Satire in the Age of Hype

By the time I purchased the bestselling novel Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, I had already encountered the book and other readers’ thoughts on it several times—actually, a lot more than several. I had seen the cover, heard the premise, observed reader reactions, and absorbed enough of the online conversation that the novel arrived to my e-reader with a small crowd of impressions already surrounding it. Many books reach us quietly, with very little context attached. Maybe a cover grabs our attention at the bookstore, or a title leaps off the spine while we’re wandering the library. (That used to be the way, right?) But in these internet days, other books arrive to us already encased in opinion, and reading them means reading not only the book itself, but the expectations that have gathered around it.

Yesteryear was that kind of book for me. Before opening the first page, I knew too much, and not enough. I knew the hook, the hype, and some of the backlash, but I didn’t yet know what kind of reading experience the novel itself would offer once all of that noise fell away, or whether I could quiet the noise enough to understand how I felt about the book apart from the internet’s collective response to it.

That is one of the strange pressures of a viral book. Once a novel becomes widely discussed online, especially on BookTok, Instagram, Goodreads, and all the other places where readers gather and react in real time, it can begin to carry an implied promise the novel itself never actually made. This is never the fault of the book or the author. It is part of what happens when a story becomes a cultural object before individual readers have the chance to consume it privately. We start to expect that if everyone is talking about a book, it should be satisfying in some broadly recognizable way. We think, if it has engaged so many, then it should surely entertain, surprise, or move us in some grand way. It should justify our precious time and attention, and perhaps, most unfairly, it should please everyone—from the avid to the occasional reader. But Yesteryear complicates that expectation even more, because it is not the kind of book that sets out to make every reader comfortable. It is a sharp, satirical novel about performance, nostalgia, domestic fantasy, and the strange emotional machinery of online influence. Before we can talk about whether it “works” or whether it lives up to the hype, we have to separate the book from the conversation around it.

Yesteryear is a sharp, satirical novel about performance, nostalgia, domestic fantasy, and the strange emotional machinery of online influence.

Love or loathe her, the star of Yesteryear is Natalie Heller Mills, a wildly successful tradwife influencer whose public identity is built around marriage, motherhood, domesticity, and a romanticized version of the bygone pioneer era. Her life online is carefully arranged to look natural, which is, of course, part of the point. Natalie sells not only an aesthetic, but a worldview: the good wife, the grateful mother, the beautiful home, the moral certainty of a life that appears to have rejected modern chaos in favor of something simpler, and therefore, purer. The irony that she’s selling this rustic lifestyle using the modern means of social media could provide enough commentary for a book in and of itself, but then the novel pushes her into a version of the very fantasy she has been enacting. One morning, Natalie wakes up, and finds herself no longer performing, but actually living in yesteryear. I won’t say much more than that about the plot, because part of the pleasure of the book is watching how its premise complicates itself, but the setup is enough to understand the satirical engine: Natalie has built a life around longing for the past, and then the past becomes something she has to inhabit.

Early in the novel, Burke writes that “the goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.” Those lines struck me because they name something essential not only about Natalie, but about the strange emotional economy of social media. We do not only follow strangers online because we admire them. Sometimes we follow because they irritate, fascinate, provoke, or make us feel superior. Sometimes we keep watching because we cannot quite decide whether we envy someone, dislike or pity them, or want what they appear to have. Natalie understands this, or at least the novel understands it through her. Her influence doesn’t depend on being universally loved. It depends on having an audience willing to keep watching, even when what they are watching annoys, unsettles, or repels them. The novel’s sharpest commentary may be that performance culture requires more than a performer; it also requires spectators willing to participate. Natalie’s power comes from being compelling enough that people cannot stop looking, even when what they are looking at makes them uncomfortable or even enraged.

This is where the novel’s satire begins to sharpen. Satire is not simply comedy, and it does not have to be funny in the obvious, laugh-out-loud sense. At its best, satire takes something recognizable and pushes it until its contradictions become harder to ignore. In Yesteryear, the target is not only tradwife culture, though that is certainly part of it. The novel is also interested in domesticity as brand, nostalgia as product, femininity as performance, and the way private life becomes something to arrange, photograph, and monetize. One of Burke’s most cutting lines comes early, when Natalie admits that “motherhood is its own kind of curation.”

That idea sits at the center of the novel’s critique. The problem is not motherhood itself, but the way motherhood can be aestheticized and packaged into proof of virtue, desirability, and success. Natalie is not only living her life. She is staging it, and one of the novel’s most unsettling details is how fully that staging has separated her from the life she claims to cherish. She performs the role of perfect mother and wife so relentlessly for the camera that, in one moment of private recognition, she realizes she can barely recognize one of her own children. The more carefully she stages the life, the harder it becomes to tell where the performance ends.

Part of what interested me about the response to Yesteryear was how quickly the conversation around the book seemed to split. Of course, some of that is inevitable now. Anything that becomes widely popular online seems to invite an almost immediate counter-reaction, sometimes because readers genuinely dislike the book, and sometimes because popularity itself makes people suspicious.

Satire does not require a likable protagonist. 

I also noticed another kind of resistance, one that seemed connected to the book’s satirical mode. Some readers seemed frustrated that the novel was not funnier, as if satire is always meant to be ha-ha funny. Others objected to Natalie herself, to her meanness, self-absorption, and general unpleasantness. I understand that reaction, but I also think it misses something important about what the book is doing. Satire does not require a likable protagonist. In fact, it often depends on a character whose flaws are exaggerated enough to reveal the culture around them. Natalie is not written as a woman we are meant to admire. She is written as a woman whose performance of domesticity, motherhood, and feminine success has become so consuming that the performance begins to swallow the person beneath it.

Another common critique I heard from readers online was about whether the novel had done enough research into the historical period it invokes. I understood that response, especially for readers who were approaching Yesteryear as some kind of historical fiction-satire hybrid. If a book seems to send a character into the past, readers naturally expect that past to feel researched, plausible, and detailed. But without giving away where the book goes, I read the historical world less as documentary realism and more as a projection of Natalie’s own fantasy: the version of the past she has sold to herself as much as to her followers. The novel is not asking what life was actually like in that era; it is revealing what happens when a curated fantasy of the past becomes inhabited. I’ll leave the rest of that revelation for the book itself.

Once Natalie is inside the world she has spent years romanticizing, the fantasy begins to curdle, then turns sour completely. The softness, simplicity, and moral purity she has built her brand around become harsh and claustrophobic. Turns out Natalie hates living the life she previously longed for. This is where the novel’s satire works best. It doesn’t simply say, “Wouldn’t this life be terrible?” It takes Natalie’s own desire seriously enough to reveal what that desire contains. Natalie captures this when she observes, “Life on this ranch feels less like a life and more like a nightmare, a contrived stage performance, a scene that never ends.” That sentence captures so much of what the book is doing. The life she imagined as authentic becomes theatrical. The dream becomes repetitive, punishing, and strangely… artificial. What looked idyllic from the outside becomes unbearable once there is no audience to perform it for, or no way to escape its brutal reality.

A book about performance, visibility, and addictive attention became part of the very machinery it critiques.

This part of the conversation around Yesteryear became most interesting to me, because a book about performance, visibility, and addictive attention became part of the very machinery it critiques. Online book culture is very good at transmitting excitement. It can give us a premise, a pretty cover, reader reactions, controversy, and plenty of reasons to be curious, but it’s not always good at helping us understand what kind of book we’re about to read. A book can easily be reduced to a hook: tradwife influencer wakes up in the past. While the hook is compelling, it doesn’t necessarily prepare a reader for discomfort, an extremely abrasive protagonist, or a novel that values exposure over reader satisfaction. Sure, the algorithm can deliver a book to us that contains topics we’ve shown interest in, but that is not always enough information to help us form accurate expectations. When the book itself doesn’t match the version we thought we were getting, disappointment can come quick, and feel inevitable.

For me, Yesteryear worked. Not perfectly. I’d never claim it’s the best work of satirical fiction I’ve ever read. And, also, not in a way I’d expect every reader to enjoy, but enough that I finished it still thinking, and considering what it was trying to expose. The novel offered much to consider about social media, parasocial relationships, the distance between what is real and what is presented, and the strange range of emotions we can feel while watching someone else’s carefully edited life. I don’t think every viral book deserves the intensity of attention it receives, but I also don’t think popularity automatically makes a book shallow. Sometimes a book becomes widely discussed because it has found a nerve.

Yesteryear hit a nerve. Toward the end of the novel, Natalie refers to “the nightmare—I mean dream—of my own making,” and that reversal captures something essential. Natalie’s dream and the nightmare are not opposites at all. They are bound together, made from the same fantasy and performance, the same longing to turn life into something beautiful enough to be believed by others. Maybe the better assessment of a viral book is not whether it earns its hype, but whether we can tune out the noise to read it on our own terms. In this case, what Yesteryear exposes is uncomfortable, exaggerated, and abrasive. The fact that so many readers felt uneasy may mean the satire found exactly where to press.

The fact that so many readers felt uneasy may mean the satire found exactly where to press.