What Am I, a Deer? Author: Polly BartonISBN-13: 9781804272176Publisher: Fitzcarraldo EditionsGuideline Price: £14.99Having relocated to Frankfurt for a translation job at a video-game company, a young woman soon recognises the decision to uproot herself as an indication of her “addiction to clean slates”. For the protagonist of What Am I, a Deer? – writer and translator Polly Barton’s first novel – life is a cycle of thwarted ambitions, driven by an unshakeable belief in the “transformative power of objects”; as a child, new dolls and magazines held the promise of substantive internal change, but never satiated the “unquenchable desire to become someone else”. The objects of her desire are different now, but the conviction remains. Frankfurt is no longer a nebulous idea, and thus fantasies about “the umbrella man” – a fellow commuter who shares her office building – offer a new means to shirk reality and “shut down all cognitive functions”.The lack of critical thinking in these future projections is made up for in the present, which refuses to “orient itself around” Barton’s lead, who bemoans this heteronormative fantasy “moulded directly from the Austen archives”. The interpersonal sphere in general doesn’t get off lightly either; “the rules about showing enthusiasm and interest [are] … so minutely calibrated” that meaningful connections are hard to come by. Barton’s decision to dart years into the future further undermines this imaginary romance, and while this may lower the novel’s stakes, it’s a reminder that the “pockets of her life” are stodgy in a way that memory tends to omit.Barton’s protagonist worries whether “the thing she was hoping for, working towards, existed”, but What Am I, a Deer? is surprisingly hopeful. Meditations on online messaging platforms, for example, are nuanced and generous, and the young woman’s gripes never feel unfounded. Karaoke is a source of unbridled enthusiasm, a means of escapism without being consumed by fantasy. It also “provides a language for sincerity which isn’t necessarily available to us in ordinary life”. Cliche-ridden lyrics intersperse the novel’s more frenetic moments, offering glimpses of “an age of sincerity” whose domain is constantly shrinking.What Am I, a Deer? flirts with convention to amplify everyday strangeness. Its will-they-won’t-they dynamic is a jab at vapid romance, and an updated take on the distance between reality and illusion results in a resonant existentialist text grounded in modern anxieties. Colm McKenna is a writer based in Paris.