Cleaner

LoveReading Says

Darkly comic, Jess Shannon’s Cleaner debut unpacks mid-twenties angst with remarkable originality, humour and wit through sharing the unforgettable, offbeat story of a young woman’s relentlessly intense, itchily restless struggle to find purpose.

With a string of academic certificates to her name, the narrator faces a common post-student wake-up call when she returns to her family home and needs to find some kind of gainful employment: “Who was I? Crouching in a pile of shit with nothing to show for myself, my skill, my education”. Less common are her distinct personality traits, and delusional, wild flights of self-aggrandising fancy that drive Cleaner’s distinctly dark brand of humour.

After taking a couple of cleaning jobs, and discovering an obsessive passion for cleaning, she meets charismatic aspiring artist Isabella while working in a gallery. As Isabella lives with her rich boyfriend, Paul, she starts working as the couple’s cleaner in order to ramp up the affair they begin having. When Isabella vanishes, our narrator slips into the space her lover occupied as Paul’s new girlfriend.

Continually caught in bizarre scenarios, the flighty protagonist has a habit of failing to finish anything — she even fails to complete a consumer marketing survey that mainly involves eating ice cream: “each failure was so small and localised that the ensuing incapacitation felt even more pathetic: what hurts more, a grown-up stab wound or a thousand tiny paper cuts?” 

The story is brought full circle to an outlandish, almost Dada-esque denouement in the gallery that served as the stage for the narrator’s first encounter with Isabella — “Baptised in my own tears, I felt meaningless, I felt reborn. It was time to move on”.

An urgent, primal, amusing exploration of identity, Cleaner gleams with sparkling, acerbic originality, and left me longing to see what Shannon writes next.

Joanne Owen

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