CLEANER

The unnamed and unmoored protagonist of Shannon’s debut novel has reluctantly moved back in with her parents: “I swapped the city I found for the city I came from.” Overeducated and underemployed, she deals with her lack of direction by becoming obsessed with cleaning. When she gets a job as a cleaner at a local art gallery and meets fellow artist Isabella, her life begins to change. The two women immediately hook up despite the fact that Isabella lives with her successful, rich, and bland boyfriend, Paul. As the narrator becomes more enmeshed in their lives, she thinks she may be able to have it all (“I wanted both of them at the same time. I wanted both of them in bed”). When Isabella leaves one day without a word, the narrator begins to slip into a life that doesn’t belong to her. Written in stream-of-consciousness style, the novel is told in one long gulp with no chapters, paragraph breaks, or quotation marks. The form situates you directly in the protagonist’s mind, which can feel claustrophobic because she’s an absolute disaster. Her thoughts ping-pong among sex, art, death, money, children, thrifting, cleaning, cooking, and everything in between. She is flaky, a liar, and makes decisions that seem detached from reality. Unfortunately, the novel is both too absurd and not absurd enough. The plot, when it surfaces between the narrator’s thoughts, is so outlandish at times that it’s distracting. Despite this, Shannon has imbued the novel with a sardonic humor that serves as a bright spot. When the artist sits down with her family to fill out the census, she tells them she’s not heterosexual to little reaction—and thinks, “I questioned whether pure, uncut indifference was in fact homophobic or progressive.” These moments of levity help the book become less mired in the narrator’s seemingly endless nonsensical loop.