Yesteryear
This month, we’re looking at smoke and mirrors and all the ways we allow ourselves to be actively fooled, starting with this months work of fiction, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. So let’s do this!
Now, why did I pick this book? Pundits on the right have been hating on it, saying it’s a shitty job of satirizing Christian values and trad-life/trad-wifestyle’s. And leftists love it because...well, it’s a shitty satire of the trad-life/trad-wifestyle. So, why would I pick this book?
First off, I don’t let other people do my thinking for me. The left and right can have their own opinions and goose step their way through life spouting the same nonsense from opposimg perspectives, but I’ll do my own thinking, which means I’ll do my own reading.
Second off, I do not pick my reading material based on the political opinions of the author. In non-fiction I will judge the fuck out of an author for inserting their politics into a topic where politics don’t belong, or for misunderstanding a political issue. But in fiction? Go for broke baby. I don’t care about the politics of the author. I care if they can tell a good story. So is this a good story?
Yes.
Now, you know I am usually extremely circumspect in reviewing fiction to avoid spoilers. However, since this book entered the arena and cultural zeitgeist as part of the culture wars, I am going to spoil the hell out of it. Mostly because that’s going to explain why, as an anarcho-capitalist, heathen, libertarian, centrist, I LOVED this book. So if you don’t want spoilers, just know that I do recommend this book, and got something different from it than the alleged hate fest that’s been advertised.
Yesteryear is the story of Natalie Heller Mills, a Christian trad-wife influencer who wakes up one day to find her self transported back to 1855 and has to live the life she was preaching to her millions of Instagram followers.
First spoiler: She does not actually time travel. We’ll circle back to that.
So Natalie was actually someone with a lot of promise. She had a full ride scholarship to Harvard, which means she was by no metric dumb. But, she has some adjustment issues at college. She was originally from Idaho, and was raised very Christian, her mother raised her believing her father left when he had an affair, and to avoid having to explain this to their church, her mother always just said “he’s no longer with us.” We later find out, the mother had the affair and kicked the father out.
So, in Harvard, Natalie finds herself a fish out of water, she doesn’t get along with her extremely progressive roommate who, for the record, the author does an outstanding job highlighting the idiocy of extreme leftist progressivism too, as the roommate, Reena, experiences her own professional setbacks.
So in a fit of loneliness, Natalie attends a Christian group on campus and it’s here she meets Caleb Mills, a senior at Harvard and youngest son of five children to senator Doug Mills from California. And they date, briefly, quickly getting married. With, of course, an ironclad pre-nup that Natalie has to sign, because she is basically poor white trash, marrying into wealthy political royalty.
And in no time, she finds herself pregnant and dropping out of college. So she gives birth to her first baby, Clementine, at 20. And shortly after realizes her husband is a man-child, a stereotypical gen-z who was spoiled by his parents and just wants to watch TV and browse the internet all day.
They spend a year living with his parents at their house in the CA wine country where Natalie and her father in law try to come up with a solution to Caleb. Doug wants to get Caleb a job working at a nearby winery as a manager. Natalie rejects this option, deciding that as a Good Christian Woman, it’s her job to make a man out of her husband.
And here are two ironies. First off, if she had let Caleb take that job, he would have at least had SOME kind of agricultural experience before jumping into the ultimate denouement. The other deep irony, and where we really start to understand Natalie’s pathology, is at one point while living with his parents, Caleb tells her that he would like to be a Kindergarten teacher. And Natalie even acknowledges that he would be really good at that. But...well, that’s not good enough for Natalie. Kindergarten teacher is much too lowly for her spouse. She wants status and prestige.
And it’s interesting that the only time Natalie actually takes an interest in anything her husband is doing, is when it goes against the lifestyle SHE wants.
So faced with being the lowly wife of an embarrassing Kindergarten teacher, Natalie locates a 500 acre cattle farm in ID, about an hour drive from where her mother and sister live, and makes an offer, $500k over asking. Then approaches her father in law and says she’s found a solution to their Caleb problem. She’s gonna make him a farmer. She just needs Doug to foot the start up costs. Which he gladly does, because having a farmer in the family is great political messaging. But not before making her sign another document that the farm would belong solely to Caleb. And in exchange, Doug wants more grandbabies. LOTS of grandbabies.
The only problem there, is that the marriage bed is essentially dead. They’ve never had awesome sex, Natalie describes it as he can only get half hard at best. Of their first 6 babies, 5 were conceived via turkey baster. We later find out that Natalie is...a dead lay. Like, she is so thoroughly uninterested in sex, you actually do feel bad for Caleb. There’s not much that makes be pity Caleb, but her freaking out over him watching married couples porn is one of them.
Literally, when they were living with his parents, she sees he’s been browsing porn and refers to him as a sex addicted freak or something like that. But it wasn’t like torture or bondage or “stepsiblings” or amputee midget, or even clown porn. It was “married couples having sex.”
So they move to the ranch in ID, proceed to pump out a couple more kids via turkey baster, when Natalie decides to take a class online about Instagram. One of the peer feedback she gets is that she just doesn’t seem likable or relatable. This is actually a running theme throughout, at one point her mother screams at her “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST BE KIND?”
So Natalie practices smiling in the mirror, being likable and relatable, and not too long after that, has a post go viral. And then she is ALWAYS smiling, a macabre mockery of true happiness, always on, in case someone is watching.
See, Caleb, who is every bit as awful as Natalie, doesn’t actually want to BE a farmer. He doesn’t want to be a cattle rancher. He wants to post the pretty pictures and leave the work to the hired day laborers while he watches football and surfs the Internet. Specifically that fucked up part of the web where men’s rights activists dwell. Think Andrew Tate, think Myron Gaines, think the idiots who preach Alpha Male lifestyle bullshit. Think far right conspiracy theories...the Q-Anon crowd.
And Caleb is talking about his traditional wife, baking bread and taking care of their babies on his manosphere webpages and one of the famous ones with millions of followers comments on how she’s a good traditional woman. And overnight, her Instagram blows up and takes off. Millions of followers, with hundreds of thousands of ad revenue pouring in from Instagram, and a slowly but steadily growing YouTube page.
Remember when I said the farm was solely in Caleb’s name? Natalie is aware this is tenuous for her, and immediately starts putting the funds in a private account. Which Caleb quickly spots and re-routes to the business accounts for Yesteryear Farms.
Natalie calls Instagram and has them split the payments, putting like 25% into a private account for her, and the rest in the joint account, which Caleb never discovers the subterfuge. I only mention this here, so I can circle back to it at the end and one of the parts of the ending that smacked of bullshit to me.
In short order, Natalie decides she needs help and they end up hiring two nannies, and a producer. Shannon. A snake has entered the garden.
Shannon is great as a producer, makes Natalie’s content really beautiful. But...she definitely lied to get the position. And lies at the end. But it all comes to a head when the Mill’s family attends one of Doug’s political rallies as he’s gearing up for a presidential run, and Shannon freaks out about what she’s seeing. And decides to start challenging some of the more...bizarre...conspiracies that Caleb has been spouting.
Since Natalie basically only talks to Caleb when they’re on camera, Caleb is intrigued by this new female attention, and has an affair with Shannon, ultimately announcing to Natalie that he’s in love with Shannon and moving to New York with her.
Remember when I said Natalie only cares about Caleb when it’s going to impact her life? There’s the pre-nup, which she did not have a lawyer look at, the property deed which is entirely in Caleb’s name, and she’s now pregnant with her sixth child. So she’s looking at being a single divorced mother of six with no income, since the perfect Christian wife, trad-life is about to be yanked out from under her. So she calls her partner in crime.
Doug.
And tells him it’s time for Caleb to join politics. Because Caleb will never leave her if there’s a political race on the line. Leaving the perfect bastion of Christian motherhood is not going to play well with the constituents.
And then she confronts Shannon and ends up physically attacking her. And then calls Doug again. Now Doug assumes it’s just an attack of a heavily pregnant woman against the homewrecker who slept with her husband, and starts prepping his PR team and lawyers like that. And as Natalie tells it, that’s exactly what it was.
When Shannon goes on national news, she tells everyone there was a sexual component to it, that Natalie may be a closeted lesbian.
For the record...I think Shannon lied because that told the better story. I don’t believe Natalie was a closeted lesbian. I think she was a Pathological Narcissist with a big helping of Borderline Personality Disorder. She was far more concerned with how things looked, than in being a good and kind person.
Which is made abundantly clear, not just from things Natalie says and does, but during Shannon’s nationally televised interview, when she starts playing clips of things she recorded on the sly.
And Natalie’s mind….snaps.
So, no actual time travel. What happened? Basically, she became convinced that if everything was TRULY AUTHENTIC, then the followers would return and they would like her again. So she starts tearing out the performative parts of her house, the kitschy, picture perfect kitchen, the carefully renovated Brazilian hardwood floors, the large claw foot tub, and starts living like she’s in the 19th century.
Caleb, who has basically been written off by the Mills family as the family dud, goes along with it, because at this point, mutual hatred and control is the only thing they have going for them. And when Natalie starts to try and back out of this newly constructed, purely authentic, old timey reality, Caleb drugs her with more of mommy’s little helpers, a prescription of we don’t know what, but his mother had a never ending supply of them to deal with her own depression.
It’s never actually stated, but I strongly suspect that Natalie starts to come out of the drugged haze around the time Doug Mills gets tired of dealing with the bullshit. The money he’s been throwing at the problem to keep it quiet is no longer worth it to Doug. She “wakes up” like 18 years after Shannon’s interview, so it’s very possible Doug retired from politics at that point and said Fuck It!
So with that, there was no more money to keep drugging his wife, and Natalie wakes up. But...well, 18 years of drug use, no matter how “non addictive” is going have an effect. She thinks she’s actually in 1855.
I knew...basically immediately...that time travel was not a factor. Why?
Well, before picking up books to review, I was pretty involved in historical costuming. If she’d actually time traveled, Natalie would have been wearing a corset.
Anyways, she does eventually piece out that she has not time traveled, but can’t figure out what’s going on. She has four children she doesn’t recognize. Caleb who she does recognize but calls him Old Caleb because she knows he’s older then the Caleb she remembers. There are no mirrors so she has no idea that she too has aged.
Her daughter Mary is barely civil to her, her daughter Maeve is not right in the head, and her two boys, Noah and Abel, mostly ignore her while they spend their days helping with boy chores at the farm. And while she had previously been quite frigid, she’s now having the best sex of her life. Turns out all they needed for a happening sex life was to grudge fuck each other on the nightly.
Anyways, this all comes out as an elaborate fraud when Maeve gets sick. And Mary tells Natalie how to get to the doctor’s house to go for help, since Caleb is basically ignoring it. And Natalie stumbles upon the cabin where one of her older sons...one of the ones who went missing when she woke up in 1855, is peeling store stickers off vegetables. Caleb isn’t much of a farmer at all. He sets the young boys to do “boy chores” at the farm, walks a mile to this cabin where his older boys are stationed, watches football with them all day, then returns with store bought vegetables for Mary and Natalie to cook for dinner.
Natalie doesn’t quite piece that the young man peeling sticker is her son, takes off at a run, and ends up circling back to the farm just in time for her first born, Clementine, to pull into the yard in a Subaru, with a court order to take custody of Mary, Noah, Able, and Maeve.
And then it all comes out.
Natalie ends up in prison for aggravated child abuse, which didn’t actually jive for me. Not that she wouldn’t end up in prison, I could see that. But in the book it’s for 30 years. Idaho caps that crime at 10 years. And given the celebrity nature of this case, the lawyers would have been crawling out of the woodwork to defend her. Even if all she had was a public defender, any half wit, newly minted lawyer freshly added to the bar would have had her before a psychiatrist before the cell door finished locking. And she would not have ended up with a brain dead lawyer. Like I said: Celebrity Case.
The horrifying details of child abuse that come out of meth addled trailer parks get public defenders. She would have had top of the line, pro-bono. Because Celebrity. And that Celebrity lawyer would have looked at the long history, at the pre-nup, the property entirely in Caleb’s name, the 18 years of secretly drugging Natalie, and painted her entirely as the victim of the politically power Mills family, who left her no choice. And she was not without resources, even if she hadn’t had a pro-bono lawyer.
Remember when I mentioned earlier having Instagram split her payments into a private account for her and a business account for Yesteryear Farm? At one point she mentions there was like $80,000 in that private account. Which no one but her knew about. And basically sat untouched for 18 years. With accrued interest, she would have been sitting on around $500,000 when she and Caleb walked off the mountain and decided they hated each other enough to divorce.
So yeah. This book was quite a good story. It was quite well done. And while I’m pretty sure the author is left of center, she actually did not inject any politics into this book. Which was very clever. And wickedly funny to me, as an anarcho-capitalist, heathen, libertarian, centrist. Remember I said the Mills family was from the California wine Country? Here’s a fun fact: California has not elected a Republican Senator since 1988. Which means the Mills family, were likely Democrat. If the author had cared to name the party. And if the lawyers HAD painted her as a victim of the Mills family...well, ID leans right. Some political creature in ID would have turned her into a cause celebre.
To me, a lot of this book was driven by an Idiot Plot. If Natalie and Caleb had actually spoken to each other, a lot of this would not have even happened. Natalie bitches at one point she didn’t have a lawyer to look at the pre-nup...it’s not like you need one on retainer. Hell, as a Harvard student, she might have been able to ask the law school for a review.
I know both left and right love or loathe this book based on it being a bashing of trad-life/trad-wifestyle, but man I do not see it. Natalie was a thoroughly unlikable character with basically no redeeming qualities. If you read this book and felt offended, you might want to seek therapy yourself, to determine what about the character resonates with you TO offend you. Burke actually includes several lines about various traditional families who are all perfectly happy. And the children in the end find a new church. It’s not a dig about family or Christianity. It’s a dig about PERFORMATIVE Christianity, and performative Trad-Wife. It’s about the mask we all put on when we post to social media, hoping for that virality that will take us out of our daily grind and launch us to the stratosphere of fame.
But what’s posted online is not reality. And I was left with a very strong sense of Nietszche: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
