"The Lodgers" by Holly Pester

Homelessness does not necessarily mean living on the streets. 

This novel about transience has two alternating narrations. In one the narrator describes, in the first person, her present life, using the past tense. The other narrative, written in the second person, is an imaginary reconstruction of the life of the person who replaced her in her previous lodging. This 'reconstruction' is clearly based on her own experiences in that house so it refers to the past while being written in the present tense.

In the present life, she is living in a sublet, forever awaiting the arrival of a flatmate. Her flat overlooks her mother's house; she goes round from time to time (she has a back door key) but her mother (called 'Moffa') isn't there. Moffa used to be an actress and was notorious in the neighbourhood for her parties; the narrator recalls being on tour as a child with her mother with all the transience that life entailed; her childhood seems to be mostly one of loneliness and observing others. Even now she is clumsy and socially awkward.

In the past life she lives in a town nearer the coast, where she studies a therapy course based on triangles. She rents a room (weekday evenings and nights only, since it was used as a workroom during the day; she has to make alternative arrangements for weekends) from a woman who lives with her daughter, a badly-behaved little girl. A professor also lodges there and they have occasional casual sex; more transience.

The novel is very good at conveying how much of an outsider a lodger is

• “How we cater for and clean ourselves will be convenient for another person we live with, or not.” (p 29)
• “What else are we except things for whoever we live with to put up with?” (p 29)
• "I learned, like you, to lodge, I mean, adapt and hide my needs rather than dig down, simply hover without much substance, meekly occupy, as the tenant of the tenant, it's how I was born.” (p 85)

The narrator is eternally trying to 'triangulate'. At the 50% turning point, she gives several meanings for this word, from psychology, geometry, and data science. She and the professor form a triangle with the child. In geometry, triangulation is a technique of establishing where something is in reference to two other points; perhaps the narrator is trying to work out where she is psychologically in reference to Moffa's house and the house in which she previously lodged. Triangulation in data science is something similar: it examines findings from different viewpoints in order to test a hypothesis; "it's a process of rigour and caring about truth" (p108). This is exactly what the narrator's competing narratives are doing.

In map-making, triangulation involves using two fixed points in order to locate a third point. But it only works if you have those fixed points. The narrator grew up with the unstable Moffa, and an apparently absent father (who is referred to only thus: “The house is all mother, carpets and bed linen, while the domain, the father, is the reason we can't look in mirrors at night.”; p 44). She has no fixed home. She is fundamentally lost.

This sense of dislocation and rootlessness is repeated time and again:

• “I had journeyed; had been myself in transit.” (p 3)
• “Maybe you also shift it around and email strangers, and move through life trying to be in the right place but keep ending up in slightly the wrong place.” (p 10)
• “I was always spinning around on the hoof of having-just-left and on the hoof of having-just-got-back.” (p 44)

She also conveys, I think, this sense in the words she uses and the sentences she constructs. What she is saying is all about utterly mundane reality, but the way she puts it can verge on the psychedelic. For example: “Having to be impermanent but ready - like an imminent alarm clock, encountering street names and weather, sacrificing one plan and one direction in favour of another, regarding a nice tree, dead tree, common threat, bad design, couples walking together, sunrise, nature in reality against my idea of it - is a socially inherited condition. What I mean is: that same morning I woke up very early and went for a walk in a nearby woods.” (p 148) Lists like this one occur sporadically throughout the book; their apparent grammatical and semantic incoherence jars and disturbs. At least this sentence is followed by its explanation. Others, such as “A child is a moving bloom of orphaned licence. Her world is made of unstoppable radial prompts.” (p 124), or “Something fundamental about men struck me in that instant: they are the inevitable figures of conclusions.” (p 204 - 205), I was unable to translate.

Inevitably, there is little in the way of plot, since a plot implies a purpose. Tenancies do, however, have a beginning and an end and so the narrative does have a shape. This hidden structure uses glimpses of the everyday life of these lodgers to build up a mosaic portrait of the narrator. Not everything is explained, the reader has to fill in a lot of gaps, but in the end one gets a sense of the character. 

Selected quotes:

Page numbers refer to the 2024 Granta paperback edition

There are some phenomenal descriptions:

• “The sandwich ... was still in the box, hardening and weeping humous.” (p 5)
• “I found a sputniky barbecue that was so rusty it made my teeth sing to be near it.” (p 46)
• “As the tap dripped into the steel sink of my sour kitchenette that night ...” (p 163)
• “The sky went a nuclear peach colour. All garden life was pulsing and gasping. Gaseous vegetal trailers and pink-lipped flowers with dark, musky herbs, nightmare-winged little birds dipping towards the light, drips from the leaking water feature, drain smell - I was part of it all.” (p 207)

Other selected quotes:

• “As a bored and nervous young girl I often imagined climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing-machine drum or bread bin, and living in there.” (p 1)
• “Your route is one I've taken before, it ends on the riposte of a cul-de-sac.” (p 10)
• “A friend of mine told me once ... that we needed to hyper-empathise with the faceless people who disturb us. For instance we should say to ourselves, that bastard needs to play his music right now at that volume because he's had a terrible nightmare and he suffers from anxiety that’s eased if he dances on the spot. Or, that disgusting slob behind me on this train is eating crisps so noisily because he's hungry, he didn't have time to eat today, he's rushing from work, his name is Nico and he's on his way to the bed size of his sick daughter who is on nil byi mouth and he doesn't want to eat in front of her. Or, that arsehole screams at her cats because she loves them so much, and she’s a war veteran. She’s an alcoholic. Her heating has been cut off.” (pp 72 - 73)
• “I've tried to trick and tempt and triangulate work, love and their materials into an order. it never works. I was more myself living in the margin of Moffa’s house." (p 85) 
• “Life makes horrible door-whackers of us all.” (p 89)
• “A child moves as she thinks, the two of the same, and because she cannot understand who you are, she bangs into you. you do the same when you can't understand what your life is, you bang into things.” (p 124)
• “After everything I still believed that if you transmit both need and warmth into the universe, the universe will send something back.” (p 204)

This novel isn't always easy reading but it certainly has an atmosphere of disruption and displacement which chimes perfectly with its subject matter.

August 2024; 217 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God