If we could visit other people’s dreams, what would we see? Jonathan Abernathy’s new job lets him find out. At night, Abernathy puts on a squeaky white space suit and a bubble-like helmet, lies down in the bed that takes up most of his basement flat, and waits for sleep.
As a dream auditor he will wake in forests, creeks, blossom-clad houses and coves where mermaids brush their hair. He will see dreamers roam these realms and relive pivotal moments from their waking lives. But they do not see him: he is an invisible intruder, standing awkwardly in their dreamscape, making notes in his log. As he grows more experienced, he unclips a hose from his pack to vacuum away nightmares, leaving the dreamers to wake fresh and untroubled, ready to maximise the profits of the corporations that employ them.
McGhee’s fierce debut is science fiction of a sort. But besides the tech that allows the employees of the mysterious Archive to visit dreams, this world is not so different from our own. There are no galaxy-crossing spaceships or friendly robots; instead, Americans struggle through life in anonymous suburbs. Work is scarce and debts are pursued with brutal vigour.
Abernathy is a worn-down, anxious twentysomething who feels he has failed the American dream. He owes money for his dead parents’ unpaid credit cards and has student loans with “an APR so lethal it can kill in a week”. His debt grows by $25,000 a year, and the gig work he does hustle up – “breathing in the steam of processed meat” at an upmarket hotdog stall – barely touches the sides. The Archive is a dream job not because it lets him explore the “delicate and invisible” imaginings that connect us, but because, as government work, it grants him a pause on his debt payments.
McGhee writes from personal experience. The Nashville author was the first in her family to go to university, incurring $120,000 of student debt, and was chased by creditors for hospital bills after her mother died at the start of the Covid pandemic. In 2022, she left her job at a publishing company, and her resignation letter citing the overwork and limited opportunities faced by junior staff went viral. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is dedicated to “the forgotten who have been worked to death”.
This dystopian drama is a shout of millennial protest and a bleak workplace satire. Desperate to impress at the Archive, Abernathy speaks in vacuous bullet points and cloaks his feelings beneath a mask of positivity. His supervisors sniff dismissively at his case notes, but he wrangles a promotion, and begins a sweetly low-key romance with his neighbour Rhoda. Yet work is poisoning him: he develops a cut that will not heal and snaps at his new assistant. Doubts swarm in his mind. Does he understand the first thing about the dreams he witnesses? When he siphons away their trauma, do the dreamers lose something of themselves? And where, exactly, do those nightmares go?
McGhee’s debut is written in the third person, but holds its protagonist close. We know Abernathy has walked into a trap, and watch with him as its jaws slowly snap shut. This gives the novel a palpable immediacy as well as a grim momentum, but it also dampens its drama. Abernathy’s dream visits are intriguing but lacking in wonder: as he muses, without context dreams are “merely a series of cliches and irregularities stitched together”.
The novel grows richer as McGhee digs deeper, showing the disturbing links between Abernathy’s work and his waking world – as well as the life of the woman he begins to love. On several occasions, McGhee proposes different versions of Abernathy, who might escape or even transform his world. But Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind is not that type of novel. It cannot wish away crippling debt, or the other real-world issues – big tech’s monetising of emotions; the opioid epidemic’s anaesthetising of them – that can be glimpsed in its pages.
Instead, it speaks compellingly of inequality and celebrates small acts of resistance and empathy that sprout even on parched ground. At its conclusion, McGhee eschews the usual acknowledgments for an extended thanks to the “invisible webs” of editors, librarians and teachers who helped bring her novel into the world, in a small but telling salute to connections and creativity.
• Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
