"Her madness seeps into the everyday: a shower caddy's arrangement becomes proof of conspiracy, and breakdown coexists with term papers, hookups, and trips to TJ Maxx. Avoiding romance and melodrama, deBoer writes in an affectless register that mirrors Alice's dissociation. The novel's power lies in its relentless banality-the mind churning while life's machinery grinds on. During a halting recovery, Alice develops "deep intuitions" about her medications, which, she suspects, interact "like hot-tempered roommates in the shabby apartment of her brain.""
""Everyone is ugly. I should know. I look at people all day." The owner, a forty-one-year-old former boxer, claims to have no interest in other people. And yet she shows herself to be keenly attuned to the desires and anxieties of her clients and to the lives of her employees, four Southeast Asian women whose mischievous characterizations include identical haircuts and nametags."
Alice, a middling student at a state university in Oklahoma, drifts from adolescent confusion into sleepless paranoia. Everyday objects become evidence of conspiracy for her, as a shower caddy's arrangement provokes conviction and breakdown coexists with term papers, hookups, and trips to TJ Maxx. Recovery is halting and marked by new, peculiar beliefs about medications that she imagines interacting "like hot-tempered roommates in the shabby apartment of her brain." A forty-one-year-old former boxer runs a nail salon and professes indifference while closely watching clients' desires and employees' lives, portraying working-class routines with dark humor and tender observation.
Read at The New Yorker
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