Novels about neurodivergent people are no longer unusual. After the well-deserved success of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog In the NightTime, there have been several novels with very memorably ‘different’ characters who have to adjust to an often unhelpful world: Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Convenience Store Woman, The Rosie Project and its sequels.
The Maid is Nita Prose’s debut novel, and at its center is Molly Gray, a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel who, it emerges, is ‘somewhere on the spectrum’. Molly loves her work. It suits her sense of order, her discomfort with disorder, and her need for stability to come in each day, clean rooms and leave them in a state of sparkling renewal.
When I’m done with my work, I leave your room pristine. Your bed is made perfectly, with four plump pillows, as though no one had ever lain there. The dust and grime you left behind has been vacuumed into oblivion. Your polished mirror reflects your face of innocence back at you. It’s as though you were never here.
Until one day she finds Mr Black, dead in his room. There are clues: open safe, missing trophy wife, missing money. There are suspicious characters: the flirtatious bartender who is obviously using Molly for his nefarious purposes, the dishwasher Juan Manuel who sleeps in a different room every night, the aforementioned trophy wife. There are the good guys: Mr Preston the doorkeeper who keeps a grandfatherly eye out for Molly, and his daughter who conveniently turns out to be a high-powered lawyer.
The plot thickens: there are bags of white powder, people with odd injuries, and clearly, some of the unpleasant characters are involved in larger schemes. Molly’s innocence drags her deeper and deeper into the mess, until she is accused of the murder.
The novel is from Molly’s point of view, and so it seems reasonable that it is written in straightforward simple prose.
I put the shortbread biscuit between my lips. It crunches nicely between my teeth. The texture is crisp, the flavor delicate and buttery. Overall, it is a delightful biscuit.
The main flaw with this novel is that Molly is a somewhat inconsistent character. Molly’s atypical behaviour and social responses are never explicitly acknowledged by any of the other characters, who describe her as ‘very special’, ‘unique’. Her dreams are distinctly naive and childlike
My chiefest hope is that while he is not a frog, Rodney will turn out to be the prince of my very own fairy tale.
Yet, over the course of the book, Molly shows an astonishing ability to parse and selectively withhold information, which seem unexpected for such a straightforward person. Molly can’t see the bigger picture, but her slightly blinkered viewpoint never seems to completely inhabit the novel, in contrast to teenage Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.
Characters around the edges of the main story are disappointingly flat. The other two maids are Sunshine, from the Phillipines, and Sunitha from Sri Lanka: one talks a lot, one is deadly silent, and that is the sum total of their personalities. Juan Manuel, the dishwasher, is noble to the point of sainthood, as is Mr Preston and his lawyer daughter.
Readers used to novels set in either the US or UK may find themselves slightly puzzled by the location of this novel. Characters occasionally use un-American phrases:
“Let me make you a proper cuppa”
and the Regency sounds quite English. At the same time, most of the dialogue is not identifiably from the UK. It takes some research to figure out that the author lives in Toronto, and the book is likely set in some (non-Quebecois) Canadian city.
A pleasant enough read, but not spectacular.
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