Beautiful Bureaucrat (Phillips)

The Beautiful Bureaucrat 
Helen Phillips, 2015
Henry Holt, Inc.
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627793766


Summary
In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database.

After a long period of joblessness, she's not inclined to question her fortune, but as the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings—the office's scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls.

When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread.

As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond.

Both chilling and poignant, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a novel of rare restraint and imagination. With it, Helen Phillips enters the company of Murakami, Bender, and Atwood as she twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder—luminous and new. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1981
• Wjere—state of Colorado, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., Brooklyn College
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York


Helen Phillips is the author of the novels, Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015) and The Need (2019). She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. Her collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was also a finalist for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize, and her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Slice, BOMB, Mississippi Review, and PEN America.

Phillips has been an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Unusual...deeply interesting.... It's an irresistible setup and if that's all there were, it would be enough... [But] Mrs. Phillips has a wickedly funny eye, a fine sense of pacing, a smooth, winning writing style and a great gift for a telling detail... [Joseph and Josephine's] love—playful, supportive, cozy—steels them for the existential and metaphysical storms raging around them, big questions about life, death, birth, marriage, the office, the ructions in nature, the vagaries of the imagination, the foibles of people, free will, fate, the confusion of the past, the promise of the future...breathtaking and wondrous.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times


Riveting...Phillips's thrillerlike pacing and selection of detail as the novel unfolds is highly skilled...What makes The Beautiful Bureaucrat a unique contribution to the body of existential literature is its trajectory, as the story telescopes in two directions, both outward to post macro questions about Gd and the universe, and inward to post intimate inquiries about marriage and fidelity. Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions.
Jamie Quatro - New York Times Book Review


Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry, Phillips's book evokes the menace of the mundane...The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one's own small life is swiftly headed.
Anna Wiener - New Republic


Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat...Bizarre and painfully human...There's not a wasted word, and it's nearly impossible to put down. Phillips is a master at evoking claustrophobic spaces...It's a deeply tense book, but never a manipulative one. It's also quite funny. Phillips' sense of humor is bizarre, dark but not oppressive...tempered by [her] exuberance, her humor, and her very real sense of joyful defiance. It's a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented.
Michael Schaub - NPR


Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips' The Beautiful Bureaucrat is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language...eerie, stomach-dropping...this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down.
Los Angeles Times


[A] joyride...very weird, very beautiful, very honest book about the surreal business of working in a city, living in a fertile and dying body, and loving another mortal.... While it may have DNA in common with other urban work and life and love stories, with Kafka and Shirley Jackson and Haruki Murakami and the Coen brothers, it really is a new species of tale.... Readers follow Josephine on a tightrope walk over the abyss, where the stakes are total, and the prose is exuberant and taut, dire and playful.
Karen Russell - Slate


Propulsive...gorgeous...stark and spare genius.... A masterpiece of contrasts.... Phillips plays with language in a way that serves both characterization and plot, showcasing her inimitable wit.... Beckett and Nabokov would resoundingly applaud.... The humor and the seriousness in an absurdist story build a tension that carries the entire world within it. Phillips pulls this off seamlessly.... A joy, darkness and terror and all.
Seattle Review of Books


With some of the conspiratorial paranoia of Pynchon, some of the poignant comical darkness of Kafka and some of the interior tenderness of contemporary literary fiction...What Helen Phillips has created is, finally, an intriguing fictional world in which love and language meet their match in routine and necessity—and who, or which, triumphs may be a reader's choice
Minneapolis Star-Tribune


Uncanny and Kafkaesque.... By turns, the novel is goofily funny, creepy and unsettling, life-affirming and sweet, deeply thoughtful and pointedly critical of modern workplace culture.... A strange, yet unsettlingly resonant, fable that melds mystery, sci-fi, romance and satire to chillingly skewer the modern workplace yet somehow leave us reaffirmed in our humanity.
Claire Fallon - Huffington Post


Phillips's novel incisively depicts the corporate hell in which young drones toil in faceless buildings, sorting meaningless files according to inscrutable policies.... The novel has enough horror and mordant humor to carry the reader effortlessly through its punchy send-up of entry-level institutionalization.
Publishers Weekly


[A] seemingly meaningless clerical job in a faceless building in a big city that is gradually revealed to have consequences worthy of a Twilight Zone episode.... Suspenseful, creepy, and distinct, this work is sparse in style but elaborate in wordplay. For readers who like their literary fiction with a side of sf. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal


Phillips's first novel is peculiar, mysterious, and intriguing, bringing to mind the visceral symbolism of Margaret Atwood's dystopian works. Clever wordplay toys with readers while hinting at a deeper commentary on the meaning of life.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [P]art love story, part urban thriller.... [T]his novel offers no easy answers—its deeper meanings may mystify—but it grabs you up, propels you along, and leaves you gasping, grasping, and ready to read it again.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these talking points to help start a discussion for The Beautiful Bureaucrat:

1. Talk about the way Helen Phillips portrays Josephine's job and the atmosphere of the institution in which she works. What is the author sugesting about the contemporary workplace? Does her description resonate with your own experiences?

2. Reviewers have compared Phillips writing to surrealistis or existentialsts like Kafka, Camus, Orwell, and more recently Pynchon, Murakami and Atwood. Why might Phillips have chosen to write in this surrealist genre? How does it affect your experience reading the book? Do you find her style illuminating, overly symbolic and obscure, humorous, dead-on accurate?

3. What does the boss mean when he tells Josephine that "you need the Database as much as the Database needs you”?

4. How much in this book brings to mind the revelations by Edward Snowden about U.S. government surveillance...or perhaps the Thought Police in George Orwell's 1984? Are other there parallels, either to literature or real-life events?

5. Phillips seems to be posing some large philosophical issues:

• Are humans merely pawns in an institutional or cosmic game of power?
• Are we predestined for heaven or hell? Or are we endowed with free will?
• Do we have a purpose in life? Or is life meaningless?
• What compensatory power does love offer?

Talk about some of those questions—and how they are reflected in The Beautiful Bureaucrat. What other issues are raised? Does the book offer any concrete answers?

6. In what way might Trishiffany and the Person With Bad Breath (PWBB) stand in for a kind of deity?

7. What is the religious and mythical significance of Joseph's handing a pomegranate to Josephine and then telling her he's found them a "garden apartment"? (Note the book's cover.) In hindsight, how does that act portend what happens next? What other Judeo-Christian symbology do you see in the novel?

8. How would you describe the characters—Josephine and Joseph, Hillary, and Trishiffany. Do they come alive for you—are they convincing? Do you care about them, particularly Josephine? Or do you find them overly determined or drawn with a heavy-hand?

9. Do you find the book's conclusion satisfying? Do you find the book satisfying?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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