Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

  “The thing about dreams—and, coincidentally, this applies to work as well—is that once the dream ends you can no longer recollect what happened” (97). This truism is from Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, a novel that explores the nature of dreams within late-stage capitalism. Dreams and work, the narrator writes, are unmemorable, though afterward “You feel that something has happened. A vague memory remains. The exhaustion is there. You are changed” (97). Clearly, both dreams and work hold deep significance for us—the dual-meaning of dreams is resonant here—and “the nature of both dreaming and working is infinite, and thus incomprehensible. We can try our best to explain it, to understand it, to conceptualize it, compartmentalize it, or track it, but the act of dreaming time is stolen and made unreal” (97). Work and dreams are incomprehensible.

So let’s try to comprehend them.

The titular character of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is distinctly unremarkable. He’s a young man, mid-twenties, with an exorbitant amount of debt, very few redeeming qualities, and a total lack of self-awareness. After a long stint of unemployment, he picks up a job at a hotdog stand in the mall—and also a more insidious secret career as a dream auditor. As a dream auditor, his job is to enter people’s nightmares and report on the elements that are most disturbing. He reports these to his superiors, who come and “sanitize” the dreams of the company’s clients. Picture this: you are having a nightmare that involves a mysterious shadow, a grizzly bear, and a bunch of children playing in the park. The auditor comes in and monitors, assessing the psychology of the dream and reports the grizzly bear. The higher-ups come in and suck up the grizzly bear in a vacuum-like hose. The auditor is swept into another dream, another janitorial site.

It gets more complicated. It turns out that the people whose dreams are being sanitized are employees of a company who is paying for the service with the nefarious idea that, by removing their dreams, the employees will be more efficient at work. Late in the book there’s the even darker revelation that all of the sucked-up elements of nightmares are in nightmare boxes in an archive and are being sold off as a second revenue stream for the Kafkaesque company that’s conducting the whole operation.

The premise of the book is pretty engaging, but I wish it went a little further. There are a lot of elements at play, some of which are really engaging, but I was expecting a little more variation. For instance, Abernathy’s direct supervisor, Kai, keeps appearing to sanitize the dreams and expels Abernathy from the site. Their relationship has some tenderness built in, but there are too many scenes where Abernathy says something stupid or insensitive, Kai expels him from the dream, and Abernathy longs to talk it out with her. Once or twice is fine, but I was expecting some more development there—even the revelations of Kai’s true backstory left things a little bit lacking. Similarly, Abernathy enters the same dreams repeatedly. There’s a narrative purpose for that, but with the premise of being a dream investigator has so much potential—you can do anything, so having recycled elements seems a bit flat. I kept waiting for an escalation that didn’t quite deliver. In one part, Abernathy works his way into middle management and discovers the conspiratorial nature of the organization from his boss, whom he knows in real life as a total prick. The revelation of what they’re doing is haunting, and the consequences are worse than Abernathy could have imagined. I’m being intentionally vague. But, even at the climax of the book, the conflicts seem to get resolved with, essentially, not a hitch. I was waiting for a big burst, but it didn’t really play out.

The book, at its core, is also a kind of love story. Abernathy is falls in love with his neighbour Rhoda, who is an older single mom with a daughter named Timmy. Both Abernathy and Rhoda are awkward with one another and can’t quite bring themselves together. One night, though, they bond and

He looks into his wineglass (a coffee mug) for a moment. He is suddenly overcome by a sweeping wave of feeling that he can’t quite put his finger on. Like he is going to cry out  of sadness, but not really out of sadness, actually, more like out of the inconceivability of life. Like life is an infinity of beauty, and he is only just now realizing it. Except, in realizing it, the beauty and the happiness are suddenly hurting him.
This is the first time Abernathy has ever been happy in love, which means that he is realizing, for the first time, that this type of happiness must end. It is a bittersweet feeling, holding both truths at once. (159)

It’s a simple exploration of a feeling but I think it really works. The balance of sadness and elation rings true—I, too, sometimes think about how the world is full of such infinite beauty that you can’t help but be crushed by it.

McGhee makes use of an allegorical, sometimes aphoristic style. She writes, almost, “from the beyond.” The omniscience of the narrator tells us early on that Abernathy only has a few years to live, for instance. There’s a playful style that points to the disconnect of characters’ experiences and their realities, there are interjections that read kind of like Ron Howard’s narrations in Arrested Development: Abernathy was about to have the best day of his life “...but really he wasn’t.” The book is framed on the cover as “riotously funny,” and I think I have a misplaced sense of sympathy because I mostly just feel bad for the characters. It’s like a dull ache watching their lives so drained of energy and life.

One of the most impactful moments for me was when Rhoda reveals the truth that governs her nightmares. She has a recurring dream of crawling across her driveway, not being able to reach her door, and her ex-husband arrives in his truck. I can imagine the dream pretty vividly and the terror it would inspire. Partway through the book, Rhoda reveals that she had two children. She describes how her father always used to say that deaths come in three. She tells Abernathy about deaths she witnessed and then the tragic story of her son eating mushrooms in the yard, being allergic, and dying while she was caring for her younger child. She narrates as follows, and the conclusion is such a great tragic intrusive thought almost as impactful as the mid-point of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust:

“When I walked into the yard,” she says, “and I saw him I called the ambulance. I called Derek and I said come home. Come home now. But it was too late. I knew it was too late. His face wasn’t — wasn’t moving. I went to go get, I went to go get Timmy. And we all sat together to wait. I held him in my lap. His perfect face. All three of us together. We were all together. All three of us were together but all I could hear in my head was my dad. He was just saying it over and over again. ‘What did you expect? At least now we’re free of it.’ I thought that. At least now we’re free of it. I thought that about my own son.” (200).

Following this harrowing account of her experiences, Abernathy, the coward, abandons Rhoda. At the height of Abernathy’s cynicism, he starts sanitizing all elements of dreams, sucking up the dreams wholesale. As it turns out, people’s memories are tied to their dreams and he starts creating zombies with no connections to the real world: just what companies wanted to achieve. He realizes too late how the banality of evil has crept into his life and makes a last desperate attempt to repair his relationship with Rhoda, which has a tender, if heartbreaking, turn.

Overall, the novel has a number of things going for it. It’s good, but not great. As I mentioned, I just wanted it to have some more escalation. I needed McGhee to give it a bigger push, to take some more wild risks, in order to give the book some more rich layering. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind has a lot of things going for it in terms of premise and social critique. If you’re into a magical realism Kafka / David Foster Wallace, it’s worth picking up. If you want an all-out dreamscape, you might turn your attention elsewhere—or fall asleep.

Happy reading!