'Yesteryear,' a tradwife satire, understands Christianity better than most Americans
“Yesteryear,” one of the bestselling novels in America right now, combines caustic humor with cultural commentary to ruminate on religion and the tradwife movement. It’s a gripping read, which is particularly impressive since author Caro Claire Burke is a first-time novelist.
In what follows, I’m not going to give you any plot points that aren’t in the jacket copy or the opening pages of the novel. No spoilers here.
As the story opens, Natalie is on top of the world. Her rural Idaho farm, “Yesteryear,” is booming, and her family is about to grow from five children to six. The kids, clad in prairie garb in “a rainbow of neutrals,” help out on the farm, their efforts chronicled endlessly for Natalie’s millions of social media followers. Her husband, Caleb, the son of an ultra-wealthy U.S. Senator who has bankrolled their farm, has embraced the cowboy dream.
So far, the novel’s stage set sounds like a riff on Ballerina Farm, the famous Utah ranch where a former Juilliard-trained ballerina now lives with her husband, who is a son of Jet Blue’s billionaire founder, and their eight kids. (Wait, make that nine: We blinked and the Neelemans welcomed their ninth child a few months ago.) The family’s Mormon faith is a largely unspoken but persistent undercurrent of their social media empire.
I started reading “Yesteryear” while I was in Utah a few weeks ago, visiting both the Ballerina Farm in Kamas and the store/café in Midway. It was hard not to see similarities between the Neelemans’ farm and the novel’s, including outrageous prices for their farm products. (Bone Broth Hot Cocoa mix: $46. A tiny pack of “Willa Sourdough Starter”: $18.)
But if the novel begins with similar threads — a large religious family, bolstered by inherited wealth, becomes internet-famous — Natalie and Caleb’s lives take a darker turn.
What their Instagram followers don’t see is the army of low-paid laborers who keep both farm and family going. Fertilizers and pesticides are sprayed at night all over their “organic” fields of harvest. Natalie is distant from her children, who are being raised by nannies, and she despises Caleb.
Caleb is aimless; Natalie is nothing if not focused. So she focuses on fixing him, steering him away from his natural inclinations (nurturing children, having fun) toward an acceptably rugged form of Christian masculinity: farming. The central tragedy of the novel is how unsuited they both are to their assigned gender roles, and their utter inability to imagine a different, happier life. Natalie is a terrible wife and mother, but she’d be excellent at roles that are closed to her, like dictator of a small country. Caleb has zero leadership ability, but he’d be a stellar kindergarten teacher, a job considered beneath a righteous Christian man.
That’s where things stand when suddenly, the novel morphs into a horror story. Natalie wakes up in the year 1855, having apparently traveled back in time to Yesteryear farm. Unlike the nostalgically “authentic” farm she has curated for online consumption, this one is fully beaten down and ramshackle. Her 21st-century tradwife life, made possible by immigrant labor and high-tech machines, has devolved into a continuous round of washing mud-encrusted laundry until her knuckles bleed.
The people are different, too. Her 1855 husband, also named Caleb, is a hardened, abusive and weirdly capable version. Her children are not her real children though they keep calling her “Mama.” Natalie comes to believe she’s been cast in a hard-core frontier reality show. If she can play her role correctly until she figures out a way to escape, she may survive.