Is Yesteryear an Unintentional Masterpiece?

I've convinced myself that the thing that I disliked the most about yesteryear actually might make it one of the more insightful commentaries on the state of popular entertainment and politics across the political spectrum. And I feel like I'm going insane a bit so I need to talk to someone about it on the internet so please join me analyzing i think some of the interesting things about Yesteryear which to be clear i thought was fast-paced entertaining very heavy-handed in a relatively short video. and a little silly at the end but a perfectly entertaining pop fiction that frustrated me but i think if we take it in a larger context it has some really interesting things to say potentially unintentionally but i'd really like you to join me on this journey and as always please post your own takes in the comments, because I don't usually talk about the most popular modern fiction on this channel. If you do want to like and subscribe, you'll find a lot of dives into weirder, stranger literary fiction and authors, but this time I just couldn't help myself, so please join me on a pop fiction odyssey through Carol Clare Burke's Yesteryear and all of the state of popular fiction and politics and the internet and social media in general, all in hopefully a relatively short time. Also as a bonus, stick around to the end of the video and I'll have some book recommendations for I think novels that take on a lot of the same themes as Yesteryear but they're in a bit more of a literary fiction vein so they mine them deeper and I think in more interesting ways because they aren't as focused on just telling a surface level skimming story as Yesteryear does, I think both for good and ill. Now I think anyone who's a reader will have heard of Yesteryear. It It is a publishing phenomenon. And they'll be familiar with the concept. It follows a trad wife influencer who is mysteriously transported back in time to the pioneering days where she has to grapple with the lifestyle that she portrays on her social media, being in the actual time where it was, where there's less technology, less support, and women have fewer rights. My friends who convinced me to read it are more familiar with Cara Claire Burke. She is around social media. She's had a podcast. She digs into trad wives and... Other topics in this book had a huge bidding war, huge deal, and has sold so many copies. And if you picked it up like me, you might be expecting something that would really dig into the Tradwife culture and all of the things surrounding it in a very cultural zeitgeist moment. Which is why I was disappointed when I opened it up and I found out that our narrator, Natalie is already cynical and jaded with the whole trad wife culture. She already knows that what she's performing for social media is fake. And so when she does have this event that trashes her back into the timeline, she is already very much not into this lifestyle. She's performing it in a sort of spiteful performance for what she calls the, in capitals, angry, women online. As the book bounces between timelines we get a sense of Natalie's youth when she went to college and she met more left-wing women and her conservatism is sort of made fun of and so she begins acting out in this performance of conservatism against these women in this cynical ploy. She marries a politician's son, she uses that money to set up the farm, she has a lot of help and she knows that what she's living is a lie. I had been expecting an exploration of what really makes trad wife culture seductive to so many people, why those performances online do so well, and why people are turning to more of a traditional conservatism. I am very much in the camp of a person that this book is pitched towards. I am more on the left wing. I am more cynical about that appeal to traditional values and cultures which tend to be much more in the white nationalist vain and exclude a lot of diversity that I think has been really good for the world to accept. But Natalie turns out from the first page to be a character. She is a shrill manipulator who knows what she's doing is wrong and has never bought into this culture other than being a holier-than-thou person who just exists on spite from other people, and this extends to the surrounding characters. Her husband is just sort of a useless blob and gets really involved into conspiracy theories and the manosphere. Her father-in-law is a manipulative conservative politician who is willing to stoop to murder to get his way, and his wife is a pill-addled plastic-surgery Republican wife. And it just feels like you are reading a comic book of stereotypes that leftists have of right-wing conservatives. And this bothered me for a few weeks after I finished the book before I started to see the parallels between how the book presents Natalie and how Natalie presents all the leftists as angry women in capitals. To the book, Natalie is an angry woman. She is a caricature of what a conservative woman is, driven only by spite of others, just as much as Natalie perceives the women who criticize her are driven and performing only out of spite and hatred. And so the book is performing... the exact same thing with the right wing as it accuses Natalie of doing with the left wing. Now I did read that Burke went to various Tradwife influencer boot camps and did quite a bit of research, but not a lot of it shows up in the novel. There is a scene where Natalie goes to one of these, but she is a standout where she already doesn't believe what is being pitched, and so focusing on her is an active choice By the book, because it is not showing a larger picture, it is already showing someone who is a stereotype of what a leftist would consider to be an influencer, someone who's cynical and already performing everything to it. And Burke has said on her interviews in this novel's publicity cycle that she considers social media to be more of the bane of the current environment than tradwives. In general, the way that it just skims along the surface level and thrives on outrage I think has benefited the book to the detriment of any discourse because the book is so surface level in its treatment of conservatives relying on stereotypes for all of the figures surrounding Natalie. It just doesn't give anything to anyone who wants to explore the subject more in depth and a lot of hatred for the book has been from a conservative community who doesn't feel like like the book understands their And interestingly, the book again points out its own flaws, where we have our producer who is a young leftist coded woman who comes in to help Natalie's career, and she says that she was initially drawn in because she also is fed up with capitalism and the nine to five daily grind and wants to have a lifestyle that is outside of that rat race system. But it's only a short scene and it's quickly dismissed as we go back. into Natalie's worldview and culture and so the book is very aware that what it's presenting is not the larger story and it becomes a thing that as the book does better and better in its caricature and sells more and more but only to a certain audience it's doing the exact same thing that Natalie is criticized for. Even Natalie's sister and mother I think are really interesting through line through the story where they both start out Quite conservative, her mother raises her in this environment, and her sister marries young to her sort of stupid high school boyfriend, gets pregnant a lot, but eventually they leave that community, they join a much more progressive church, and they begin to accept things. But it doesn't really show the appeal of that strict conservatism to structure people, and it has that sort of liberal thing, well you just, you need a religion, but you need like a broader, more accepting religion that's more fun. As it goes, and again, it's reflecting that stereotype that liberal people might have towards conservatives without reflecting as to why that more strict and more traditional values might have appealed in the first place. And it doesn't really create a convincing switch from them, though it does create a satisfying storyline for those characters, for the left-wing readers of the novel. This extends to the twist ending of the novel, which is frankly silly and ridiculous and unsatisfying and unbelievable in so many ways and I think because it is such a silly ending that requires so many hoops to jump through if anyone buys into it as a satisfying ending the book is again performing. Now I'm going to bring up spoilers here so if you've listened this far and want to be completely unspoiled please turn it off now but I think the twist that Natalie has a complete mental breakdown and rebuilds her life as an earlier traditional farm and her husband buys in and her sons live in a cabin with a big manosphere sign in it is just so patently ridiculous that it requires a suspension of belief in the reader as great as Natalie's own suspension of belief in her psychosis and mental breakdown that causes the twist. The book throughout its entire length exactly mirrors Natalie, in the experience that it gives its leftist... readers where it pursues an angry woman fueled completely on spite existing within a very stereotyped world. While some of its criticisms are valid it is a very narrow and shallow view which is as equally and narrow and shallow as the view that Natalie has with the wider world and I think it becomes a really fascinating piece of fiction. Through this lens, because as a pop fiction item that sells well and does so well in this social media age, driven by social media access, it mirrors Burke's own criticism of social media influences in the tradwife culture just as much in the others. Now, to be fair, I don't think this is an equal sides view where the truth is somewhere in the middle. I think tradwife culture is incredibly damaging, and I think that return to conservative values is absolutely damaging for. for a lot of society, but I think a refusal to engage it on a level beyond that surface level stereotypical pop fiction does a disservice, but it makes a really interesting analysis of what sells really well, what goes big on social media, and what is ultimately satisfying for readers to have that reflection of a world which doesn't actually exist, whether it is Natalie's Farm or it is the world of yesteryear to confirm their own biases because the world is is very complicated, even if we would like it not to be, and even as someone who sympathizes with a lot of the criticisms that this book has, I found it very heavy-handed. All that being said, I think it's a perfectly fun, entertaining beach read, and if you don't think too hard about it, it is a silly and entertaining novel. I don't mean to come after Burke, and I think actually it's quite Well written for what it is. It flows along really well. It's well constructed. The chapters are short and they bounce around timelines a bit. It's a bit overlong, but as far as these things go, it's one of the better pop fictions that I've read despite my criticism. And I think a lot of people can get some enjoyment out of it, but I think digging into it, it can actually have a much larger conversation. So I'd be really interested for those who have read the book, which I know probably doesn't overlap with a lot of my normal audience, what your thoughts on it are is my criticism of it valid and are my thoughts about it as a product of pop culture that i actually find really interesting almost as a piece of performance art reflecting so much of its own criticisms in its own Oh, metafictional structure. Just let me know because I'd really love to have this conversation beyond just me speaking to the internet. But I also did promise you some other book recommendations where I think if you are interested in these sorts of things, really dive into some great fiction that explores a lot of these things in, I think, a bit of a deeper and more complex way, because it's not just focusing on telling a fun and fast-paced story. If you're interested in fiction about women in conservative North American religious cultures, I'm a Canadian so I really have to shill for a Canadian author who I think does a really good job of this which is Miriam Taves who's almost a national treasure here in Canada but she was raised in very strict Mennonite communities which have very strict gender roles and more more traditional cultures and even an appeal back to a lesser technology era and I think her Her later novels really explore to pick any of them up. I think Women Talking is a very harsh one to go through, but it's a really interesting one as well. But I think as someone raised within that culture, she treats it with a lot of nuance and respect, though she has a lot of strong criticisms of it, and her characters and dialogue really shine through, and she is a really fantastic author. And even her stories, which don't necessarily reflect in that culture, All My Puny Sorrows is just one of the great Canadian novels which deals with a lot of heartache around self-harm, suicidal ideation, as well as family. So just read any Miriam Taves, but if you want to read about conservative cultures and women struggling through it, read that. Or if you want in less of a North American context, I have talked about it before in short videos, but Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter is this really wonderful Senegalese classic. novel where Ba wrote it at the end of her life. She only published two novels and this is essentially a reflection on her life and the cultural changes within this very patriarchal Senegalese culture. It is semi-autobiographical and it follows a woman who's writing a letter to her friend and she is secluded during a mourning period after her husband has died and it talks about all of their life together and it is a very almost didactic Novel because it is taking place in this epistolary form where she's explaining all of her life and her culture to her friend who would Presumably know this but its tone is fantastic because it is this older woman and you get that very Older woman vibe who has learned her life lessons hard, but she talks about how polygamy and the limited Thank you. experiences and opportunities that she had really affected her life and how she's glad to see things move in the work that she's done to move things forward, though she obviously doesn't completely agree with the more liberal mores of some of the younger generation of her children. It's a really lovely perspective, I think, on Senegalese culture. It's a very simple novel. The language is clear, but it has that wonderful ring of truth. And if you haven't really explored African fiction, I think it is a really good touchstone. I read it in French, and it's just a really solid novel. If you just want a novel with a really messy protagonist who's making terrible decisions and destroying her life, I will continue to claim that Emma Cline's The Guest is one of the most entertaining reading experiences that I had in the last few years from just following a young woman. She is with an older boyfriend in the Hamptons and she is using him for money, but of course Of course, she gets too big for her britches and Makes a mistake, gets kicked out, and so she's wandering the Hamptons trying to figure out her next move. She's burnt all of her bridges at her home in New York and is just trying to figure out her next step. Gets involved in a whole bunch of shenanigans. But you are rooting for her because Cline creates such a fascinating, sympathetic character that you can't help but root for despite all the terrible choices. that she makes and it just breezes along into a relatively abrupt ending but I think one that continues to resonate with me and Klein is an incredible writer and just really starts from page one to hook you in and is a fantastic piece of I think literary fiction that can masquerade as pop fiction but has a lot of depth within the relatively fast pace breezy tone. And if you just like a good time travel story this will surprise no one I think who has read But Octavia Butler's Kindred might be the greatest time travel story ever written. It's consistently ranked in one of the best novels of the 20th century. Butler was an incredible speculative fiction author, most famous for Parable of the Sower, which depicts a utopia which feels eerily similar to our present day. But Kindred is a fantastic novel because it follows a black woman in the 70s. She's in an interracial marriage with a white husband. And mysteriously, she's sucked Back in time to plantation era America where she saves the life of the plantation owner's son and she bounces between her present and the past. She can't really seem to control it but she tries to figure her way out as the son grows up and it shows as she tries to change him from the horrible We're talking about the terrible racism and power structures of that day. But how much you can control someone, how your relationships works, the blind spots that her husband has as they try to figure out their way through, and just a really interesting examination, I think, of race in America, as well as guilt, belonging, obligation to other people in this really nuanced way that you never really expect even from a good literary fiction author. I think Butler treats it with incredible poise and just an incredible novel. That has stuck with me for years and years since I've read it, and so if you ever really just want to read a great time travel novel that treats a traditional problematic culture with a lot of depth, then Kindred is where it's at. If you haven't read it, you owe it to yourself to pick it up. So that's my take on Yesteryear, which I found entertaining, fun, very heavy-handed, but I But I think as a piece of fiction that's having the success that it has, I think that That its complete mirroring of its criticisms of conservative culture through its own structure that can be just as clearly a criticism of the left and that shallow understanding of those on the opposite side makes it a really great cultural object that I think will be discussed for years within that larger construct. As always I would be fascinated to hear your own comments and takes because I probably left some things out but I found this a really Interesting way to look at the novel within a larger context that even the author might not have realized, but I think more than digging into trad wife culture, Yesteryear digs into the horrors of the internet and surface level understanding of everyone and the shock value and hooks that will just make something a flash in the pan without really having too much to dig into. So as always, like, subscribe, and I'd love to hear your own thoughts as we talk about some more great books on this channel, and I will talk to you soon.