committed to pretense and dissimulation than Natalie is. But marriage is forever, or as she puts it, ‘You certainly didn’t leave your husband if he was just a dumb rich guy.’ Motherhood turns out to be a disaster, too, thankless drudgery and sleep deprivation, all for a small tyrant who seems to hate her. Natalie’s postpartum depression is poorly handled by her mother and her husband, who just need her to shape up. Everything’s going wrong, but Natalie can’t negotiate with her own beliefs. If they aren’t right, what of her righteousness? Her beliefs are are her lodestar, her comfort, her justification. She knows they are the only route to happiness. ‘Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith, sweetheart,’ her mother says. When she’s unsure, she boosts her morale by conjuring up fantasies about her former roommate, Reena, and how awful her secular career woman life must be. Being judgey is the only pleasure she’s got.
Determined to make her family life work, Natalie manipulates her father-in-law into donating the money to buy a big farm in rural Idaho, and in return he makes her promise to have lots more children. Hence Yesteryear ranch is created, and Instagram offers Natalie the perfect way to validate her inauthenticity. She manages to build a substantial following with pictures of her perfect life. Except everything is a lie. The big brood of kids has been created by intimate moments between Natalie and the chicken baster, such is the state of her marriage. The loving relationships she performs with her children are all staged, because her dire inability to cope has resulted in the employment of two nannies. The organic produce from the farm is full of pesticides. Home schooling is indoctrination into Caleb’s QAnon-type conspiracy theories. And all these cracks in the facade become very apparent to a young woman, Shannon, who comes to the ranch in order to create Natalie’s content.
So this is where we enter the story, with Natalie and her lifestyle on the point of complete meltdown. Then the second strand of the novel immediately kicks in. Natalie suddenly finds herself in a home that is a primitive version of her home, with a family that is not quite her family. When she tries to run away, believing herself to have been kidnapped, she mangles her foot in a steel animal trap and the crude first aid she receives is hair-raising. Hovering over her life in a semi-fugue state, Natalie struggles to make sense of what’s happened to her, her favorite premise being that she’s in a particularly brutal reality TV show.
Spoiler’s incoming – skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know the twist.
Only this is not time travel, or virtual reality, or a reality show, or a kidnapping. It’s just a continuation of the life that Natalie was living, with the narrative taking a skip forward in time, rather than backwards. In the present day strand of story, Shannon has revealed to the world that the whole Yesteryear set up is a fake. Publicly shamed, Natalie has deleted her Instagram account and decided that the problem was inauthenticity. Yes! Only, no. Her solution is to live with Caleb in her house in an even more realistic simulacrum of the homesteading past. By this point, she’s lost it mentally and is barely functioning. Her first set of children have been taken away, but she and Caleb have just created more. What happens from here on in isn’t worth talking about because it’s a complete dog’s dinner of an ending. Natalie has doubled down once again on the rightness of her chosen path and made everything even worse than it was. This is psychologically correct. We know that these mass shaming events don’t work, because cognitive dissonance is so powerful and so painful that offenders can’t compute what’s happened. Mostly, they do just continue to tough it out, denying wrongdoing and suffering terrible mental health consequences. But because of the way the book is set up, this part gets lost in a scramble to find some place to stop narrating.
Okay, safe now!
I call it Sophie Hannah Syndrome. She writes her books by coming up with the most impossible crime scenario she can think of and then works out a way for it to be real. The results, to my mind, are plot resolutions that are either absurdly convoluted, nuts, or both. If a narrative scenario looks impossible to resolve, the chances are it IS impossible to resolve, at least in any truly satisfying way. When will publishers learn? High concept does not necessarily make for a great book. The main problem with this twist, as I see it, is that it’s a twist that acts only on the reader. When the twist happens to the protagonist, the reader can be shocked and appalled in solidarity. The twist in Yesteryear leaves the reader simply duped and wrong-footed. The slight of hand left me feeling, is that all there is to it?
So, for me, the real twist of this novel is that the concept is not, in fact, the concept. This isn’t really a book about motherhood or historical homesteading, but rather about the rage and confusion that results from being sold a concept that can’t possibly live up to its premise. Which is a whole lot of irony! And it’s a shame because there’s a good cautionary tale here about what happens when we allow our beliefs to make us lose touch with reality, an inevitable consequence of clinging to them too tightly. Beliefs are a form of theory about life, a perfect, meaningful fantasy about how life should be led. But theory and practice are radically different things, and the place where they meet requires careful negotiation. So this is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of policing ourselves and others rather than embracing the flawed humanity we all share. It’s a warning about the opportunity social media gives us to promote false selves, an act that will always end in misery, dislocation and self-sabotage. No amount of virtue signalling is worth the ultimate cost of abandoning our vulnerable and imperfect selves. And it’s a reminder that stories distort reality – they put coherence in the place of messy reality and offer something deceptively clear cut when the truth is often nuanced, complex and paradoxical. These are all messages that our social-media obsessed, belief-addled society needs to hear. Unfortunately, they get lost behind an eye-catching concept that can never be sufficiently resolved.
