Office Girl by Joe Meno
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
At first I thought I was reading about millennial hipsters, riding their bikes around snowy Chicago, defacing public property with paint pens. (I like this book’s alternate title: “Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things.” It suits the story much better, as only a fraction of the book is from the “office girl’s” point of view.) Soon I realized I wasn’t reading about millennial hipsters at all. The story takes place in 1999, making them . . . GEN-X hipsters!
The first section of the book (Odile) didn’t quite captivate me. Parts felt like creative writing exercises. Long passages of internal monologue, chapters in list-form, quirky line drawings, and a Tao Lin-esque writing style felt contrived rather than original.
It all pulled together once the point of view character switched to Jack. Finally, the contrivances fell away and the story and characters began to emerge. Odile and Jack ride through the snow on bicycles. They’ve semi-ironically started a new art movement. I was no longer annoyed with them at all. I liked them, I felt for them. I even enjoyed their fake art.
Rebecca Kelley 
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