In Vacuum in the Dark, Jen Beagin explores questions of home and belonging through the story of Mona, a 26-year-old house cleaner in Taos, N.Mex. Mona is trying to restart her life after a doomed relationship with a not-so-good-for-her boyfriend she calls Mr. Disgusting. She cleans houses and makes art and sometimes combines the two activities by taking self-portraits in her clients' homes while wearing her clients' things.
"I like how cut-and-dry it is," Mona says of cleaning houses. "How black and white." But in reality, Mona's experiences as a house cleaner are anything but. They exist solidly in the murky grey area of smudged boundaries and complicated relationships: she has an affair with the husband of one of her clients, whom she calls Dark; talks to Fresh Air's Terry Gross in her head; and finds herself posing for the work of a Hungarian artist couple who grieve the loss of their daughter.
Mona made her first appearance in Beagin's 2015 novel, Pretend I'm Dead. Readers unfamiliar with Beagin's debut, however, will have no trouble diving straight in to Vacuum in the Dark, which stands on its own as a book about boundaries and self-discovery. Mona's story is not always easy to read, but her sometimes cringe-worthy decisions feel real to their very core, depicting a young woman stumbling through life as best she can, trying to find where she ultimately belongs. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm