Is there such thing as a literary poo joke...?

Jen Beagin's Vacuum in the Dark opens with Mona, a twenty-six-year-old house cleaner, accidentally washing her hands with a poo, mistaking it for a 'fancy hippie soap.' She immediately refers to her imaginary friend, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Gross" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Terry Gross</a>, for advice. Terry suggests breathing through her mouth and repeat rinsing.
<p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>"The shits are real, Terry," Mona said. "They have heft. They engage all the senses."</em>
<em>"Start keeping a record of some kind," Terry suggested, as Mona finished vacuuming. "Indicate the time of day, the location, plus a brief description, and maybe include a drawing."</em><!--more--></p>
This story is dark. It's also deadpan funny and occasionally a bit repulsive. It tells the story of Mona's 'relationships' with her clients - a blind woman and her husband, 'Dark'; and a Hungarian artist couple whose beautifully decorated home masks their complicated personal life.
<p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>Five minutes hadn't passed, yet the woman was revealing her most intimate secrets. Often, after Mona copped to cleaning toilets for a living, people took it as a cue to be candid.</em></p>
Odd story lines - Mona embarking on a clandestine photography project of self-portraits in other people's clothes and homes; and her modelling for the Hungarian artists - are the front for much more difficult themes around Mona's traumatic childhood and troubled relationships.

The minor characters are sharp and brilliantly realised, notably her neighbours, an older married couple, Nigel and Shiori, who have a penchant for loungewear and tantric sex. Mona calls them Yoko and Yoko, because <em>"...in some ways, they reminded her of John and Yoko, but, as they were both terrible musicians, she called them Yoko and Yoko." </em>

When Mona returns to LA to visit her mother and step-father, she is forced to confront her past.
<p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>You're here, she told herself. You're home. You got your wish. The wish was stale. A decade too old. It was as if she'd finally gotten that cashmere sweater she'd wished for at fourteen, but now the sleeves were too short and it was some weird New England colonial pumpkin color.</em></p>
Jokes aside, Beagin's tentative reveal of Mona's traumatic past is perfectly executed. In one sense, it is expected, because we know Mona is hurt, but the extent and dimensions of that hurt are unexpected, and the last part of this novel is deeply sad (and written with great sensitivity).
<p style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>Strange, she thought, how affected you are by malice when you're a kid, how a mean word or look can unravel you, how devastating cruelty feels when you're too young to protect yourself. But eventually, after all those defense mechanisms are firmly in place, it's the so-called positive shit - mercy, not malice - that brings you to tears.</em></p>
It should be noted that while this book follows on from <em>Pretend I’m Dead</em>, it also stands alone as a novel.

I received my copy of <em>Vacuum in the Dark </em>from the publisher, Oneworld Publications, via <a href="https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/154195" target="_blank" rel="noopener">NetGalley</a>, in exchange for an honest review.

3.5/5 Odd and memorable.

I really loved Pretend I'm Dead and will admit I was surprised to see a sequel, but it's equally as dark and disturbingly humorous as the first. Hopefully there will be a third to round things off.
Mona is one of the most damaged characters that I've come across and liked, she is so raw and honest.

A good, entertaining book.
It's full of a sort of dark humour, with quirky characters and a somewhat weird plot.
I can say I liked it even if I was expecting something else.
An interesting read experience.
Recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC

I loved Jen Beagin’s first novel, Pretend I’m Dead. We met Mona, an intelligent woman who is a cleaner. Just a cleaner. Not a student working as a cleaner, or a writer working as a cleaner, or a mother-of-three working as cleaner. Just a cleaner.

And Mona was quirky, enjoying both her work (she knows how to clean pretty much any mark or stain), and also taking selfies in her clients’ apartments and sometimes in their clothes.

Vacuuming In The Dark is pretty much the same. Mona has relocated from Massachusetts to New Mexico and meets a different set of grotesque clients. Mostly it feels like an episodic novel, distinct novella/short story sections with a thin narrative thread running through to hold them together. Those episodes are quite readable, but a bit like Mona’s life, there’s a sense that it isn’t really going anywhere. The quirkiness feels a little bit stale, the vibrancy of the first novel seems to have dulled. The tropes – Terry the talkshow DJ; Mr Disgusting; Mona’s ambiguous sexuality – start to feel repetitive.

It must be hard to follow up a quirky hit – Mark Haddon and Graeme Simsion would attest to that. But writing the same novel as last time wasn’t the right way to do it.