Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke review – the downfall of an all‑American tradwife

Could Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear be the first great tradwife novel? This was my hope: finally, a literary response to the unhinged social trend of women cosplaying “traditional Christian values” – pronatalism and obeying one’s husband – to large social media followings. I am not immune to hype, and Yesteryear has been hyped to high heaven, prompting massive auctions for the rights, and landing a film deal with Anne Hathaway.

You have to admit that the premise – Instagram tradwife wakes up in what appear to be the actual pioneer days, and finds that traditional wifedom is not as much of a hoot as her whitewashed social media re-enactment had implied – is genius. As one of the “Angry Women” our heroine Natalie so disparages, I was looking forward to some sweet schadenfreude.

Natalie is a “good Christian woman” with a rageful core, or, as she describes herself, “the manic pixie American dream girl of this nation’s deepest, darkest fantasies”. She knows exactly what she’s doing, because “America hates women. What a comfort to remember.” Her biting and occasionally hilarious voice – of the night she loses her virginity to her new husband, she says: “I felt like I needed to throw a dish towel over his penis and wait an hour to let it rise” – means the novel zips along. Intelligent, ruthlessly ambitious and callous at best towards her own children, she’s a sort of Maga Becky Sharp, or Amy Dunne from Gone Girl if she wore smocks. Yesteryear is the story of how she builds a millions-strong following, only to meet her downfall. “I wanted all the aesthetics of the olden times and all the amenities of modernity,” Natalie says. In other words, a “time machine”, but, naturally, 1805 isn’t at all how she imagined.

Burke is good at exploring how children can’t consent to social media exposure and where that segues into child neglect. There are also some interesting ideas about religion and performance – “Who is our Lord and Saviour, if not the original audience member for our lives?” The briefer sections set in “1805” lack detail; one description of the endless laundry causing her fingers to “crack and bleed” is excellent, but I wanted more. This strand of the plot is more compelling than the greater space devoted to how she built her Instagram account. Has she really time travelled? Is this an awful reality TV show? A message from God? Or has she lost her mind?

Resolving this mystery becomes the novel’s main drive, to the detriment of more profound concerns. Natalie is a mother many times over but Burke has failed to make her a convincing one. I am always interested in the things a novelist chooses to dispense with. Here, Burke dispenses almost entirely with the female body, an odd choice for a novel about a woman who births multiple children as part of a pronatalist agenda. Descriptions of pregnancy and birth are shallow and cliched (“my body would have to split open for a child to leave it”), and the rationale for Natalie’s increasing insistence on unmedicated birth entirely unexplored. Breastfeeding is just that: there is no latch, no letdown, no description of any kind. Natalie’s postpartum difficulties bonding with her children are skimmed over.

It’s a shame, as is Burke’s choice to remove politics almost entirely from the narrative. There are hints at the homophobia, misogyny and racism underpinning the movement (“Some women didn’t know they were women any more. Some men didn’t know they were men … The birth rate was plummeting … The white race was going extinct”) but this novel largely fails to meet the political moment. Perhaps this is a deliberate ploy to reach more American readers, but to a European it feels like a bizarre omission.

There’s an even more unforgivable sin, however, and that is how Yesteryear uses birth injury and child disability as a plot point. As well as being shockingly cack-handed, the treatment shows a disappointing lack of curiosity on the part of the writer about how these events shape both a mother and a child: it feels cynical and underresearched. In her attempt to create a clever plot twist, Burke lets her characters’ humanity fall by the wayside. Perhaps this is what happens when your novel is workshopped by producers and Hollywood executives from its first draft. Had Burke, who is undoubtedly talented, been left alone to explore some of these questions in more depth, we might have had a very different book. As it is, the child disability plot twist feels unfilmable, at least in a way that is not totally egregious. For a book with such promise, Yesteryear is a real lesson in not allowing a fun premise to get in the way of a good story.

The Guardian wp:paragraph