A sense of selves

Helen Oyeyemi, the Nigerian-born, London-raised writer now based in Prague — and author of, among others, the novels Gingerbread, Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird — is an absurdist, an ardent lover of language and a narrative escape artist, constantly slipping from one story to another.

A New New Me, her tenth book, starts simply enough. The protagonist, Kinga Sikora, is a single 40-year-old woman with a corporate job.

Oyeyemi’s inclination for mischief-making kicks in right away, though, when we realize Kinga is actually a number of personalities, from Kinga-A all the way to Kinga-G, with each personality getting one day of the week.

The Kingas are supposed to keep in touch with each other by writing in a shared journal or dropping voice memos, but the system comes under severe stress when Kinga-A comes back to their flat to find a strange man zip-tied to an armchair in the pantry.

Even before the whole man-tied-up thing, though, there have been issues with these seven “sisters.” There are unreliable accounts, constant complaints, unauthorized spending binges, a certain amount of undermining — not to mention the couple of Kingas who self-identify as “Team Toxic.”

One Kinga is jeopardizing their therapy by obsessively stalking their therapist. Another, resentful of Kinga-A’s bossiness, is fomenting a laundry strike. And there are brief, haunted glimpses of “OG Kinga,” whoever this woman might have been before she splintered so dramatically.

To be clear, A New New Me is not in any sense meant to be a realistic depiction of dissociative disorder. It’s not a psychological thriller. Like much of Oyeyemi’s work, it’s a weird tale, a fractured fairy story, a mind-messing postmodern joke.

Oyeyemi has always been fascinated by doppelgangers, doubles, alter egos and shadow selves. Identities aren’t fixed in her fiction, and all her characters contain multitudes. It’s just more obvious here.

Kinga-A is best suited to face Monday mornings, being optimistic and organized, a get-things-done sort of gal. Kinga-C is “our beloved weirdo.” Kinga-F can be a bit of a party girl, while Kinga-G is thought by the others to be saintly (possibly too saintly).

With its suggestion that everyone is juggling roles, balancing personal and professional demands and basically multitasking all the time, the novel also functions as a satire of late capitalism.

Kinga-A’s corporate position — and she’s a keener — involves matchmaking bank employees, not to make them happy but to make them more productive. Kinga-B does the same job, but she’s a cynic and a slacker. The other Kingas are either underemployed or out there in the gig economy, their various side hustles including perfume muse, window washer, thief, flea-marketeer. One Kinga’s sole role is to stay home and sign for deliveries.

Finally, the seven-in-one protagonist allows Oyeyemi to play with narrative. It’s not just that the novel is related from seven different — and often contentious and contradictory — points of view. It’s also jammed with diversions and detours and even dead ends. There are stories-within-stories-within-stories — one of which is paradoxically titled A Tale Told by No One to No One.

At points, these wayward side-plots might feel a little too random, a little too whimsical, even. But there are always Oyeyemi’s sharp insights, her anarchic energy, her sheer glee — and she uses that word a lot — in language, which veers from the complex and abstract to the snappy, comic and very vernacular.

Taken all together, with every Kinga having her say, A New New Me is sometimes uneven but rarely uninteresting.

If you’re reading on Monday, you might find it intermittently vexing. On the other hand, your Friday self, perusing it in the bath with a glass of wine like Kinga-E, might have a ball.

Alison-A signed up to write a book review. Alison-E just wanted to play online solitaire all day. They worked it out.