The Brooklyn Rail

Katharina Volckmer’s Calls May Be Recorded opens with thoughts on when a person is most likely to shit themselves. According to the novel’s narrator, it’s when you’re on your own doorstep, closest to private space. At that point, a body can sense its impending freedom. It knows it will soon escape the constraints of public space and, like a cat that becomes violent in its carrier when it’s almost home from the vet, it will give in to the “most vile of all hygiene violations.”

Or at least that’s what happened to Jimmie, the main character in Volckmer’s startling new novel, after a final, calamitous day of his job at a funeral home, where he worked impersonating distant family members at poorly attended funerals. In the opening pages of Calls May Be Recorded, Jimmie recalls this day while commuting to his new job in a London call center. Riding on the bus, surrounded by seemingly well-adjusted people, it seems like proof of his failure at life. “It was confirmation,” he thinks, “that life is not just a cruel joke, because at least a cruel joke would give you something to laugh about.”

Calls May Be Recorded takes place during a single day in Jimmie’s life at the call center, where he fields customer service calls from wealthy European vacationers. Italian by birth, Jimmie moved to England with his mother when he was young. He is now nearly thirty and still lives with her, though she rarely smiles or leaves the house. Jimmie feels ashamed of his body, which he sees as overweight and unappealing. He is strongly attracted to his co-worker Daniel and recently had a sexual encounter with him in an office bathroom, but Daniel has since been promoted and now only thinks of their interaction with fear and regret. In other words, there is ample reason for Jimmie to think of his life in terms of failure.

There is less reason for him to think that life has given him little to laugh at, beginning with the complaints he hears over the course of the day. Some of my favorites include “The pool boys are refusing to hit on me” (Morocco), “A cat peed on my suitcase and it also got on my leg” (Sicily), and “I came here to write but got booked into a surfer’s lodge and no serious work of art has ever come out of a surfer’s lodge” (Cornwall). Like most of the nearly fifteen calls that Jimmie takes over the course of this short novel, these complaints come from entitled European travelers and offer readers a chance to laugh safely at oblivious rich people.

But these aren’t Jimmie’s only calls or experiences in the office. At one point, an older woman calls from Prague, upset because she’s found a hair on her pillow. As they talk, Jimmie comes to understand her distress and asks if she wants a suggestion for what to do with the hair. When she says yes, he replies, “Keep it. Keep it and pretend you got to fuck someone extraordinary. Nothing wrong with believing in your own story.” She giggles. He’s made a connection.

At another moment, Jimmie, who often feels out of place in the office because he lacks a strong connection to a European home country, recoils from an assumption that his German co-worker makes about his Italian background. In response, Jimmie imagines how his lack of belonging might be remade into something positive. Looking around the room at all his colleagues speaking different languages, he imagines their words “doing a dance like innumerable little birds.” The birds might form into flocks, he thinks, but the flocks “would never reveal all their secrets,” and it was always possible for birds to join new flocks. Like Edward Said writing on exile, Jimmie concludes that we should have “no countries beyond the borders of our imagination.”

These and other moments show that there is more to Jimmie’s professional life than just the dismal routine of a modern office job; that even in an inhuman setting, there is room for intimacy and imagination. Still, it would be a mistake to think that the novel believes in the power of these moments to overcome or even compensate for the restrictive, bureaucratic setting from which they’ve arisen. There is no happy ending for Jimmie, as there is for Jim and Pam in the American version of The Office. There’s no nostalgia for office camaraderie, as there is in Joshua Ferris’s novel Then We Came to the End.

Early in the novel, Jimmie gives us an image for how we might think past this binary. After a call from a fancy hotel in the Maldives complaining about the infinity pool, he looks at a photo of the hotel and imagines “plants fighting their way through the endless swimming pool tiles, those cheap mosaics being destroyed one bit at a time, thousands of little green limbs reaching up until they were united with the sun. Until they could grow over that which was built to torment them.” Wilderness images appear frequently in Volckmer’s writing, but this one works particularly well to represent Jimmie’s imagination in Calls May Be Recorded because, like Jimmie’s imagination, wild plants are always present but often below the surface and hard to see, particularly in manicured settings.

It also works well because while wilderness may be exciting, it is not always comfortable. Jimmie’s deepest and most substantial connection comes in the book’s final pages, during a long conversation with a caller from the US (Alex). Alex and Jimmie end up having phone sex, which Jimmie knows will end his employment in the call center, but which also inspires the novel’s narrator to open up to readers and explain why Jimmie lost his job at the funeral home and began the novel with shit running down his leg. This explanation will likely confirm many readers’ distaste for the book. To me, it seems like a wildly imaginative, deeply intransigent novel’s final refusal to settle for easy answers.