Unpacking Nita Prose's The Maid.
Also, a random Life Pro Tip.
Hello, friends.
How goes it? I’ve survived the shift back to the cold-cold-cold, but it’s past five p.m. and it’s still sort-of light out, so we’re gaining. Also, I took a ramble out on the Blueberry Plains yesterday and while the wind tried to stab my eyeballs out, there were lots of patches where the snow had entirely melted, which was exciting.
I went for a walk around Kennebunkport this morning before work and the ducks were quacking their heads off and that made me laugh. Also a lot of people were out walking very angry little dogs, and that made me laugh, too.
I’m not going to go into the state of the world, because the last thing anyone needs is a Hot Take from some random lady in Maine, and also because I’m pretty sure that you already know what I think anyway.
The Maid, by Nita Prose
Molly Gray is a maid at a luxury hotel, and she absolutely loves her job.
She loves her uniform, she loves the perfect little bars of soap, she loves creating order out of chaos. She’s less enamored with her tip-stealing supervisor Cheryl, and with the guests who see her uniform but not her humanity, but overall, she looks forward to going into work each and every day.
Her predictable world turns unpredictable when she walks into the suite of one of the hotel’s wealthiest regulars, only to find him dead—and based on the state of the room, natural causes seem unlikely.
My feelings on this one were decidedly mixed, but I’m pretty sure that most of those mix-y feelings can be chalked up to my own personal STUFF? Let me try to unpack:
While the word is never used, Molly is coded autistic. I don’t have anywhere near the expertise to make a call on the representation, whether it’s strong or gross or somewhere in the middle. But I *did* find it both weird and frustrating that with one exception—unvoiced, but there’s a moment in which a character very clearly shifts gears while the two of them are interacting—none of the other characters seemed to consider the possibility that she might be neurodivergent?
For the first 2/3s of the book, we watch Molly get cheated, manipulated, and used by people that she either trusts or has no recourse to speak out against. Sometimes she knows they’re being jerks, and sometimes the reader knows and she doesn’t, and both types of situation are just a bummer to read about. The book isn’t at all mean-spirited, but that aspect of it, for me, was rough-going? I just… I’m already seeing so much meanness in real life that it was oddly tough to read about here. So: My stuff.
Tonally, it’s all over the place: The locked room mystery involving the death of a man who no one particularly liked is a classic cozy setup. The drug-running and torture (off-screen) is more classic crime novel. The courtroom scene with Molly in her pajamas reads farce, and Molly’s team-up with a group of unlikely allies is pure caper. I’m not MAD at the book for bouncing around like that, but I’m also not sure that all of the pieces slotted together into a cohesive whole?
This last one is definitely completely MY STUFF: The Job As Life thing. I get it, I really do. I love workplace stories. I am absolutely one of those Watch The Office Over And Over people. And I do realize that Molly’s arc ultimately carries her (to a degree) AWAY from the Job As Life thing. But two years into a pandemic that exposed the absolute absurd horror of American assumptions and expectations and culture around work—work as the priority, above life and health and humanity, as the thing that gives our lives meaning, and people who dare to question those ideas are somehow the ones who are wrong?—it was hard to settle comfortably into a book that felt like it somewhat bought into those ideas? Obviously, your mileage may very much vary.
There ARE some interesting threads about truth and memory here: truth as something that can be surprisingly fluid, especially when you bring lies by omission into the mix, and memory as something that can be self-edited.
Have you read this one? Where did it leave you?
Life Pro Tip:
If you’ve just eaten a gigantic portion of delicious baked oatmeal, don’t turn around and hula-hoop your brains out while watching Bones.
Soooooo yesterday I learned that if you DO do that, you will develop a RAGING case of heartburn that no number of Tums will cure, and then you won’t sleep and will be generally miserable all night long and then you’ll get up and feel like you should go to work even though you feel like garbage because it was an unforced error.
Welcome to middle age, I guess?
LUCKILY, this morning I tried the old teaspoon of baking soda in a glass of water remedy, and LET ME TELL YOU I WISH I’D DONE THAT LAST NIGHT because not only was I feeling fine fifteen minutes later, I was feeling fine enough to put on 900 layers of clothing and go stomp around the Port and laugh at the ducks for a few hours before work.
Talk soon,
Leila