When Holly Pester visited the archives of the experimental poet Hannah Weiner (1928–1997), she found herself cohabiting with the dead writer in her kitchen sink. In the early 1970s, while suffering from schizophrenic hallucinations, Weiner had become convinced that she was magnetic. As Pester discovered in intimate detail in the poet’s diaries, she relocated her body into the small space of her ceramic sink, localizing her two remaining biological functions: drinking and pissing.
Anyone familiar with intense archival work will know that it doesn’t take long before the facts of your own life begin to merge with the life you’re researching. Letters, journal entries, shopping lists, to-do lists—there’s an uncanniness to silent confrontations with intimate, quotidian ephemera. Pester’s poem “Hannah Weiner’s Sink” tracks the strangeness of these quasi-corporeal textual encounters. “On the third day,” she writes, “I cried as she described her decision to live in the kitchen sink.” Before long, Pester feels alienated by the realities of “the men I stayed with,” “the librarian,” “the seals” off the coast of San Diego. And so, “I went back to the library and got in the sink with her.”[1]
Pester’s debut novel, The Lodgers, opens with a familiarly Weiner-esque fascination with compact spaces. “As a bored and nervous young girl,” Pester writes in the book’s first sentence, “I often imagined climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing-machine drum or bread bin, and living in there.” But despite appearances, The Lodgers is no bildungsroman; these preliminary recollections are merely a prelude to the narrator’s arrival in a new sublet, where an “open-plan kitchen and living room […] reminded me of those spaces” (1). In today’s rental market, as The Lodgers shows us, Weiner’s relocation into a space just large enough to accommodate basic bodily needs is no longer a symptom of mental illness—but it may well be a cause.
The novel follows a brief period in the life of an unnamed narrator, who has returned to her hometown, renting an inadequate room to reconnect with “Moffa,” her mother, in a vernacular spelling that hints at a West Midlands accent (the region of the UK from which Pester hails) and reveals a poet’s ear for spoken words. Jobless, friendless, and close to penniless, Pester’s narrator is an archetype of the twenty-first century precariat, “dogpaddling,” as Lauren Berlant might put it, in an endless loop of temporary living.[2] Pester writes:
I get a job, I try something, then come to my senses as it all fails and head off, fold the beginning of a life up and shoo myself into transit. Not unstuck, stuck still. […] Each life I had before was just a short story to put inside me, every new start a failure, and each temporary address was one head on top of a beast of multiple heads. Is this making sense? (35)
These “short stories”—part lived, part imagined—describe the novel’s structure in which the many-headed beast of its narrator splits herself through the act of storytelling to forge an unnamed “you,” a fictitious doubling of the already fictional self. “In the new flat I was tired and un-unpacked,” the narrator tells us at the close of the book’s first chapter. “I sat down, still in my coat, on the cola-stained sofa, got comfy, hated it, and set to work imagining you” (8). Here, the narrative shifts from first to second person, establishing the story-within-a-story that structures the novel. Chapter by chapter, it oscillates between the narrative “I” and an imagined “you” who moves into the rented room that the narrator has recently vacated in the home of a working single mother and her young daughter. In the subnarrative that unravels (a secondary story that lodges like a tenant within the first-person narrative), we find that “you” both is and is not a self-address. “You’re there now, in a different town, walking towards an address that I arrived at one year ago. You have heavy bags. You are younger, summer is nearly over. You walk slower than me […] you’re taller and have longer limbs” (9).
This unfixed—“you” the “you” that is simultaneously “me” (the narrator, the writer) as well as “you” the reader, as well as an entirely imagined, entirely other “you”—also characterizes the logic of lyric address. In a Shakespearean sonnet, to take an orthodox example, readers are rarely troubled by the unnamed “you”: we don’t need to know, historically or textually, for whom these verses may have been intended. Perhaps we even accept the fluidity of the second-person pronoun, the fact that “you” can signal several different “you”s within a single utterance. Through this lyrically inflected “you,” Pester’s narrator attempts to disentangle the logic behind the rental market of her present: over the past twenty years, the number of people dependent on England’s private rental sector has doubled, while rents balloon and living spaces shrink in proportion.[3] “This rotation of buttocks and welcomes,” the narrator informs “you,” “is what you are now economically part of. Get used to it” (19). Confronted by the direct, second-person address, each reader becomes an anonymous “you,” briefly inhabiting the novel like a tenant in a temporary sublet. Like the spatially coded relationship between Pester and Weiner that the archive—and then the poem—makes possible in “Hannah Weiner’s Sink,” The Lodgers’ lyric address asks us to imagine narrative space as an analogue for rented space: an economy of “buttocks and welcomes,” of cramped, temporary rooms occupied by a growing turnover of anonymous bodies, in which we, the readers, are implicated.
The book’s twinned narratives develop along their own axes of precarious mundanity. The narrator staves off the inevitable reunion with her mother via trips to the supermarket, interactions with old lovers, tentative job searches—but mostly through daydreams of “you.” And as “you” gradually takes shape, the quotidian details of her day-to-day life start to give way to her own fantasies. Glimpsing herself, the landlady’s daughter, and another tenant (a middle-aged man known to us only as “the professor”) reflected in a television screen, “you” imagines alternative kinship structures to combat the forlorn reality of living alone in somebody else’s home. The “mock family” that stares back at her from the blank TV is one more set of heads on the beast of transitory life, one more short story within the web of fiction that Pester—or Pester’s narrator, or both—is weaving (76).
At the center of the novel, we encounter a chapter titled “Triangles”—the only chapter to break the regular see-sawing of titles that mark their narrative strands with the words “Moffa” or “You.” After cataloging a series of models of triangulation—in the family, in the workplace, in geometry, in data science, in Buddhism—the narrator tells us: “The triangle is the end point, the goal of being. Doing triangles is inevitable, triangulating money–housing–sex, work–family–art, father–son–holy ghost” (108). In a novel that centers on a housing crisis sparked, in large part, by the transformation of a basic human need (shelter) into a valuable asset (buy-to-let property), it’s tempting to hear an echo of Marx in this chapter. Writing about the commodity, Marx employs a “simple geometrical example” to illustrate the principle of exchange value:
In order to determine and compare the areas of all rectilinear figures we split them up into triangles. Then the triangle itself is reduced to an expression totally different from its visible shape: half the product of the base and the altitude. In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be reduced to a common element, of which they represent a greater or a lesser quantity.[4]
This analogy—whereby shapes get reduced to triangles and triangles reduced to expressions—rhymes with Pester’s suggestion that “the triangle is the end point, the goal of being.” There’s a sense here not of the golden perfection of the strongest shape but of the jagged brokenness of the shard; of something once whole, now shattered to its most reducible form. But Pester’s triangles have a double valency, alluding not only to the increasing commodification of housing but to the tenant herself as fungible commodity, endlessly exchanged within a rental “economy” marked by “the transactions, the equivalents, the values that are substance, the values that are pressure, the timing and the work and the promises, the heat, the shape, the terms” (14). In The Lodgers, the distillation of life into triangles isn’t emblematic of spiritual transcendence—it’s part of the relentless logic of capital.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve encountered triangles in the novel: they’ve been surfacing erratically since the narrator first arrived in her new home. Lifting a sad-looking, store-bought sandwich out of its cardboard box, she notices that the flimsy container is a simulacrum of the apartment’s “awkward corner shape” (2). “The triangular box was empty,” Pester writes, “with an inside that resembled, like sarcasm, the one I was in. I looked inside. It had a window too” (5). A couple of pages later, the narrator lapses into her first monologue on triangulation. “My life is a triangle of where I am, have been and want to be,” she tells us, “of what I crave, don’t have and can’t have; of who I miss, hate… forget” (8). These congruences of suspended presents, failed pasts, and desired futures are another articulation of the narrator’s tendency to make stories out of a life in transit. As if in response to this tangent, it’s here that she sits herself down on the sofa and “set[s] to work imagining you” (8).
A language of enterprise pervades the novel, reminding readers that in today’s housing market private renting means business. In the narrator’s “marketable style” sublet, the table and chairs are “staffroomish,” the bedroom “featureless as a till receipt,” and, while the narrator imagines “business-friendly conversations” with an absent flatmate, “you” gets mistakenly called a “manager” by the landlady’s young daughter (1, 2, 4, 38). What the girl meant to say was “lodger,” but the slip betrays more than childish error. The semantics of working and living are confused in the lodger’s home, where, for the landlady, the spare bedroom doubles as home therapy studio, a “testament,” Pester writes, “to privateering and need” (50). So when the narrator “set[s] to work imagining you,” the semantic choice is surely no accident. For Pester the novelist (and poet), imagining “you” is precisely work. Could it be, then, that the book’s narrator is engaged, not in obsessional cathexis, but in the labor of fiction writing? And that the triangular sandwich box—which lends its image to the book’s cover—is the novel? Just as Pester reaches into her writing to move her character from scene to scene, so the narrator peers into the cardboard container, like a child with a dollhouse, to construct a “you” who has taken her place in her former temporary home.
This spatial coding is key. If triangles are what private landlords create when they carve up rental spaces to eke out as much profit as possible, then the novel has to reckon with that geometry to enable encounters between its characters and its readers. And here, again, Pester writes with a poet’s feeling for textual space, crafting her novel in the knowledge that writing doesn’t only represent spaces but constructs them. In verse, Pester is always alive to the possibilities afforded by poetic form, playing with line length, visual density, and errant gaps to open up the kinds of small spaces that let her into a sink with a dead poet. In The Lodgers, it’s the compressed, sandwich-box fragments that give shape to the novel, simulating the experience of precarity in poky spaces.
In the end, though, it’s not so much the images of triangles that lend the novel its spatial force as the triangulation of writer–reader–text that Pester borrows from lyric convention. “In geometry,” she writes in the novel’s central chapter, “triangulation is the process of measuring the distance from two known points to a third point. You work out where something is by its relation to other things. It’s about coordination” (107–8). The narrator and her imagined other become the novel’s “known points,” indicating a third point that must be you, the unknown reader, who inhabits the text by virtue of lyric’s logic. This is reminiscent of what William Waters calls “poetry’s touch,” the way that the address to an unnamed “you” renders poetry “a form of contact.”[5] Waters’ haptic conception reminds us that, like architecture, poetry is always animated by the promise of an “I” and a “you” meeting in textual space. To put that another way, when the lyric “I” calls out to the lyric “you,” there’s always a poetic intrusion into the reader’s time and space. “Who knows,” says Walt Whitman in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”[6] But there’s also an implicit invitation to the reader to inhabit the space made possible by the poem. Because in poetry’s stanzas—or rooms—space amounts to more than simply the gaps between words and lines. It’s where the body gets inscribed. And Pester’s novel knows this; it knows lyric’s tendency toward the quasi-corporeal encounter. Through its coding of cramped and broken spaces, through its lyrically inflected address to a multiplied (or triangulated) “you,” The Lodgers brings poetry’s touch to bear on narrative form. If this book is about precarious housing, then it’s also a work that lets its reader in on the possibility that, to paraphrase Hölderlin, poetically we dwell.
Notes:
[1] Holly Pester, Comic Timing (London: Granta, 2021), 61.
[2] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 199.
[3] Vicky Spratt, Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain’s Housing Emergency (London: Profile Books, 2022), 7, 156.
[4] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 127.
[5] William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
[6]Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” in The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (London: Penguin, 2004), 194.