Vitória, the narrator, lives in an unspecified time and place that could be nineteenth century England (she is expected to marry, clean, cook, entertain, and raise children) if it weren’t for the slippage that occurs in details like the books the narrator reads or the art she describes. While Indelicacy orbits themes of identity, social class, female friendship, creativity, and desire, it is ultimately a story of a woman claiming her freedom.

The memory situates the narrator in her own narrative-while she is looking outside herself (through the window, but also at the painting reflected in the window) she is simultaneously staring back at her reflection, gazing within. It meant something to me to see myself with them.” Seeing her reflection blurred with the art elevates the narrator’s sense of self. While working as a cleaning woman in an art museum, the narrator starts to see herself reflected in the art: “When I was supposed to be cleaning, I would look out the windows of the museum, the paintings behind me reflected in the glass. Instead, Cain writes into the expansiveness of the narrator’s thought processes, not in isolation but in concert with her surrounding environment. Cain has said that “inner life can propel a narrative forward as much as plot,” and indeed what animates Indelicacy is the thrill of experiencing the narrator’s mind attuning to both her inner and outer worlds with equal parts agency and wonder.Ĭain’s magic act is her ability to write the interior life without tumbling into the traps of isolation, solipsism, or spiraling self-obsession. Like Cain’s short story collections, I Go to Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009) and Creature (Dorothy, 2013), the space the novel inhabits is largely interior, yet the longer form opens the narrative up to a grander investigation of self and society. Indelicacy tells the story of a woman who desires a life beyond her janitorial duties, a life where she can nurture her writing aspirations and the friendships she holds dear however, to focus on plot alone would deny the narrative its inner depth.

In the tradition of the Künstlerroman, Cain’s debut novel Indelicacy follows the maturity and growth of an artist, and like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, it is a novel interested in consciousness, identity, the passage of time, art, and freedom. The reach of her fiction is an invitation to peer deep into our inner worlds. On its surface, her fiction is quiet, lovely, contained, but sit with any passage and that which seems still uncoils and comes alive. To read Amina Cain is to enter tide pools of the mind.

Amina cain indelicacy