by Nicole Yurcaba
As Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday discounts, higher inflation, and the ever-not-spending dollar dominate American headlines, many might be left wondering what exactly America has to offer the world. After all, if Americans can’t buy, spend, sell, and discard, what, pray tell, can they do or offer? Dorota Maslowska’s phantasmagoric, nightmarish novel Honey, I Killed the Cats provides an answer, one that many readers, particularly those engrossed in America’s spend-and-languish-in-debt culture may not want to hear. Maslowska’s novel follows two independent women–Farah (known as Fah) and Joanne. Fah is a malcontent germophobe; Joanne is a hair-styling, blissful ignorant. When their consumerist ties that bind them together finally break, each flits about their own life, learning that perhaps, thanks to the commercials and glossy magazines they’ve consumed really haven’t given them much to offer not only themselves, but also anyone else.
The power of Maslowska’s novel lies in how it so well and so bluntly captures the banalities of America’s consumerist culture in Joanne and Fah’s characters. Though Fah has brief moments of philosophical clarity, her preoccupation with shopping overshadows any depth Fah possesses. Fah recognizes the need for transformation, thinking “the gradual discovery of the joy of life is a long-term process full of conscious effort and an appropriate channeling of energy.” However, Fah, being the faithful consumer that she is, equates self-awareness and personal change with, well, a change in her wardrobe: “Above all, there was somehow no way to anticipate the changes in her old garments.” Farrah “spent huge amounts of time wandering around the mall and buying whatever,” attempting to assemble her new self.
Along with its main characters’ materialistic focuses, the novel deftly captures the class crisis plaguing America due to its buy-spend-discard culture. Joanne and Fah both struggle to live the lifestyle their favorite magazines brainwash them into believing is attainable and real. On Bohemian, the street on which Joanne works, Maslowska creates a world in which the rich live to spend their cash and eat the poor. On Bohemian, the rich Maslowska portrays don’t moan about not having a place to live; instead, they “bought themselves a palace in Florence,” and if they don’t have a Porsche, they “bought themselves a Ferrari.” The rich deem people who can’t achieve their levels of affluence as “worn-out folks who aren’t worth shit,” and if the rich encounter those who can’t match their wealth and consumption, they can “take a hike, because they’re [the rich] calling security.”
Maslowska’s novel portrays America’s consumerist habits as a personal, societal, and climate crisis. Fah sinks deeper and deeper into a depression sparked by Joanne’s romantic pursuit of an unemployed Hungarian (after all, what do languages, art, and diversity matter when one can buy, buy, buy?). In her dreams, she hangs out with mermaids in seas where they swim “past old French fries and shopping bags.” Even the mermaid Fah befriends in her dreams learned to dicker and deal from the humans above: “With childish delight she pulled the legs of Farah’s pajamas over her arms and slipped into the dark turquoise depths.” Images of polluted seafloors and dying, scale-sloughing mermaids permeate Fah’s dreams, but no matter the dire warnings Fah receives, one message rings above others–keep consuming.
Maslowska’s novel seizes on yet another consequence of America’s devotion to the dollar—loneliness. What readers can immediately grasp about Fah is that she is definitely lonely, and even though she attempts to fit in with coworkers, she can’t. What Fah can’t recognize, however, is that it’s not only her coworkers’ superficiality she can’t stand—it’s also her own. Maslowska depicts social settings where social media dominates and coworkers spend time together after work, conversing “about who had written and read what on Facebook until they finally got hammered and howled themselves ragged as an old pair of panties until midnight.” What Maslowska’s novel also advocates is that while consumerism and materialism fill a void for a short period of time, when the transitory satisfaction they bring fades, it leaves “us to prey upon ourselves” and “We’re like a starving boy who doesn’t yet know life, to whom a derelict will show a dirty leaflet in some corner.” Chained to consumerism and materialism, “we lie there through sleepless nights, craving something, longing for something, trying to be attracted to something.”
By the novel’s end, what Maslowska’s nightmarish, simple-minded society makes readers realize is that because of America’s focus on materialism, its culture and those who inhabit it are a “beloved collection of bullshit, piled up so eagerly” against “memories, thoughts, garbage, tastes, obsessions, and regrets.” Maslowska’s work challenges readers to look inward and analyze their consumption patterns, their mental and social health, and, perhaps most importantly, the true foundations of the relationships they hold dear.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
