Review: A different woman every day of the week

A New New Me
Helen Oyeyemi
Faber, £16.99, pp256

Helen Oyeyemi’s eighth novel takes place over the course of a week. Its protagonist is Kinga, a 40-year-old living in Prague. Exactly what else is true about Kinga depends on which day of the week it is – for she isn’t just one character. She splits herself into seven iterations, each of whom has her own job (matchmaker, window cleaner, professional lounge-around-er), habits and acquaintances.

Each of the novel’s seven parts is narrated by one of these different Kingas – conveniently named Kingas A-G – as she writes in their shared journal, updating the others about her day. “Hi girls,” begins Kinga-A, who goes on to refer to her associates as “my darlings”. Kinga-D, meanwhile, prefers to address them as “squad”, while, quite delightfully, Kinga-F writes to her “Special Ks”. Naturally, organising the separate strands of this single life comes with a lot of admin: “You can only contact me on Mondays,” Kinga-A tells a new friend.

Their system begins to unravel when Kinga-A finds a man tied up in her apartment. None of the other Kingas has admitted to knowing him. So how did he end up there?

It’s a brilliantly fun set-up, and – although not exactly straightforward – more purposeful a conceit than in the Nigerian-born British author’s previous novels. Those books – including White Is for Witching (which won a 2010 Somerset Maugham award), Gingerbread, and Peaces (which was shortlisted for the 2022 Goldsmiths prize) – are lively, unexpected tales. But they do leave the reader perplexed rather than satisfied.

So it’s exciting that A New New Me is the plottiest of Oyeyemi’s novels to date. In a sense it becomes a whodunnit as told through a kaleidoscope. Oyeyemi enacts the tale with her typically fun-loving panache as she details everything from Kinga-C’s spirited love for her “unicorn wellies”, to Kinga-E’s explanation of why she doesn’t love taking a bath: “liquid creeps out of your ear as if it’s a slug that’s appalled, simply appalled, by what it’s discovered”. As Kinga-E walks around Prague’s Petřín Gardens, she observes: “Autumn and winter are deranged predators that rip softness away from every skinny little twig that ever reached out for something to hold. And we look the other way because we’re charmed by the multicoloured leaves followed by the ice skating and whatnot.” There is hardly a sentence here that won’t make you smile.

But whether the book works overall is a different matter. Most jarringly, the seven Kingas don’t feel distinct enough to make the supposed rivalry between them believable. Perhaps it’s just over-ambition on Oyeyemi’s part; for while a character per day seems a simple premise, when it comes to it, the Kingas end up seeming very similar. But maybe this is the point after all. Maybe Oyeyemi is telling us that while we may sometimes feel as though we have different personalities, or, thanks to the demands of modern life, are made up of many different people, we are in fact only ever ourselves. Perhaps, for once, a book from this mind-bogglingly imaginative author has a pleasingly clear explanation – not that Oyeyemi would ever let on.

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Photograph by Katerina Janišová