Early on in Beatriz Serrano’s cutting and satirical debut novel, Discontent, we learn that 30-something main character Marisa has already had it with corporate life.
“The truth is I don’t know how to do anything, and I don’t know how I got here,” she says. “I suppose it was by perfecting the office game until everybody believed I was a great professional.”
Marisa has risen through the ranks at a successful advertising agency, but she hates her job and everyone at it. She spends most of her working hours either locked in her office hiding from coworkers or racing around in an attempt to look busy.
“Offices are like hunting,” she says. “The more you move, the less chance you have of being shot.”
What she really does, though, is pawn off any actual assignments to her personal assistant or the advertising students in her master’s program class, so she can watch YouTube videos in her office or escape to her favorite art museum. At the museum, in a drug-induced buzz, Marisa contemplates the meaning of life while staring at paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. She also dreams of getting hit by a car so she could go on disability.
If this novel sounds a bit like Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, it’s because it very much is. Both Moshfegh and Serrano explore the depths of millennial ennui, with characters who live lives of extreme privilege but battle relentless — and at times annoying — existential dread. Both authors also master the art of dark humor, with writing that deftly navigates the line between grim and hilarious.
When mentors advise Marisa to “fake it ’til you make it,” she responds with her own version of the rule: “Fake it until people leave you alone. You can’t change the world; you can only try to keep the world from changing you.”
Discontent was written in Spanish and translated for English audiences by Mara Faye Lethem. Nothing is lost in translation here, because Serrano’s cutting wit, like the cheesiness of those inspirational office posters, transcends the boundaries of culture. When Marisa gripes about TED talks that implore you to “FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS” or that boss who treats employees like his teenaged kids (“I believe in you” … “You can do hard things” … “I know you won’t disappoint me”) we’re all nodding and rolling our eyes, no matter the language.
Woven amid the Office Space narrative are enjoyable side characters who underscore the humor if not the actual plot. Marisa’s middle-aged parents call once a week even though they have nothing to say, and her friend Elena jokes that she’s had so much work done, she’s “filled with plastic. … I’m the Atlantic Ocean,” she says.
By the time Marisa is forced to face her worst corporate nightmare — an overnight team-building retreat — we tag along with morbid fascination to an isolated forest outside Madrid. That’s where we can only assume the company paintball battle will not end well. Surrounded by overzealous bosses and coworkers — not to mention an excess of drugs — Marisa’s carefully crafted office persona threatens to come undone, and story’s climax had me cringe-laughing.
This audacious paperback original is another small novel that packs a big punch. At fewer than 200 pages, you could almost read it over your lunch break. An extended one, of course.
