Book No. 8 of 2021
A gorgeously unsettling book—Leilani creates a veritable cocktail of alienation, absurdity, and creeping unease. Some of her lines quietly skewering the sensation of being othered in America are so sharp and so accurate that I had to reread them multiple times to really savor and take them all in. (As always, I love when books crystallize things I have felt but never been able to articulate.)
Each character is deeply unrelatable (in their behavior and general decision-making) and yet amid the creepy grotesqueness of their actions there is something mirror-like in each of them. The intentional alienation via setting is very real in this book—the stink and squalor of New York City is made just as unappetizing as the carefully crafted blandness of a Jersey suburb and the sterile creepiness of a hospital morgue. The lens of the protagonist is so voyeuristic and cool that mundane observations are rendered surreal and ridiculous absurdities are matter-of-fact.
Similar Reads
I found the voyeuristic and uneasy tone of this book to be most similar to Leila Slimani’s Lullaby/The Perfect Nanny.
There have been lots of comparisons between this book and Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, for good reason.
Moments of very dry absurdity reminded me of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.
The protagonist’s discomfort and self-destructive dirtbag tendencies reminded me strongly of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
The alienated-aimless-protagonist-in-a-bizarre-cohabitation-with-problematic-overtones thing totally reminds me of Sayako Murata’s Convenience Store Woman.