Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke: Indian Conversations on US Politics
I read Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke over a month ago and I needed this time to structure my thoughts about it. This is not because the book itself has high literary merit. It’s because it’s hard to assess this book through a solely literary lens.
This book is a milestone in a larger conversation; one that people are having with grudging fascination and in spite of themselves. Because Yesteryear forces you to ask the question of how long you can keep politics and literature separate.
This is what the blurb of the book has to say:
A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
I came across a mention of this book on one of the global (read American media-focused) websites that I follow. I also follow a lot of the discourse via Bluesky. I discern what is relevant to me, sometimes even just as a metaphor. Race politics in the US feel like a good parallel to the caste issues in India (not to mention our respective cult-of-personality leaders).
This was never just a novel
Yesteryear did not make my cut because—and I still think this—it’s part of a very specific political war of words in the US. If you’ve been following world politics, even loosely, you can see the patterns clearly. The timing of the book and what I understood from podcast interviews of the author tells me that Yesteryear was written as a way to hit back at that narrative. We are in a world of wars being fought via clashing narratives. Trans rights are suddenly part of the conversation because the British right wing defined their hate agenda on that point (and presumably got a popular author to front it).
The American right wing narrative has been pushing for Christian values, rigid gender roles and quite specifically against women’s reproductive rights. Overturning Roe v. Wade was a milestone in American politics. Season 1 of this exact narrative was the 1950s (American) housewife–a bid to create a specific kind of society after the mayhem of the World Wars, relegating women to kitchens and maternity and silo’ing jobs to male members of families only. The tradwife is a version of this construced narrative, updated for the 2020s.
It even shows in the way the book goes—an extended revenge saga against performative religious internalised misogynists. That’s a lot of big words to say that a toxic mean girl had a hard ending, and god and supreme masculinity didn’t save her. In reality, the typical tradwife is white, affluent and well-insulated from financial hardship. If she’s not having to worry about keeping it all together just to pay the bills, I would think it’s just the need for male approval.
That’s something a lot of women around the world live with daily. It makes for unhappy lives but I don’t think it devolves into the kind of ending this book depicts. This is also why I believe that this book was not written as just another fiction novel but as a decided act of propaganda politics. Giving the villain a tragic backstory insulates Yesteryear from outright backlash. The reader is not allowed to wholly fall into hating the protagonist, because poor thing. This is emotional whiplash and I think the exact thing that people are saying when they say it started well but then “went somewhere else”.
Yesteryear first amused my mean streak. Literature allows me to build metaphors between societies and politics. I am decidedly on the side that opposes what a tradwife represents. But it also left me with a bad taste in my mouth. My support for an ideology does not include support for ugly takedowns or unethical manipulations. I feel used in the narrative warfare.
When metaphors cross cultures
My first thought was that Yesteryear wasn’t going to show up on Indian audiences’ radar. Last year, I called Butter by Asako Yuzuki, a tradwife takedown. Most people did not get it and I saw one book club moderator ask the other,
“What’s a tradwife?”
Sometimes I forget to code-switch. It’s not that Indians are apolitical or unaware. We are political in a very different way from the West. And we articulate those politics very differently.
As with all societies, our most privileged group is our most vocal and powerful. But we are also criss-crossed with a culture of silence and automatic shutdown of dissent or non-conformism. This is so deep-rooted, it even informs the core of those of us who want to think of ourselves as moderate or even liberal/left-wing. And of course, the easiest path is to not think about it, let alone articulate it.
The politics we pretend not to notice
This brings me to the complexity of reading this book as an Indian person. The Indian equivalent of the antivaxxer is the Coronil/gaumutra-as-medicine kind. It isn’t a stretch to see that the American Republican is the same as the Indian RW’er demanding that science textbooks be replaced with scripture, and Hindu women birth more kids as dharmic duty. Indian book clubs are undeniable bastions of privilege. Male dominant, caste superior and decidedly pro-that man. At first, the hypocrisy of claiming to love Yesteryear, sickened me. Then I remembered a man confidently holding forth at a book discussion,
“I’ve read this amazing book called Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s mind-blowing. But you know, don’t worry, I don’t think things like that will happen now. It used to happen in those olden days, lol.”
He didn’t like it when I pointed out that we were less than a kilometer from a place that had been vandalised because a performer made a joke about a politician. Clearly, the others didn’t it either, as I now know from the intense hostility I faced afterwards. I wonder how far this new love of performative reading is going to go, when it clashes with the fact of independent thought. How do you describe the term tradwife without bringing politics into it? How exactly does one think about Yesteryear and keep politics out of it?
When rage replaces conversation
Harper’s Bazaar ran a story about ragebait literature, featuring Yesteryear front and centre as a prime example. I narrowly avoided a skirmish when I shared the link.
So what? The book succeeded. We are talking about it.
I felt that acidic burning rise up behind my eyeballs. The thing that Instagram makes me feel. But it also crystallized what I actually feel about the book. How are we measuring success? The rage algorithms succeed in amplifying our nastiest instincts and spewing. That makes for a war, not a conversation. Erasing other points of view, bullying people into silence and the mob mentality of toxic fandoms—these make for compliant homogeneity, not a conversation.
It was significant to me that in a different book-based conversation that same week, one man had an absolute meltdown because I said (to somebody else) that I didn’t want to read a particular classic. Another member anonymously complained that,
“I think she hates the boys. Fake inquilabi. Things were so good before she entered the room.”
Can you imagine that every one of these charged interactions were ostensibly about fiction books, not even written by anyone known to the speakers? None of it was personal. And yet, it all was, because literature (even crass, propagandist pop culture) affects us. It alters us at a subliminal level when we refuse to face it openly. Layer it with the Indian propensity for homogenization, conformity and desire to compartmentalise politics and art. This is mayhem, not conversation.
What your non-political opinion says about your politics
Yesteryear was written to be hated. If you’re liberal, you’re supposed to hate the protagonist. If you identify with her, you’re supposed to hate this brutish takedown. But in India, you aren’t allowed to admit it because these become inadvertent statements of your politics. And we don’t talk about that.
You’re also not allowed to challenge the book’s propagandist nature if your politics are in alignment. A lot of religious people were offended by this book because it definitely calls out the people who build religious superiority as their whole personality. What happens in India, where this describes the most vocal and visible people who are discussing this book? This book forces even the most conflict-avoidant, toxic positive to express these misalignments within ourselves. Maybe that is part of the conversation that such literature forces. No wonder my interactions about this book went the way they did. That disruption has to go somewhere and it’s easier to target it as hostility towards the person who speaks up.
I doubt that we are going to be talking about Yesteryear at the end of the year. The news cycle will have morphed into newer obscenities. And yesterday’s propaganda will be less than last week’s newspaper. Because that is what this book is. Counter-propaganda is propaganda too. A revenge fantasy about a bad person is still an ugly thought to hold in one’s mind. Are you sure you really want to wish that kind of an ending even on your worst enemy? That’s not a question that anyone willingly defining themselves by an algorithm cycle wants to answer.
An experiment in impossible neutrality
Here’s my attempt at a politics-free review. This was written weeks before this post and treats the book as a standalone piece of literature. I don’t like this review and that’s a statement about how boxed in my expression feels:
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I did not expect to read this book, let alone want to finish it through. And now I respect it, which befuddles me.
This book is a scathing critique of social media, through the lens of a tradwife influencer. It should make me gleeful because a year ago, I told a book club that ‘Butter’s Kajjii was a victim of the tradwife brigade. And no one knew what a tradwife was, besides it was just easier for them to see Kajjii as evil and me as a woman who had to be shut down.
I came in expecting a kind of petty takedown of tradwives, whose equivalent in my culture would be bored, privileged housewives being spiteful and holier-than-thou about single, working women. But this book was so much bigger than pettiness.
It dug deep under the fingernails and then the very skin of a woman behave this way. It made me feel empathetic to a really bad person whose existence has been nothing but parasitic on the world.
That is some good writing and I feel like I’ve been gut-punched. Simply because most people read reviews to answer the question of “Is it a good or bad book?”, I say,
“Good book. I will never want to read this author again.”
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
This is why I read. To remember to think for myself. Some days it’s a war within me. I’m calling Yesteryear my endurance reading for this year.