The Lodgers by Holly Pester: book review
The narrator is returning to her hometown to see her mother. Except, she gets a sublet that comes with a perpetually absent roommate and spends every day thinking about how she should go see her mother but finds herself unable to. She spends her days walking past without stopping. Or letting herself in the back door without making contact. In the other portion of the novel, the narrator imagines a "you" who is a lodger living in the place the narrator used to live with her former roommates, a mother and a child and eventually a professor. It is unclear how separate this "you" is from the narrator's own past experience, and the narrator seems to build this "you" and her personality and experiences as she goes.
This is a disorienting novel in plot, in language, in form—in every possible way. I read the first page and wondered if I was going to read the second, but I kept turning the pages, kept wanting to push forward. The book is maybe most aptly described as surrealist. Pester is a poet and that bleeds through in the pages, not in the traditional sense of pretty, florid sentences but in the comfortability of language and playing with absurdity. Of putting images together that don't intellectually make sense but feel right. The book banks on feelings, and it delivers. The less I tried to read it and the more I allowed it to simply wash over me, the more I enjoyed it. I found it to be a truly fascinating and unique reading experience.
This pairs well with the subject matter that Pester tackles. This isn't the story of a particular character, despite this character being both amorphous and deeply, oddly specific. This is a story about the unique and often dehumanizing reality that the majority of people face being a lodger, a renter, someone who is not in control of their own living situation by virtue of a landlord and roommates. And the stranger than fiction moments that happen here feel legible. There is truly no world more absurd than that of flatmates. Because, at the end of the day, when you're not in charge of your environment, how long you'll be able to stay somewhere, how much you have to put up with to find something you can afford, there's plenty of room for unfathomable events to be grown and tolerated. It feels like a generational story, one that is maybe most applicable to millennials and Gen Z but reaches beyond that as well. The book is tight and compact but takes wide sociological swings. And I think it's quite successful in that.
Then, beyond the mother and daughter that the "you" character encounters representing an absurd rental situation, their dynamic also plays into the thread of mothers and daughters that runs through both sections, and it also invites plenty of thought about childhood, adulthood, where they intersect, and how it all fits together. The Lodgers particularly nails the weird liminal space between childhood and adulthood where you are legally, physically an adult but haven't fully crossed into that realm yet mentally. There are layers here that I truly cannot even begin to unpack. Thoughts I had about possible connections between the layers that might be entirely on point or completely wrong. But it doesn't quite matter where it lands. It's a chaotic choose your own adventure of a book without the formatting. It's refreshing in a literary world that seems to favor straightforward, nearly formulaic checklists of what you must do to build a novel. Pester follows no rules and unearths a strange profundity in the misshapen puzzle pieces.
I went in a skeptic and was entirely won over by this strange little book about being utterly adrift and untetherered in the world.
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