Katharina Volckmer’s new novel, Calls May Be Recorded, is a workplace satire taking place over the course of a single workday. While one can say of any novel that it is not for everyone, that would be a gross understatement in the case of this thoroughly kinky novel.
The protagonist, Jimmie, works in a London travel call center, handling complaints from unhappy vacationers. A straightforward premise, one would think, but it immediately devolves into a multi-layered, twisted complexity.
The surface narrative serves up madcap humor.Jimmie, who is gay, presents himself at work in his mother’s old dress and sporting her old lipstick. He answers a total of 14 calls. The complainers include a vacationer with a skin condition who is worried because he has heard that at the beach sharks can smell blood a mile away, a caller upset that the resort allows more than one person at a time into the infinity pool since he wants his photos to make his trip look “exclusive” and a woman upset to find a hair from someone else’s head on her pillow.
The calls and responses in Calls May Be Recorded are zany, and the protagonist’s inappropriate comments range from extremely personal to sarcastic. The 14bizarre calls prompt fourteen twisted responses.
“I’m pretty sure they’re mocking me here [in my Paris hotel].
The hotel staff?
Yes…
Are you sure they’re not just French?”
When the woman calls to complain about the stray hair on her pillow, Jimmie handles the complaint by replying, “Seems like you’ve got a good eye for hair.”
The plot contains another vein mined by Volckmer: intra-office rivalries and intrigue. Jimmie, following a stint as an actor-mourner employed by a funeral parlor, attended drama school with his friend Daniel. Then, they performed together as clowns at children’s birthday parties.
Jimmie, we are informed, touched Daniel for the first time in a birthday boy’s bedroom. Daniel, who is now an employee at the same call center, has just been promoted from his and Jimmie’s “call-boy” jobs to become the Assistant Manager.
Recordings of calls are used for employee training purposes. Adding to his workplace angst, after the recording of one of Jimmie’s outrageous calls is played at a training session, he is invited into the boss’ office. Jimmie is sure that he is about to be fired. Thus is the one-day narrative steeped in Jimmie’s dread, both specific as to his boss and general as to his life.
Talking with his boss, Jimmie first diverts the conversation by telling him a “red-wedding” story. His Italian mother was about to marry a Mafioso, he says, “one of those possessive little Italian men with chest hair and a golden necklace”, when his grandmother, who always had an electric kitchen knife at hand and plugged in, proceeded to slice at the groom’s throat when he sunk his fingers, as was his wont, into the food.
In the hope of further distracting his boss from the anticipated firing, and in an attempt to evoke pity, Jimmie asks him:
“How would you feel if your own mother had beaten your pet to a pulp in a fit of rage? …I held his white paw for hours after he died, I could feel it getting cold and stiff. …I let my little Henry down.”
Nine pages later, we learn that “sometimes [Jimmie] wished his mother had actually clubbed the bastard to death on the kitchen floor so that he could feel sorry for the cat instead of himself.”
There is more. Much, much more.
The storylines in Calls May Be Recorded are thoroughly hyper-sexualized. There are trysts (as well as a lipstick tutorial) in the men’s room, continuous graphic references to specified bodily fluids, and other explicit scatological and sexual references. Jimmie’s last call morphs into phone sex after which Jimmie recalls his sexual encounter, in his mother’s dress, with a corpse in his former employer’s funeral home.
As I say, Calls May Be Recorded is not for everyone.
Teachers of the writing craft often note the importance of putting characters under pressure. One way to do that is to put them in a confined space, and Volckmer imbues Calls May Be Recorded with claustrophobia. Jimmie and the other employees work in dirty, grey-walled cubicles, the “pathetic kitchen” has the call-center’s only window, and several important scenes occur within the men’s room’s orange-walled stall.
However, under the darkly comedic surface of this edgy workplace tour de force lies finely-wrought literary fiction illuminating the protagonist’s deep alienation. Volckmer writes with clarity and psychological depth, creating a character whose dress and lipstick and wild interactions with others mask a disjointed isolation from the world and his thoroughgoing, existential sadness.
Calls May Be Recorded is funny/not funny.
It is a tale of interpersonal connection, its function, and dysfunction. While at no point in the plot is Jimmie able to establish a genuine interaction with either his workplace colleagues or the help center callers, below the surface narrative, Volckmer’s insightful writing succeeds at the difficult task of delineating, with emotional poignancy, an isolated soul’s yearning for connection.
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