Indelicacy: A Novel
Amina Cain"Indelicacy isn't merely a book, it's a world; a world I wanted to live in, forever . . . Arch, yet warm; aspiring & impervious; confiding & enigmatic; reposing & intrepid; Cain has conjured a protagonist who purged my mind & filled my heart." —Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond
FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION'S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE
"Cain’s small but mighty novel reads like a ghost story and packs the punch of a feminist classic." — The New York Times Book Review
A haunted feminist fable, Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is the story of a woman navigating between gender & class roles to empower herself & fulfill her dreams. In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson & David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her.
She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, & so must find a way to win herself the time & security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, & a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labour—social & erotic—but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another & more drastic solution is necessary?
Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, & Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, & a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life & literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, & the battle to find one’s true calling.