ABSTRACT

In D’Stair’s novel, a young woman cleans her great-grandmother’s untidy house and confronts the reality of her unfocused present.

It’s 2001, and for almost a year, 20-something Cora Freelene has been living rent-free with her cat, Chloe, in her late great-grandmother’s impossibly cluttered abode in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. She’s been tasked with cleaning and organizing the place, where 10-year-old TV Guides coexist with garish, clown-themed cookie jars and 1940s-era erotic photos. Cora struggles to complete her mission, even as the one-year deadline creeps closer, and it soon becomes clear that her boredom and frustration with life runs deep. She derives little satisfaction from her day job, which requires parsing Congressional hearings into terse sentences: “Glumly or with joy, either way, the abstract must come forth.” Her relationships with her coworkers are shallow and superficial, at best, but for a while, she entertains an interest in Roman, her favorite clerk at local Potomac Video. In some respects, this story comes across as the Generation X version of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”; however, instead of its protagonist vowing, “I would prefer not to,” Cora appears to want to do something else, but she isn’t sure what it is. D’Stair has fashioned a compassionate and very modern narrative, skillfully weaving together the threads of Cora’s dissatisfaction (“She always makes the wrong choice. What else could she have done?”) with a world that never stops intruding on her quiet life, particularly after Sept. 11, 2001. Her problems seem fated to overwhelm her—a problem that the author resolves in an unlikely but satisfying fashion. Despite its setting, this isn’t a glib Douglas Coupland–esque slacker-fest, but a more complex tale that readers will be glad they picked up.

Ambiguity and irony curdle with unsettling results in an engaging story of early 2000s metropolitan Americana.