MOOD SWINGS

Barnet presents a canny portrait of the doomscroll generation, set in an absurdist near-future world.

Jenlena is 21 when animals finally seek vengeance on humans. After creatures of all sorts start attacking people around the world, California billionaire Roderick Maeve funds the development of a sonic signal that kills each and every animal on Earth. Jenlena and her best friend, Daphne, emerge into Quebec’s new normal with English degrees and little sense of purpose: Jenlena takes to stealing and reselling houseplants (which have become a stand-in for pets) and acting as a dog for hire for lonely customers, while Daphne works at a coffee shop and navigates dating a canceled musician named Jordan. Looming in every corner of this increasingly dreadful society, wracked by environmental disasters and political turmoil, are the Moon Bethlehems—a radical cult determined to save the planet. When Jenlena begins sleeping with the Roderick Maeve, the cult enemy no. 1 who is dead set on making time travel a reality, she is swept up in his exceptional privilege. This is a sharp satire of a hyperonline culture, with genuinely moving insights into modern inequality and climate crisis throughout. “We’ve all become like someone on their deathbed, calling up our old transgressions and making apologies,” Moon Bethlehem mouthpiece (and Jordan’s ex-girlfriend) Moon Cicero says. “It’s pretty easy, really, when you’ve got no real intention of changing. You know you don’t have to because you haven’t got the time.” Jenlena and her friends epitomize the wild oscillations between naïveté and cynicism that can define young adulthood, and, while each character is ridiculous at times, they are all delightfully multidimensional. In an apt formal choice, Barnet peppers in the “mental pollution” (as one character calls it) of the online world: she includes tweet-style posts and Instagram-angled poems (as well as a couple of pages of animal doodles and one single photo of Ted Cruz). This book is a great choice for fans of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021).

An off-kilter, hauntingly hilarious debut novel.