Temporary is a short, surreal novel about the precariousness of temporary work. The unnamed first-person narrator is a Temp, as was her mother, and grandmother, who works job after job, hoping to find her Permanence.
Nearly all the jobs we see the narrator perform are fantastical in some way. She briefly fills in as the chairman of a board of diectors, as a barnacle, a ghost, an assistant to a witch. We see other temps too - replacement girlfriends and mothers. Almost all the temps we see are women.
The narrator has longer, more consequential placements on a pirate ship, as the assistant to a hitman, on a bomb-dropping dirigible. The compromises everyone has to make with the organizations they work within are literalized as being ordered to commit murder, with her continued placement and the quality of her recommendation on the line. How much does she want her Permanence? What is she willing to do to earn it? And what will happen to her if she keeps refusing to make that one fatal compromise? The plot reaches a crisis point when the narrator finds herself unemployed and, she fears, unemployable, and then resolves.
Leichter's prose is very lively, with a lot of alliteration and prosody and riffing and repetition with variations. She knows her story is silly, but tells it straight. And the emotions of fear and uncertainty that accompany precarious employment come through as authentic. It's a lot of fun to read, and by the end, surprisingly moving.
One of my favorite details is the narrator's abundance of boyfriends, who she sees on different days of the week - the culinary boyfriend, the tallest boyfriend, the favorite boyfriend. I think there might be a new one every time she talks about them, and they're just a fun little extra in a short book stuffed full of fun extras.
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