The Lodgers by Holly Pester: book review
The Lodgers by Holly Pester 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 ...