Clean A novel

Clean is the opposite of what readers will feel when they finish this novel by Chilean author Zerán. Domestic worker Estela García moved to the big city to work, aiming to make her adored mother's life easier in their hardscrabble coastal village. She ends up with an upper-class couple she calls señor and señora. What this couple values is appearances. An unreliable narrator who self-medicates with pills from the señora's stash, Estela keeps the household running, everyone fed and clothed, and cleans up every mess; she is the silent witness to the adults' secrets, a marginalized and dehumanized member of the household. Estela's efforts to find connection and affection are tragically, painfully doomed, her links to her own family and home stretched thin and broken. When the couple's young daughter dies, Estela ends up in an interrogation room as emotionally sterile as her employers' house, where she tells her story to an unseen panel of judges behind a one-way mirror, which becomes the reader's perspective. While Zerán's uncomfortable, fascinating, lovely, and affecting novel is set in contemporary Santiago, Chile, Hughes' splendid translation assures it will resonate in many more places where people live with the alienation and superficiality of late-stage capitalism.

Chilean writer Zerán (The Remainder) delivers a propulsive story of class differences in Santiago. After Julia, the young daughter of a successful doctor and lawyer, is found dead, having drowned in the family's pool, Estela, their longtime maid, is brought in for questioning. Sitting in an interrogation room, Estela recounts her decision to leave her home in her mid-30s to find work in the capital and divulges information about her employers. She describes stumbling upon them having sex in the dining room and retreating when they notice her, after which their cries get much louder. In addition to cleaning, she's forced to double as a nanny for the "fragile" Julia, and she learns secrets about the family, such as the mother's use of birth control pills and antidepressants. Zerán employs Estela as the novel's lone narrator, smartly crafting a version of events that suggests the maid's innocence, even as Estela admits to bottling her rage, leaving the reader to wonder whether Julia's death was accidental, a suicide, or murder. Though Estela's recollections become repetitive as the novel's climax nears, Zerán keeps up the momentum with short chapters and Estela's appealingly snappy voice (she frequently tells her interrogators to "write this down"). This is bursting with intrigue. (Oct.)