Beautiful Bureaucrat (Phillips) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Unusual...deeply interesting.... It's an irresistible setup and if that's all there were, it would be enough... [But] Mrs. Phillips has a wickedly funny eye, a fine sense of pacing, a smooth, winning writing style and a great gift for a telling detail... [Joseph and Josephine's] love—playful, supportive, cozy—steels them for the existential and metaphysical storms raging around them, big questions about life, death, birth, marriage, the office, the ructions in nature, the vagaries of the imagination, the foibles of people, free will, fate, the confusion of the past, the promise of the future...breathtaking and wondrous.
Sarah Lyall - New York Times


Riveting...Phillips's thrillerlike pacing and selection of detail as the novel unfolds is highly skilled...What makes The Beautiful Bureaucrat a unique contribution to the body of existential literature is its trajectory, as the story telescopes in two directions, both outward to post macro questions about Gd and the universe, and inward to post intimate inquiries about marriage and fidelity. Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn't afraid to ask the deepest questions.
Jamie Quatro - New York Times Book Review


Equal parts mystery, thriller, and existential inquiry, Phillips's book evokes the menace of the mundane...The Beautiful Bureaucrat asks uneasy questions about work and life, love and power, and where the whole enterprise of one's own small life is swiftly headed.
Anna Wiener - New Republic


Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat...Bizarre and painfully human...There's not a wasted word, and it's nearly impossible to put down. Phillips is a master at evoking claustrophobic spaces...It's a deeply tense book, but never a manipulative one. It's also quite funny. Phillips' sense of humor is bizarre, dark but not oppressive...tempered by [her] exuberance, her humor, and her very real sense of joyful defiance. It's a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented.
Michael Schaub - NPR


Part dystopian fantasy, part thriller, part giddy literary-nerd wordplay, Helen Phillips' The Beautiful Bureaucrat is both a page-turner and a novel rich in evocative, starkly philosophical language...eerie, stomach-dropping...this novel ultimately proves both clever and impossible to put down.
Los Angeles Times


[A] joyride...very weird, very beautiful, very honest book about the surreal business of working in a city, living in a fertile and dying body, and loving another mortal.... While it may have DNA in common with other urban work and life and love stories, with Kafka and Shirley Jackson and Haruki Murakami and the Coen brothers, it really is a new species of tale.... Readers follow Josephine on a tightrope walk over the abyss, where the stakes are total, and the prose is exuberant and taut, dire and playful.
Karen Russell - Slate


Propulsive...gorgeous...stark and spare genius.... A masterpiece of contrasts.... Phillips plays with language in a way that serves both characterization and plot, showcasing her inimitable wit.... Beckett and Nabokov would resoundingly applaud.... The humor and the seriousness in an absurdist story build a tension that carries the entire world within it. Phillips pulls this off seamlessly.... A joy, darkness and terror and all.
Seattle Review of Books


With some of the conspiratorial paranoia of Pynchon, some of the poignant comical darkness of Kafka and some of the interior tenderness of contemporary literary fiction...What Helen Phillips has created is, finally, an intriguing fictional world in which love and language meet their match in routine and necessity—and who, or which, triumphs may be a reader's choice
Minneapolis Star-Tribune


Uncanny and Kafkaesque.... By turns, the novel is goofily funny, creepy and unsettling, life-affirming and sweet, deeply thoughtful and pointedly critical of modern workplace culture.... A strange, yet unsettlingly resonant, fable that melds mystery, sci-fi, romance and satire to chillingly skewer the modern workplace yet somehow leave us reaffirmed in our humanity.
Claire Fallon - Huffington Post


Phillips's novel incisively depicts the corporate hell in which young drones toil in faceless buildings, sorting meaningless files according to inscrutable policies.... The novel has enough horror and mordant humor to carry the reader effortlessly through its punchy send-up of entry-level institutionalization.
Publishers Weekly


[A] seemingly meaningless clerical job in a faceless building in a big city that is gradually revealed to have consequences worthy of a Twilight Zone episode.... Suspenseful, creepy, and distinct, this work is sparse in style but elaborate in wordplay. For readers who like their literary fiction with a side of sf. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal


Phillips's first novel is peculiar, mysterious, and intriguing, bringing to mind the visceral symbolism of Margaret Atwood's dystopian works. Clever wordplay toys with readers while hinting at a deeper commentary on the meaning of life.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [P]art love story, part urban thriller.... [T]his novel offers no easy answers—its deeper meanings may mystify—but it grabs you up, propels you along, and leaves you gasping, grasping, and ready to read it again.
Kirkus Reviews