A disaffected young woman’s work as a cleaner takes her on an increasingly surreal search for a creative fulfillment, gainful employment, and the meaning of life in this debut novel.
Moves with crazed propulsion, uninterrupted by paragraphs or chapter breaks ... The prose is electrically weird, at once flippant and yearning, affectless and romantic – in other words, messy, too. Yet, in our narrator’s relentless interiority, something close to the truth begins to coagulate. Cleaner reads less like a coming-of-age novel than the delineation of a fugue state. Its real force lies in its refusal to distinguish between the grotesque and the sublime.
