Marvel and a Wonder (41 page)

And this is what makes her so mad as she’s riding home from work that night. The realization that, after all, she knows she is nothing special, not to anyone but herself, and does that even count? Not very likely.

Why did she think this city would be different than Minneapolis?

Because it isn’t. It’s only bigger. And a whole lot noisier. If anything, this city’s only made things harder for her. Because just look at the kind of person she’s becoming. One of those girls who will give a handjob to just about anyone. And this, Paul, this is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you fall in love with someone you shouldn’t.

On she rides, still mumbling to herself beneath her green scarf, thinking of all the other things she does not like, and so this is what she mutters out loud:

ODILE MONOLOGUE TO SELF.

“I do not like beards on men. Or ironic mustaches. I do not like kissing someone and seeing a bunch of marks all over my face because they don’t know how to shave. I don’t like men with big hands. Or small hands. Or hands that are sweaty. I don’t like men who wear the color red. I don’t like the color red. Red is for assholes. I don’t like music you can high-five to. I don’t like high-fives. Or the act of high-fiving. I don’t like the look people get on their faces when they high-five each other. I don’t like the size of my breasts, which are almost nonexistent. I do not like my butt either, which is too flat. Or my hair, which I’ve dyed too many times and now is brown and shoulder-length but brittle. The bangs are okay because I cut them myself except now I look like some kind of flapper.

“I don’t like the fact that no one has any imagination anymore. It doesn’t pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone. Nobody wants you to think about anything new or use your brain or make anything interesting because everything important has already been made. America is over; it’s done being brilliant. Just like all the factories near the river, which are closed-up and empty. Everything genius has already been built, like all the great works of art have already been produced. Also, whenever I tried to do anything imaginative in my classes at art school, all the teachers looked at me like I was a nut. Like the time I made the dress out of chewing gum. Actually, I never learned anything of the slightest importance in art school. I only have two semesters left and I doubt I’ll go back now, because what’s the point? It doesn’t seem like any of it matters. Besides, I haven’t made anything interesting in a long time and now I’m working so much that it’s hard to give a shit about going back to school.

“Then there’s the fact that I do not know if I have what it takes to be an artist, because the kind of things I like to make don’t seem to go over with anyone. Like paintings of igloos having sex. And genitals on fruit. Because I don’t give a shit about taking myself so seriously, but apparently, that’s all my teachers really wanted me to do. Apparently, everyone was supposed to make a painting about war and the failure of God and female genital mutilation at some point. But really, I didn’t want to. It doesn’t take any kind of artist to make art about what already exists. Or that’s the way I think anyway. Any idiot could do something like that. What I want to make are things that you have to imagine, things that are slightly impossible, but then you have people like Professor Wills who taught my Painting Four class and who said my work was ‘twee’ and ‘whimsical,’ which really meant ‘weak.’ And what were the other people in class painting? Still lifes of vases and flowers. Which is the real reason I think I quit art school. Because no one had any imagination. That and the fact that I couldn’t really afford it. And how many people become artists out of art school? It’s all pretty ridiculous if you think about it.

“I’m better off working a job anyway. The job at the survey office is not so bad and even though it’s a bore, I know I’m lucky to have any kind of job right now, even though it’s pretty mind-numbing. But it’s still better than my roommate Isobel who works at a corporate copy shop making copies for people who can’t figure out how to use a copier themselves. At least, with the survey job, I don’t have to deal with absolute idiots. There are just a high percentage of people who are incredibly old, because those are the only people who answer their phones anymore, and then there is the fact that I’ve fallen in love with someone who happens to be my supervisor, and I’ve only slept with him three times, and two of those times I only gave him a handjob, which hardly even counts, but apparently it doesn’t mean that much to Paul either because he’s obviously seeing other girls in the office. Which is retarded. Because the more I think about him, the more I realize I really like him.

“Paul is probably the first person I actually enjoy having sex with, because he’s a couple years older and totally unapologetic, while the other four people I’ve slept with always wanted to talk about everything beforehand, and during, and even after. I lost my virginity back in high school, when I was a senior, working on the school yearbook. It was with a boy I did not like but I knew he was smart and I thought I could trust him. It was more like a social experiment than actual sex, at least to me. We only did it twice because he had a girlfriend who was away at college, and he never mentioned it to anyone, and I think I will always be thankful to him for that. The first time we did it he came on my skirt and I didn’t know what to do so I just laid there. For like a half hour. Seriously. Anyway, he used to kiss too hard. He kissed like that because he watched too many porno movies, I think. And then there was Brandon, who I dated freshman year, and a boy I met a party who I never saw again, and then this other guy, Will, who I was seeing off and on for a while—a photographer who I met in art school, who doesn’t even actually take pictures anymore because he’s a waiter right now—and once he wrote me this long letter asking why I didn’t make any sounds during sex and I happen to think it’s more sexy if you are quiet and he said I needed to start acting like I was having fun with him in bed, so I decided right then it was probably not going to work because what I’ve figured out is that it never gets any easier once you fall in love with somebody. Even with Paul.”

Odile pauses at a stoplight on Orleans, just after the bridge. The snow comes down like a bad feeling.

She looks up, catching a single snowflake on the tip of her pink mitten. The snowflake is lopsided and quickly melts.

She glances around and watches the city fall off into darkness.

You murderous city.
You oafish palace.
I’d like to burn it all down.
What am I doing here? What am I even doing?

What do you do with the rest of your life when you realize you don’t like anything?

She decides the only thing to do now is quit.

Okay. She will quit. It will be easy.

Because Odile has quit seventeen jobs in the last three years already.

END OF EXCERPT

More about
Office Girl

“An off-kilter romance doubles as an art movement in Joe Meno’s novel. The novel reads as a parody of art-school types . . . and as a tribute to their devil-may-care spirit. Meno impressively captures post-adolescent female angst and insecurity. Fresh and funny, the images also encapsulate the mortification, confusion and excitement that define so many 20-something existences.” —
The New York Times Book Review

“Wonderful storytelling panache . . . Odile is a brash, moody, likable young woman navigating the obstacles of caddish boyfriends and lousy jobs, embarking on the sort of sentimental journey that literary heroines have been making since Fanny Burney’s Evelina in the 1770s. Tenderhearted Jack is the awkward, quiet sort that the women in Jane Austen’s novels overlook until book’s end. He is obsessed with tape-recording Chicago’s ambient noises so that he can simulate the city in the safety of his bedroom, ‘a single town he has invented made of nothing but sound.’ Mr. Meno excels at capturing the way that budding love can make two people feel brave and freshly alive to their surroundings . . . the story of the relationship has a sweet simplicity.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“In Joe Meno’s new novel, set in the last year of the 20th century, art school dropout Odile Neff and amateur sound artist Jack Blevins work deadening office jobs; gush about indie rock, French film, and obscure comic book artists; and gradually start a relationship that doubles as an art movement. They are, in other words, the 20-something doyens of pop culture and their tale of promiscuous roommates, on-again/off-again exes, and awkward sex is punctuated on the page by cute little doodles, black and white photographs (of, say, a topless woman in a Stormtrooper mask), and monologues that could easily pass for Belle & Sebastian lyrics (“It doesn’t pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone”).”
—Publishers Weekly
(Pick of the Week)

“Meno has constructed a snowflake-delicate inquiry into alienation and longing. Illustrated with drawings and photographs and shaped by tender empathy, buoyant imagination, and bittersweet wit, this wistful, provocative, off-kilter love story affirms the bonds forged by art and story.”
—Booklist
(starred review)

“The talented Chicago-based Meno has composed a gorgeous little indie romance, circa 1999 . . . When things Get Weird as things do when we’re young, Meno is refreshingly honest in portraying lowest lows and not just the innocent highs. A sweetheart of a novel, complete with a hazy ending.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Along with PBRs, flannels, and thick-framed glasses, this Millennial Franny and Zooey is an instant hipster staple. Plot notes: It’s 1999 and Odile and Jack are partying like it was . . . well, you know. Meno’s alternative titles help give the gist: Bohemians or Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things. Cross-media: Drawings and Polaroids provide a playful, quirky element.”
—Marie Claire

“Odile and Jack are . . . two characters in search of authentic emotion . . . their pas de deux is . . . dynamic. Meno’s plain style seems appropriate for these characters and their occasions, and the low-key drawings and amateur photographs that punctuate the narrative lend a home-video feel to this story of slacker bohemia, the temp jobs, odd jobs and hand jobs.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Meno’s book is an honest look at the isolation of being a creative person in your twenties living in a city . . . Cody Hudson’s hand-drawn illustrations, which relate to the text only laterally, add a charm akin to the small doodles that break up long New Yorkerarticles. The photos by Todd Baxter add a third level to the package, helping to make Meno’s book feel more like an artwork.”
—The Daily Beast,
“3 Must-Read Offbeat Novels”

“A beguiling and slyly disquieting storyteller, Meno forges surprising connections between deep emotion and edgy absurdity, self-conscious hipness and timeless metaphysics. In this geeky-elegant novel, Meno transforms wintery Chicago into a wondrous crystallization of countless dreams and tragedies, while telling the stories of two derailed young artists, two wounded souls, in cinematic vignettes that range from lushly atmospheric visions to crack-shot volleys of poignant and funny dialogue. With bicycles in the snow emblematic of both precariousness and determination, Meno’s charming, melancholy, frank and droll love story wrapped around an art manifesto both celebrates those who question and protest the established order and contemplates the dilemmas that make family, creativity, ambition and love perpetually confounding and essential.”
—Kansas City Star

“A wispy, bittersweet (emphasis on the bitter, not the sweet) romance,
Office Girl
is the story of Odile and Jack, a pair of alienated twentysomething bohemians whose artistic ambitions are being worn away by one soul-killing call-center job after another in Chicago.”
—Chicago Sun-Times

“
Office Girl
is a bittersweet little love story framed by Bill Clinton’s 1999 impeachment trial and the turn of the millennium . . . By letting his characters be emotionally vulnerable, even shallow or trite—which is to say . . . real—Meno supplies an off-kilter, slightly inappropriate answer to the Hollywood rom-com. Meno is a deft writer. The dialogue in
Office Girl
is often funny, the pacing quirky, and some of its quick, affecting similes remind me of Lorrie Moore.”
—Chicago Reader

“Meno’s books have become increasingly liminal and idiosyncratic. In this latest, it feels as if Meno has written the book he’s been wanting to write for years, combining all of those classic elements of his previous work: the stop-and-start of youthful inertia, the painful purity of romance, the way childhood informs (i.e. wrecks) us as adults and a direct prose cut into vignettes and montage. He also works with longtime collaborators photographer Todd Baxter and painter Cody Hudson . . . Gorgeously packaged, it’s like a Meno box set 15 years in the making.”
—Time Out Chicago

“It might be a standard boy-meets-girl tale, if not for the fact that the boy likes to record the sounds of gloves abandoned in snowdrifts, while the girl has a penchant for filling elevators with silver balloons. It’s 1999. Odile has left grad school while Jack’s wife has recently left him; after both stumble into jobs at the same telemarketing firm, they meet, and it isn’t long before he is supporting her attempt to create a whimsical, anti-establishment art movement.”
—Time Out New York

Best-selling novelist Joe Meno is back with fantastic new novel about two young people and a visionary, doomed art movement

No one dies in
Office Girl.
Nobody talks about the international political situation. There is no mention of any economic collapse. Nothing takes place during a World War.