It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one's true calling. Indelicacy takes place in an unnamed city, in an unknown time though we hear mention of. Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. Indelicacy is the story of her desire for subjectivity in a world that has only offered her subjection. Perhaps another, more drastic solution is necessary. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor-social and erotic-she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her.

She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. Indelicacy introduces us to a cleaning woman at an art museum who nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. Amina Cain's extraordinary fiction has been said to take place in 'a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch' (Blake Butler), and this, her debut novel, is no exception.

Indelicacy by Amina Cain