THE STAGER

It’s tough enough being a hapless 20-something without having a global pandemic tempt you into becoming a luxury-apartment squatter in Manhattan.

Twenty-six-year-old Maya works as a stager for a beautiful, slightly oblivious designer named Athena. In an opening worthy of the movie Bridesmaids, Maya leaves a mess in a showcase penthouse. “Soaps are my forte,” says Maya, but her heart’s not in the high-rise game. Flashbacks to art school and her friendship with fellow student Clarissa take up more real estate in her head than her actual job. Athena has chosen one of Clarissa’s stunning paintings for the place, a painting so accomplished it makes everyone else’s work look lackluster in comparison—including, alas, Maya’s. Maya’s own medium turns out to be not paint, but puppets, which she makes from found materials and for which she creates distinct identities and voices: “My instructors called them puppets. Yes, they were human-like figures that I held on my hand and made speak in funny voices, but they were more. They were themselves avatars of the universal forces of transformation…in meta-territory, crafting dynamic sculptural reflections on Self.” After avoiding Clarissa’s first gallery show, she boxes up her creations and shoves the box in the bedroom closet of her Queens apartment, convinced she’s not meant to be an artist or an artist’s friend. She satisfies herself with the staging gig, booty calls with a nice enough fellow former art student named Craig, and admiring Clarissa’s superb work from afar. However, it’s late 2019 and then early 2020, and more and more conversations are revolving around a “big bad virus”; Maya decides there’s no harm in staying in the penthouse to ride out the Covid-19 quarantine. Before she manages to eat and drink all the supplies, Craig, then others—including her unhappily married sister—have joined her in a somewhat madcap but totally interesting ménage à many. Yes, that friendship with Clarissa, as well as Maya’s creative spark, will re-emerge, but the joy of this novel lies in its back-and-forth between aspects of Maya’s life and all her penthouse mates.

A snappy first-person voice, charming chaos, and plenty of Manhattan atmosphere make this debut a standout.