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Summary
Summary
FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
" Cain's small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic." -- The New York Times Book Review
A haunted feminist fable, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender and class roles to empower herself and fulfill her dreams.
In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor--social and erotic--but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her . Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?
Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one's true calling.
Author Notes
Amina Cain is the author of a novel, Indelicacy , and the short story collections Creature and I Go To Some Hollow . Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Paris Review Daily , BOMB , Granta , n+1 , the Believer Logger , and other places. She lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cain (Creature) upends fairy tale endings in her stimulating story of insidious oppression. Vitória works as a cleaner at an art museum in an unnamed large, modern city, skips meals to afford simple splurges like a nice blouse, and yearns almost compulsively for the time and freedom to write about art. She commiserates with her lazy co-worker Antoinette, who longs for a husband. When Vitória marries a rich man, she glides into a life of ease only marred by quiet clashes with her cold housekeeper. Her husband does not understand the unfocused, self-reflective observations she finally has time to write, but pampers her with everything she wants. Vitória feels naggingly unsatisfied and starts ballet lessons, where she befriends the most promising student, Dana. Vitória's sense of being stifled increases when she reconnects with Antoinette, now happily married to a poor man, and watches Dana move into professional dancing roles. She hatches a devious plot to achieve a different kind of freedom. Vitória's deadpan voice and Cain's finespun descriptions of quotidian disappointment energize this incisive tale. This novel disquiets with its potent, swift human dramas. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Amina Cain's short debut novel is easy enough to outline. Vitória works as a cleaner in an art gallery until she marries a wealthy man and can dedicate more time to her writing. But the change in her material circumstances does not prove as transformative as she hoped. Indelicacy, though, is a thing of real delicacy, with a fine, distilled quality to the writing, every word precisely chosen, precisely placed. At first it seems almost too sparse, each chapter just a few pages, with Vitória as enigmatic and elusive as her surroundings. We're in an unnamed country in an unnamed point in history. But there's a slyness to Cain's writing that cuts through, and makes the tale increasingly engrossing. By the end, you walk in step with her heroine as she finds her own path towards freedom. There's also an intriguing playfulness, initially obscured by all that poise, that seems to resist the reader's expectations of historical realism. Contemporary colloquialisms creep in - "life went normally, I guess" - and Vitória deploys wicked put-downs to irritating men who interrupt her: "Your face looks like the butt of a wolf and it's interfering with my concentration." Characters' names have been borrowed from other works: those of Antoinette and Dana, two treasured friends, recall women in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Octavia Butler's Kindred, while a truculent servant, Solange, is from Jean Genet's The Maids. All strain against the constraints placed on their lives. But although Vitória is bound by the tiresome duties of home and marriage, she refuses to be trapped by them: she dominates her husband in the bedroom, pursues intimacy with women, and is able to prioritise her writing. Far from being conflicted about following her own "process of becoming", she is coolly unapologetic. "These days I rarely conceded anything."
Kirkus Review
An aspiring writer finds a way to live the life she's always wanted.In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf wrote that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"and that sentiment echoes through Cain's (Creature, 2013, etc.) debut novel. The protagonist, Vitria, a young and bright museum cleaning woman, spends her days dreaming about writing. In the moments between scrubbing toilets and floors, she writes descriptions of paintings and notices the world around her. Soon she is plucked from her life by a rich husband and placed into another. Her new life is complete with a large house, a personal study, and a maid, who serves as a constant reminder of her own upward social mobility. Despite her good fortune, Vitria is unhappy. At one point, Vitria wonders about her good luck and how she was "saved" from a wholly different life. She writes about a glue factory where women work and horses are sacrificed: "We should memorialize the horses, remember them truthfully, and the women who have to spend their days in that way....I have benefited from a woman who never stops working, walking back from the factory in the morning and the night." She recognizes the sacrifices women make and, more importantly, the ones she no longer has to make. Deeply rooted in the literary tradition, the novel inconspicuously references works like Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Octavia Butler's Kindred and explores themes like class and gender. With its short, spare sentences, Cain's writing seems simple on the surfacebut it is deeply observant of the human condition, female friendships, and art.A short, elegant tale about female desire and societal expectations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Cain's bewitching first novel is so deeply internalized that the reader knows neither what city the solitude-loving narrator lives in nor the time frame, though candles and carriages are mentioned, nor her age and appearance. In it, the narrator reflects on her quiet life as a cleaning woman at a museum and returns home each night to her small, nearly empty apartment to write about the paintings she gazes at so intently. She doesn't even say goodbye to Antoinette, her one friend, when she abruptly leaves her job and marries a rich man. Now she has beautiful things and the freedom to look to her heart's content at the museum, but she is ill at ease with having a maid a hostile one, at that and worries about ""decadence."" Her businessman husband is dismissive of her writing and displeased by her lack of interest in social obligations. Funny and plangent, she writes, I'm afraid that I might burn everything up. Cain's concentrated, subtle, and intriguing portrait of an evolving artist resolutely rejecting gender and class roles, with its subtle nods to Jean Rhys, Clarice Lispector, and Octavia Butler, explores the risks and rewards of a call to create and self-liberate.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
