The key ideas

Temporary

Hilary Leichter, 2020

Her jobs last a day, a week, sometimes a month. She has filled in for a chairman of the board, organized someone else’s shoes and washed skyscraper windows. Now she wears a necklace holding the ashes of the chairman she replaced, and every now and then the Chairman himself appears and talks to her. The agency promises that permanence will come someday. Meanwhile her handler, Farren, calls with a new assignment: on a pirate ship, she has to become a woman named Darla.

Who it is for

For anyone who has gone from job to job, waiting for the one that stays. For lovers of strange fiction where the funny and the sad walk side by side. For anyone who has ever felt like someone’s replacement.

There is nothing more personal than doing your job.

A job that stays

“I have a shorthand kind of career. Short tasks, short stays, short skirts.” The author gives her heroine neither a name nor an age. She is a temp: on Mondays and Fridays the agency calls her and gives her a new placement.

Her handler at the agency is called Farren. Farren’s nails are painted in sparkly polish, like constellations behind clouds.

The heroine has only one dream. Temps call it permanence: one day a job will simply stay, and a person will become like everyone else. What the heroine fears most is not noticing it when it comes.

What she does have is boyfriends: the earnest one, the tallest one, the favorite one and many others. None of them lives with her. Only their sweaters live in her closet.

The Chairman on a chain

Farren sends the heroine to fill in for the chairman of the board of a huge corporation, Major Corp. The heroine signs papers she doesn’t understand and wears a polka-dot scarf with her suit, knotted like a tie.

On her last evening at work, in the snack pantry, she finds the real Chairman. He is thin as a bean pod, with thick white hair and a handkerchief in his breast pocket. He shells pistachios with one hand and eats them shells and all. She asks him why he is hiding. “I’m not hiding, I’m dying.”

Soon a box with an urn is delivered to her. Farren explains: all his life the Chairman was a man about town, so let him go on being one, and for that he has to be carried around. When the heroine asks when the assignment ends, Farren answers, “When does anything end in this infinite world?”

The heroine pours part of the ashes into a necklace, a gift from her handy boyfriend. The rest she hides in the box at the back of her closet. A week later the necklace starts to burn, and the Chairman is already standing on her couch, touching the ceiling. She asks whether he grants wishes. “What do I look like, a genie?” And he vanishes.

The boots she wears belong to someone else too. Their owner, a lonely woman who lives with her shoes, hired the heroine to organize them, and one day walked out of a store in new loafers without paying. Soon afterward the heroine took the boots from her closet. A shoe for a shoe.

Read in Livria

About the author

Hilary Leichter lives in Brooklyn and teaches fiction at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in n+1 and The New Yorker, and she has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her novel Temporary came out in 2020 from Coffee House Press in Minneapolis.

All books by this author: Hilary Leichter

Terms from the book

  • Carl
  • permanence
  • Farren: The heroine’s handler at the temp agency. Always in lip gloss and sparkly nail polish, always promising that permanence is just around the corner.
  • Major Corp: A huge corporation where the heroine fills in for the chairman of the board.
  • Chairman: The chairman of the board of Major Corp. After his death the heroine wears part of his ashes in a necklace. When the necklace burns, the Chairman appears and talks to her.
  • Darla: The pirate the heroine replaces on the ship. Everyone tells her what Darla would never do, while Darla herself is visiting her grandparents in Florida.
  • Pearl: The heroine’s friend on the ship, in a patchwork skirt. She herself once took the place of the first Pearl, who one day never came back to the ship.
  • barnacles: Small crustaceans that cement their shells to rocks for good. In the novel, people stand in for them on a rock while the species dies out.
  • Laurette: A bank robber. Carl was supposed to kill her, but by mistake he killed her younger sister.
  • Agency for Fugitive Temps: A service that hides temps who have broken the rules in the most out-of-the-way places.
  • Last Temporary: What the novel calls the heroine at the end, once she has gained permanence and outlived everyone.

All terms

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