NIGHTSHIFT

A retrospective chronicle of a young woman’s obsession with her friend in late-1990s London.

South African expatriate Meggie Groenewald is treading water at her dull job at a media monitoring service when she meets Sabine, an attractive and mysterious woman who knocks Meggie’s life off its axis. Although Meggie has a dedicated, steady boyfriend, she is immediately captivated by Sabine’s “mesmeric” voice and her “eyes so dark as to glint like pitch.” Her boyfriend quickly realizes that Meggie is infatuated with Sabine, but Meggie insists she just wants to be friends; still, after Sabine transfers to their service’s night shift, Meggie does the same. Soon, Meggie is sucked into the surreal life of a night-shift worker, which chips away at her relationship with her boyfriend but brings her closer to Sabine. The relationship between the two women grows increasingly sexual but maddeningly opaque: Sabine will only kiss Meggie in public and goes on long trips with an older, married boyfriend. Debut novelist Ladner is a gifted stylist; although her prose is not flowery, her sentences are smooth and occasionally surprising. The somewhat affectless tone of this novel, though, as well as the self-loathing tendencies of its narrator, can get tiresome. “Why was it such a great thing to respect yourself?” Meggie wonders. Many recent novels have posed similar questions, particularly novels featuring young female narrators, and readers of those books will find the style and themes of this novel familiar. Its treatment of queer sexuality also feels outdated: The trope of the mysterious, hypersexual, possibly unstable woman who tempts another female character to explore queer desire but will not quite seal the deal is distasteful and, again, familiar. Ladner obviously has talent; hopefully, in the future, she will use it to better ends.

A frustrating and derivative debut novel by an author with promise.