CALLS MAY BE RECORDED

An employee at a travel-agency call center scrapes together moments of hilarity and strange intimacy into a life he can stand, somewhat.

The first three pages of this book describe our protagonist, Jimmie, losing control of his bowels on his doorstep (or, rather, the doorstep of his mother’s house, where she lets him live). This idea, that “bodies get in the way”—of the productivity expected at a dead-eyed corporate job, of true connection with other people—pervades Volckmer’s novel. Jimmie is good at playing the fool: After finishing drama school, he worked as a clown, and then a paid funeral mourner, and now, as he puts it, “a call boy” in London. For minimum wage and no benefits, he half-attends to the complaints of vacationers. The callers he services are usually ridiculous, and their perceived problems even more so. A man in pursuit of a “seamless” tan calls in a huff after being told off for going nude at his Sardinian resort, to which Jimmie responds, “You might want to try wearing a sock?” When a woman staying in the Marais calls, convinced the staff at her hotel are mocking her for her weight, he assures her “that nobody likes French people.” Jimmie feels the weight of this daily humiliation ritual, and, as he nears 30—socially isolated and, as a fat, gay immigrant, socially marginalized—he sees the possibilities life might have held for him winking out one by one. However, over the course of a single workday, we see Jimmie manage to poke holes in precarity, reaching for moments of freedom through daydreams, illicit intrigues (real and imagined) with coworkers, and leaps over the established boundaries of customer service. Volckmer’s prose is electric, and as she skillfully unearths moments of tenderness, even ecstasy, amid the sweat and stench of abjection, she ensures this brief book lingers past its pages.

A raucous, gutting workplace novel.