Book Review: Indelicacy
From the blurb, Cain’s Indelicacy is my perfect novel. A young woman working at a museum, who writes in her spare time, marries rich and starts living life as she wishes. When I bought it at the store in Melbourne, it was one of my first trips out in over one hundred days because of Melbourne’s hard lockdown. I went into the city and visited all the independent bookshops I could find. Indelicacy was the book I bought from The Paperback Bookshop. It’s a small store crammed with thousands of books, all of which I wanted and had been dreaming about being surrounded by for the last one hundred days. When I handed it over to the bookseller, they said they’d been meaning to read this since it came out too, they’d only heard great things. It’s also been a staff pick in The Paris Review, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a finalist for the Center of Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
Much of the novel is just of reach for the reader. The narrator’s name, Vitoria, is hardly mentioned, and she lives in an unnamed city and in an unknown time. Usually this kind of device irritates me, but I didn’t find this with Indelicacy. Instead I was intrigued. For some reason I had come into thinking it was set in modern day times. I couldn’t shake it, even when she talked about candles and carriages. I enjoyed puzzling out where she was. In the end, I settled on 1800s Amsterdam.
I was worried that I would find it dull once she got married, because I wanted the museum to be the most important part, and if not the museum, then her writing about the art she saw in the museum. But when it happened I found myself fascinated by the woman she was becoming, how the money had changed her life and who she was. It turned out the excerpts from her art writing were actually my least favourite parts. I only wanted to know more of Vitoria and her unusual relationships with her friends, husband and maid.
In an interview with Music & Literature with Sofia Samatar last year, Cain wrote a lot about museums. It is clear she has a love for art and it’s theory.
I went to London to spend time in the National Gallery, to New York City to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, and MOMA. I went to museums in my own city, like the Getty Center, the Hammer Museum, and LACMA.
As a student, Cain attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, the students receive free admission to the Art Institute of Chicago, and Cain said for the two or so years she was there she went to the Institute at least twice a week. She stated “I had an intimate relationship to that place, which is not true for the other museums I visited when I was writing the book”. Above all the museums and galleries she spent time in for research, this is the one Cain couldn’t escape. This was the one she chose for the inspiration for the museum Vitoria worked at.
Ultimately, Indelicacy made me think about the perfect piece of fiction set around a museum or art gallery. What kind of story would I like to write about a woman working in the art world? I’m not one for writing literary fiction, although I love reading it and spend a lot of time being jealous of the authors talents. My own story would likely be more frivolous, perhaps an office romance with a forgery side-plot thrown in for good measure.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/27/indelicacy-by-amina-cain-review-a-room-of-her-own
https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/indelicacy
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/books/group-text-amina-cain.html