Title: Office Secrets
Author: Mary Asher
Date: 2023
Quote: "If all of these trips here and there are going to affect your marital prospects, then I would suggest you put a pause on them."
Evelyn has reached the level in her career where she's sent out on business trips. Her father congratulates her, but her grandchild-craving mother frets that travel might keep her on the job rather than getting her into the nursery as soon as possible. Poor confused Evelyn tries to like man after man, but there are serious reasons not to like the first half dozen. Then, at the beginning of the story, she decides she likes Matthias, who decides he doesn't like her. Meanwhile she's sent on a trip with a junior employee, Tobias, as assistant. Tobias is a charming, amusing extrovert with an invisible friend.
Friend? In the story, Casper, Tobias's friendly "ghost," is not a very helpful friend. Tobias is always yelling at him and having to tell people that he was yelling at a roach.
In my belief system, Tobias is a classic schizophrenic, even if he's not asexual yet. Sometimes classic schizophrenics hear voices before they lose interest in sex.
In Asher's belief system, Casper is a deceiving spirit who really exists, but he'll have to go away if Tobias commits to being a Christian.
It matters; in my belief system, if Casper does go away for a while, he'll soon be replaced by other hallucinations, probably worse ones, and he's one of a small minority of people whose spouse will be fully justified in locking him up and divorcing him, because he won't remember who she is anyway. In the English-speaking countries this is the majority belief system. Rare though classic schizophrenia is, I have more than one e-friend who had to leave a schizophrenic husband to living death in a long-term care facility. But in some countries most people apparently still believe that people can be troubled by these deceiving spirits.
I suspected that an earlier book by Mary Asher was not originally written in English or in an English-speaking country. With this book I'm certain. Evelyn does not initially want to work with Tobias because she thinks he's "lousy." Evidently in the language everyone was really speaking in the author's mind, this is a slangier synonym for "lively," which Tobias is, and nobody does more than smile reproachfully. In the US and UK "lousy" is used as a general slang term of profound contempt, much worse than "filthy" or "'rotten," because actual infestations with lice are rare and the most common kind are classified as a sexually transmitted disease. If someone is literally lousy, we don't mention it. If we think someone is lousy in a slang sense, perhaps "lousy with money" or "a lousy manager/writer/technician" (etc.), and say so, some listeners would be offended by the word itself, and certainly everyone would understand you to mean that there was no chance of love or friendship ever developing between you and that person.
Or, of course, you might be dyslexic...but it's rare for people who are that dyslexic to be sent on business trips. Dyslexic authors are few, and even they usually spare their characters that inconvenience. Dyslexia in fiction is almost always limited to a child's having difficulty learning to read. Well-known people who have the kind of dyslexic brains that may learn to read easily, but mix up words in speaking, usually don't blurt out insults like "lousy." Dyslexic brains make mistakes by sorting out neurological messages from different parts of the brain in the wrong order, so we're more likely to mix up words in a sentence or sounds in a word. President Bush's "sex, er, setbacks" in a discussion, or Dr. Spooner's "You have completely tasted two whole worms," are typical dyslexic mistakes. I've said things like that but I'm more likely to mix up alternative ways of saying the same thing, singular and plural, positive and negative, passive and active: "She had seen Quebec before; she had spent her whole life in Calgary," or, "Every employee were given a bonus." Then there's the pattern where we "dysphonics" use the antonym of the word we mean: "It was white as a crow." And some of us mix up numbers, which is the dyslexic mistake I make most often; to my brain, a numeral is a numeral is a numeral. But a dyslexic American would be unlikely to say "lousy" for "lively." An American yuppie would be more likely to describe a subordinate employee as "impulsive" or "hyperactive" or even "volatile." A dyslexic American yuppie might well say "He's so hyperpulsile," or even sputter "He's so hyperpulactivile." But not "He's so lousy."
(What the character might have been saying might, of course, have been accurately translate by the US slang word "antsy." Because a person who has actual, literal ants in his pants presumably got them by walking over an anthill rather than sleeping around, it's acceptable, if not exactly polite, to say that a child or a childish young man is antsy.)
I like Mary Asher's writing but I'd like it better if her fiction was set in the country where Asher obviously saw or imagined the stories taking place. In a place where many people believe "familiar spirits" are real, a character who had one might be naive but competent, and not a hopeless prospect for anyone at all to marry.
And that awful mother-in-law Asher's given poor daft Tobias? In a better novel any woman like her would next be seen widowed, with a chronic disease, and struggling to bring up four or five grandchildren alone as her daughters had all given birth to twins or triplets, been divorced, left the babies on their mother's doorstep, and left the country. So many things are so much worse than not having grandchildren that anyone who wants to be allowed to see grandchildren, if and when they are born, should make it a spiritual discipline to act as if person couldn't care less whether person ever has a grandchild...even if (as in my parents' case) this is an outright lie they become unable to sustain for a minute after a grandchild appears. Society as a whole may be in no danger of an excess of femininity, but in Jungian psychology "toxic femininity" is seen as a condition from which a patient (even if male) may suffer, and one of the more obvious expressions of toxic femininity is, if utterly unable to keep children from growing up and leaving her alone in the nursery world, badgering the adult children to give her grandchildren.
(For those who missed the lecture on Jung at college: Carl Gustav Jung, a junior colleague of Sigmund Freud's for several years, theorized that everyone has a masculine "soul" and a feminine "soul" among the other archetypes in our psyches. The one that corresponds to our physical sex should of course be more fully expressed, but it's good to be aware of both of them. Healthy masculinity is expressed in behavior like planning ahead and working diligently; healthy femininity, in behavior like caring for those who need care; toxic masculinity, in behavior like brawling and quarrelling; and toxic femininity, in behavior like gossip and manipulation--perhaps most of all in trying to manipulate others to have babies.)
