Jen Beagin is a wonderfully funny writer with a knack for serious subjects. Her exuberant new novel, 'Vacuum In The Dark,' follows a young house cleaner who grew up too fast and is trying to reinvent herself.
When she's not confiding in Terry, Mona spends her time taking clandestine photographs of her clients' houses and trying to avoid her insufferable hippie neighbors Mona finds herself in a series of inadvisable relationships with her clients — she becomes engaged in a torrid affair with the husband of a blind woman whose house has been plagued by mysterious fecal deposits, and then agrees to model for a bohemian artist couple who intrigue her, but whom she finds slightly creepy, but...
When Mona's mother, Clare, calls her out of the blue to ask her to come visit her and her husband, who are renewing their vows, Mona is torn — her childhood was far from happy, and she's always had an uneasy relationship with Clare . Mona travels to California with the intent of picking up some boxes of her childhood ephemera, but of course it ends up more complicated than that — she's forced to confront past events in her life that she'd just as soon forget.
Beagin is a wonderfully funny writer who also happens to tackle serious subjects, which few authors are able to pull off successfully., but the character of Mona, who Beagin first introduced in her debut novel,, is the main one. She's a mass of contradictions, which is exactly what makes her so real — she's kind but prickly, confident at times but self-sabotaging at others.
Beagin, herself a former house cleaner, treats Mona, and all her characters, with real dignity. She's a wise observer on how it's easy to be exploited when you're an open person who's willing to listen:"People were vampires. Their stories drained the life out of her. Then, half-dead and bloodless, she carried on cleaning their toilets like nothing had ever happened."
Beagin is a wonderfully funny writer who also happens to tackle serious subjects, which few authors are able to pull off successfully. Mona is a survivor of multiple sexual assaults and another character is a recovering victim of incest; others are dealing with substance use problems. Beagin never treats these subjects lightly, but she doesn't shy away from employing very dark humor; the result is a comic novel that's a joy to read but never frivolous or superficial.
Australia Latest News, Australia Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Are small cities the smartest?Urban development has become less about infrastructure and more about technology. Case in point: A city in Finland with a vacuum waste system, where people simply take their trash to a port and it gets sucked to an underground disposal center
Read more »
Cancer patient's treatment leaves radiation contamination in crematoryRadioactivity was detected on the oven, vacuum filter and bone crusher of an Arizona crematory where a deceased man who'd received radiation therapy was incinerated, according to a new case report. Worse still, a radioactive compound unrelated to the dead man was detected in the urine of an employee there.
Read more »