Nothing can spoil one’s day like an irritating co-worker. You wake up, read the paper and get to work on time, only to have your cubemate hovering in your doorway, nattering about her date. Or perhaps he sneaks into your office and spoons from your secret stash of peanut butter. It’s enough to drive you insane.
In Lydie Salvayre’s “Everyday Life,” that is precisely what happens. Suzanne’s life was going along just fine until a new secretary showed up at work and invaded her space. “Her big moon-face,” Suzanne spits, “her beady little eyes.”
Even before the new secretary has revealed the depths of her annoyingness – her cursed anti-smoking campaign, the way she bullies men with her breasts – Suzanne knows her life is ruined. She wants her silence back. “I loathe her, I loathe her, I loathe her,” she writes.
Narrated enitirely in Suzanne’s voice, this swift and nasty little book will validate any antisocial thought you’ve ever had, confirm any doubts that the enforced jollity of everyday life is a sham. “Friendliness disgusts me,” Suzanne says, when trying to explain why her rival’s seemingly benign gestures make her want to scream. “Wearing the mask of the smile, friendly people insinuate themselves into your life. They pry and wreak havoc.”
This attitude is pitched to amuse at first and then disturb – and it succeeds on both counts. As Suzanne circles her subject, we begin to wonder how much of the story we’re getting is accurate. Is the secretary really that awful? Is Suzanne’s daughter in an unhappy marriage, or does Suzanne just resent being a third wheel? “I don’t dare exhibit myself in a bathing suit in front of my daughter and son-in-law the doctor,” she sniffs after they invite her to the beach.
“Everyday Life” is a very short book, with none of the flashbacks, expository description or scene-making of a traditional novel. All we have to focus on is Suzanne’s state of mind – its zinging conclusions and boomeranging jealousies. Keeping up would grow tiresome were they not so clearly the sign of a woman unraveling.
Like George Saunders or Zoe Heller before her, Salvayre has such a sure touch that we almost don’t feel her mediation in this downhill slide.
Eventually, the word “doctor” begins to creep in, and it becomes clear this monologue is perhaps not delivered standing up, but rather lying down, the speaker a patient, not just a narrator. This should be the moment “Everyday Life” collapses into a harmless, mean-spirited satire.
But it doesn’t. Salvayre never pushes this story beyond plausibility, where we can abandon Suzanne to her machinations, her inappropriate feelings. “Mine is an incurable illness,” she laments near the book’s conclusion. It would be an easy tale to dismiss were it not ours, too.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
