^ a b Berwick, Isabel (17 September 2020)." 'A Trace of That Darker History': An Interview with Amina Cain". "The Space of Writing: A Conversation with Amina Cain". "Eternal Present: An Interview with Amina Cain". ^ a b Cain, Kate Durbin interviews Amina (11 February 2020).The book was shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Īccording to literary review aggregator Book Marks, the novel received mostly "Rave" and "Positive" reviews. īerwick grouped Cain's work with that of Jenny Offill and Ottessa Moshfegh, calling their styles "modern flat". Isabel Berwick, writing in a review for the Financial Times, referred to the novel as " a strange, short, beguiling book." This sentiment was echoed in The New Yorker, which called the book "sparse" and "elliptical". Ĭain had several drafts for the novel, and has referred to earlier versions of the book as "terrible". The city in which the novel takes place also never receives a name, and Cain has referred to it as "a combination of Chicago, London, and then some imagined place". The novel is partially set in an unnamed museum and for inspiration, Cain visited the National Gallery in London and the Frick Collection in New York City. The novel follows the life of its narrator, Vitória, from shortly before her marriage until shortly after its dissolution. Genet spawned The Maids out of a true and violent story-it’s intriguing to consider what Cain might make from sturdier material.Indelicacy is a 2020 novel by American writer Amina Cain. It couldn’t have been written in the past it’s set in, yet it also doesn’t draw much from the time in which it appears. Indelicacy makes a tacit claim as a feminist fable, in which Vitória attempts to carve out room for herself without either submitting to or being complicit in exploitation-but the book’s very ease makes it slight against its much darker lineage.
Meanwhile the social constraints that serve here as Cain’s artistic ones also feel too filmy and indistinct to sustain the requisite tension. Vitória lacks the stark self-pity of Jean Rhys’s heroines or the swooning, spiritual intensity of Clarice Lispector’s, and Cain doesn’t manage the magic trick accomplished by those predecessors, in which a mind becomes the world and all outside it vanishes. Cain’s sentences are elegant and often suspenseful, but the narrative can’t fulfill the promise of their strangeness.
These references, though they impart the odd frisson, invite unflattering comparisons.
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