ARTWORK: Sian Williams
we deserve better than matt haigh’s ‘the midnight library’ DANIEL RAY CW: suicide, depression, mental illness Matt Haigh’s 2020 novel The Midnight Library takes the ‘literary’ out of ‘literary sensation.’ As I have written in a previous Woroni article, The Midnight Library is a “juvenile, flat, self-help” book about depression. Its major message: Don’t Kill Yourself. Rather than a 2020 Guardian review’s claim that “Contrary to the fantastical premise, the novel turns out to be a celebration of the ordinary,” The Midnight Library turns out to be a celebration of the banal. Specifically, the banal phrase: It gets better. Its sophomoric exploration of depression in poorly written narrative form in no way betters the already congested proliferation of mental health discourse we’ve seen in the past few years. We follow Nora, who has even less personality than a depressed Murakami narrator. After the death of her cat, the loss of her job and best friend, she decides to kill herself. But lo! instead of dying, Nora finds herself in the eponymous Midnight
Library, where each book contains a different life she could have led. As the librarian (a one-dimensional repository of exposition) explains: Every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living. We travel through different iterations of her possible lives as she reads through each book, and… that’s it. That’s the whole novel. It’s much, much less exciting than it sounds. The Guardian writes that this idea of the “many worlds theory” is “a beautiful concept, but Matt Haig doesn’t explain it in any depth.” This multiverse-esque multi-world idea has become something of a cliché in popular culture, and Matt Haigh should in no sense garner any kudos by using it in its unoriginality. It’s a bad sign for a novel when its major draw (literally its selling title) is more complexly explored in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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