It’s Capitalism All the Way Down — A Leftist Look at TJ Klune’s ‘Under the Whispering Door’
A book about the wonderful ubiquity of life, love, and wage labor
(Spoiler Alert: If you’re reading this because you’re wondering if you should read Under the Whispering Door, well… it’s a good book, go read if you’re into queer romance with a dash of metaphysical.) Now, scram, before you get to the spoilers.)
(Disclaimer about being mean: I like to think I’m not a mean person, and I want to acknowledge any and all critiques are never meant to devalue someone’s blood, sweat, and tears in producing a creative work. Maybe Klune is a radical lefist, I wouldn’t know. Also, this is the first book by Klune that I’ve picked up so I don’t really know the author.)
Synopsis
Wallace Price is, well, an asshole, who dies in the first few pages of the book. His ghost is taken to a cafe, where he must stay until he’s ready to ‘move on’, which, in this book, amounts to going through a door from which whispers emanate. And, the owner of the cafe is incidentally quite attractive.
His name is Hugo, and he’s a Ferryman, whose job is to essentially act as a low-key therapist. He’s a real human, but has the ability to see ghosts like Wallace. He also works with Reapers — also humans with ghost-seeing abilities — who go around picking up ghosts and bringing them to the cafe. These humans work for the Manager, a mysterious non-human entity with Infinity Stone-level powers, and tends to zap people out of existence if he doesn’t like them.
Wallace eventually calms down, and becomes nicer, and grows closer to Hugo. After a few incidents in which Wallace runs afoul of the Manager, he is told that he has outstayed his welcome, and needs to leave soon. Wallace ties up his loose ends in the mortal realm, but has one final demand for the Manager: to save the Husks.
Husks are ghosts who have struggled to move on, and basically become zombie ghosts. And while they have historically been left to their immortal purgatorial states, Wallace insists — after a lecture about the beauty of human experience to an unfeeling Manager— that the Manager do something about it. The Manager acquiesces, on the condition that Wallace finally just die. Wallace agrees, and starts to make his way into the next world, at which point, the Manager has a discussion with his manager, and gets Wallace a new job: helping all the zombie ghosts move on.
Wallace is given a mortal human form again, and he can blissfully now be with Hugo, happily ever after.
Late, Late Capitalism
As with any book that deals with the afterlife, the content inevitably has to make some grand commentary on the nature of life, the meaning of existence, and all that. And, as these sort of stories typically go, it’s something like: be nice to people, understand the world is bigger than yourself, and so on.
What they tend not to do, however, is give you a hammer and ask you to smash patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and so on. And that’s the funny thing: because if we’re going to transcend our mortal, material lives, shouldn’t the next plane of existence break free from these notions? Shouldn’t these metaphysical experiences be liberating from our sociopolitical shackles? Seems like a fine fictional way to explore liberating ideas.
Instead, both the Reaper and Ferryman are employees of the Manager, who serves an even larger cosmic bureaucracy. Actually, ‘employees’ is too soft a term. See, they were approached in times of emotional vulnerability and given this job, though they’re not really allowed to leave. There’s no pay to be heard of, though they get a cafe to live in, I guess. If they act out, the Manager shows up and literally obliterates them from existence — as he did to a previous Reaper. I’d say that sounds a whole lot like wage labor, except, actually, it’s quite literally slavery.
Sure, Hugo and Mei (the current Reaper) are generally happy people, but they are, for the length of the book, terrified of the Manager. When Wallace stands up to the Manager he doesn’t deconstruct the Cosmic Bureaucracy. Rather, he simply wins a small concession. Wallace ‘won’ by becoming co-opted. Or, enslaved, really. The Manager literally threatens to wipe Wallace out of existence if he steps out of line.
As an ironic aside, earlier in the book, the other characters — all of whom are people of color — tell Wallace that as a white man, he will almost always ‘fail up’. And considering he showed up as an angry asshole, made friends and found a romantic partner and got to live forever, this turns out to be quite true even in the afterlife (though, of course, all within the framework of Cosmic Capitalism).
Okay, but why does this matter?
I mean, really, it doesn’t. Not that much. It’s a romance book. Just shut up and enjoy the ride.
But… look: what are our options, when faced with systemic oppression? What power do we actually have in the capitalist workplace, using only what’s available to us within a capitalist system? None, really. Unless you consider unions, which have been all but crushed in the USA. The only leverage they had was to stir up as much trouble as possible until the owners made concessions. And that’s really the only play that our social consciousness has in our arsenal.
We’ve never truly challenged why the Owners exist, to begin with.
Under the Whispering Door lives entirely within this framing, unable to escape, and internalizing the enslaved mindset. Not so good for a book about moving past purgatory, I’d say.
