Beatriz Serrano’s ‘Discontent’ Is Jezebel’s November Book Club Pick

In Beatriz Serrano’s new novel, Discontent, the narrator, Marisa, has a creative job (that she hates), her own office (that affords her no privacy), and a decent apartment (that is fairly tiny) in Madrid. Few things bring her joy anymore, except: her fifth-floor terrace, the Prado Museum, and YouTube. 

Occasionally hooking up with her downstairs neighbor, Pablo, doesn’t bring her joy, per se, but something else that she cannot quite articulate. “I think it was Julian Barnes, or maybe some other British guy, who had a pretty dead-on definition of love being like a scowl suddenly relaxing. When I’m with Pablo, I feel my facial muscles easing, but when I say goodbye and close the door, they always go back to their natural state of tension,” she thinks without following the thought to its obvious conclusion—which remains hidden from her for much of the book. 

It’s an illustrative example of how Marisa almost revels in her discomfort and apathy, which stems primarily from her well-paid job as a “creative” at an ad agency, creating ad campaigns for makeup and personal grooming products. She ruminates day in and day out on how pointless and occasionally damaging her job is, but entertains no real possibilities of leaving it, except for the dream of getting in a serious-but-not-life-threatening accident on the way to work and living out her life on workers’ comp. 

Despite this depressing setup, Discontent—which, I think, must be a play on “content” (that is, the umbrella term for everything consumable on the internet, including what you are reading right now)—is fun and funny. Serrano is a master of pithy asides about irritating colleagues and the absurdities of international corporate life: When Marisa’s boss asks for her help choosing a speaker for their upcoming offsite, the options he presents are “a divinity coach” who was a priest, but fell in love, left the priesthood, joined a company, “then realized that his religious training was equally valid for corporate culture”; “an Olympic medalist in track in field, but then he lost his legs in an accident”; a “third one [who] doesn’t have legs either”; and “a sixty-five-year old man who, after an entire life devoted to one thing, left it all behind and created a successful food-delivery app.” Is this a novel or a transcription of real things an ad exec said sometime in the last 18 months? Who can say. 

The general tone of the novel is that of cynicism and malaise, but it occasionally dips into darker places, especially when Marisa’s anxiety disorder comes to the surface, or when she thinks about the (assumed) suicide of the only colleague she was remotely close to. Unsurprisingly, the two occasionally arrive hand in hand. 

In her better moments, Marisa experiences genuine human connection and her discontent (get it?) fades away. The book offers no solutions for the stuck middle-class millennial who suddenly finds themselves in middle management at a job they took shortly out of college—but if it did, it might be: Go spend time with people IRL!!

The novel avoids becoming too much of a bummer (or a borderline documentary on the banality of contemporary offices) with its absurd final third. The climactic event takes place at the company’s offsite weekend; it pivots from the preceding pages by being fairly unbelievable (and definitely not work-appropriate). But like the rest of Maria’s work life, the stakes are fairly low—and at least it gives everyone involved a juicy story to tell at future company holiday parties.

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