Neighbor Helen Phillips’ Debut Novel, ‘The Beautiful Bureaucrat’ Is An Intriguing, Fast-Paced Thriller

A novel about bureaucrats doesn’t seem like it could be thrilling, but neighbor Helen Phillips’ new novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, is a fast-paced and intriguing story about a young woman who gets a strange data-entry job, which has been compared to Franz Kafka and existential writers like Albert Camus. We couldn’t put it down.

So we reached out to Helen to learn a bit more about her writing process, her inspiration, and where she likes to work in the neighborhood.

DPC: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Helen Phllips: I’m a mother of two, a writer of fictions & nonfictions, a professor in the English Department at Brooklyn College, and wife to artist Adam Douglas Thompson.

Tell us about The Beautiful Bureaucrat.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is an “existential thriller,” as my friend Elliott Holt put it, about a young wife who gets a mysterious data-entry job in an enormous windowless building. When her husband starts to disappear at night, she realizes that neither her work life nor her home life is quite what it seems. To borrow from the jacket copy, “In order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate the inner workings of an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond.”

How did you get into writing?

Like many writers, I knew at a very young age—as soon as I was able to write a story, when I was six—that I wanted to be a writer. It has always been a calling for me. I feel extraordinarily lucky; I’m living my childhood dream.

This is your first novel, correct? How was writing a novel different from the short stories you’ve written?

Well, this is my debut novel … But I wrote three novels (now buried deep in the computer files, never to be re-opened) before I wrote my first published book, And Yet They Were Happy, which is a collection of flash fiction. And then I wrote an adventure tale for middle-grade (10-12-year-old) readers, Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green. So for a long time I’ve been working on writings of dramatically varied lengths. When an idea comes to me, it usually brings its length along with it—I’ll sense that this is a one-page concept, or a twenty-page concept, or a novel-length concept. In all cases, I can anticipate a very chaotic first draft, a ton of revision, and a neurotic obsession with each comma.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?

This is one of the most clichéd pieces of advice, but that’s because it can’t be topped: Samuel Beckett’s “Fail again. Fail better.” Advice not only for writing but also for life.

Your book is probably on a lot of people’s must-lists. What books/movies/shows are on yours? Anything you’ve read/seen lately that you’d recommend?

As a working mother, I have far less time for books and movies than I’d like. But my recent life-changing revelation is audiobooks, which I can listen to while cleaning the kitchen and rushing to pick my kids up from school. Classics read by British actors take the cake. Recently I relished Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Old favorites (and inspirations for The Beautiful Bureaucrat) include the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski,” and works by Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, Italo Calvino, Margaret Atwood, Lydia Davis, Jorge Luis Borges, Haruki Murakami, Jenny Offill, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin…

Why did you settle in this neighborhood?

Because Ditmas Park feels pastoral and urban at the same time. We Ditmas Parkers get to have our cake and eat it too. Six years in, I love it more than ever.

What is one of the neighborhood’s hidden (or not-so-hidden) gems?

The easiest question yet! Kettle & Thread, the new café on Church Avenue between Argyle and Westminster. I am sitting in their gorgeous backyard garden as I type this. This wonderful retreat is never as crowded as it should be. Actually, I guess I ought to keep the secret to myself…