Alexandra Kleeman's You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine is a terrifying, exhilarating display of intelligence. The world of the novel is contemporary and familiar but taken to a disconcerting extreme of satirical surrealism. The narrator, a young woman known only as "A," is a copy editor languishing in a featureless neighborhood, in an apartment she shares with "B," who is an insecure, anorexic version of A. A is dating "C," a nice guy who likes reality television, watches porn while they have sex and thinks that A worries too much.
A is obsessed with "Kandy Kakes," a highly processed food product that can be found at Wally's, a supermarket chain with borderline-dystopian shelving policies and an overabundance of veal. In her despair she is eventually drawn into a cult-like group that claims to want to free her "ghost" through an exorcism of individuality, which involves wearing a white sheet and eating nothing but Kandy Kakes.
The hyper-modern setting, and the disenfranchised millennial characters coping with crippling apathy, seem to belong to the Internet-driven micro-genre of alt-lit, yet there's much more to this novel than a bleak portrait of overeducated, underemployed ennui. Kleeman expertly parodies the consumerist haze of life under late capitalism in the United States, pinpointing the bleakness of fading individual identity. The plot itself is straightforward, if absurd, and the language is clean and highly readable. Kleeman's triumphant debut is a highly entertaining book with stunning hidden depths, worth reading and reading again. --Emma Page, bookseller at Island Books in Mercer Island, Wash.