October 8, 2024
The Lodgers, by Holly Pester
“If you’re unsettled, you’re unsettling,” the narrator tells us in THE LODGERS, the debut novel by UK poet Holly Pester (and also the debut novel published by Assembly Press here in Canada). It was a novel I wanted to like based on its premise (a woman returns to her hometown to live in a sublet, all the while reflecting on the person who’s moved into her just-vacated previous quarters) and also based on its cover design (“For some reason I ate [the sandwich], I wasn’t happy. But as a result the triangular box was empty, with an inside that resembled, like sarcasm, the one I was in. I looked inside. It had a window too.”) but very styled slightly abstract fiction that refuses to show its hand isn’t always my favourite thing (so many cool books I tried to love, but couldn’t) so I wasn’t sure how THE LODGERS might go over. It isn’t that I don’t like being unsettled per se, but instead that I want my novels to add up to something, being cool is not enough, but this one does add up. Strange, disorientating, and indeed unsettling, but it has a hook for me to hang my hat, metaphorically speaking. Our unnamed narrator’s new sublet is around the corner from the home of her mother, Moffa, a home to which the narrator still has a backdoor key, letting herself in from time to time once she’s back in town, but Moffa is never there. And neither is Kav, the supposed inhabitant of the second bedroom in her sublet, whose arrival could come at any time, the narrator never able to relax into her new abode because of this anticipation. And meanwhile she addresses the new inhabitant of the room she’d left behind, a room that was only ever hers between the hours of 6pm and 9am because otherwise her landlady operating her massage business of the space, and the narrator found comfort in belonging to this home, however tangentially, and her connection to the landlady’s child, the suggestion of a stable domestic situation that our narrator herself has never known. This is a novel that goes in circles, the way the narrator’s life seems to be, every path leading back again to a home that never was, poignant, comic, and biting at once.
