Insignificance

More about the book

For fans of Otessa Moshfegh's Death in Her Hands and Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, a plumber's Mrs. Dalloway In an addictive, interior-monologue lyric novel, we meet Joseph. Back on the job after a long leave, he's not at all sure he'll make it through the day. Bad thoughts keep creeping in. He believes that his son, suffering from a condition in which he believes someone close to him has been replaced by an imposter, has tried to kill his wife. And that he'll try again. And that his wife is planning to leave him. Meanwhile, he's fixing a sink for his wife's friend. Insignificance unfurls over the course of a single day. Placing the reader inside the head of the struggling Joseph, it works double time, as a portrait of the uncertainty and awkwardness of one vulnerable man and his relationship with the world, and also as a tense, emotional, and gripping drama. In this deeply human and highly inventive story, we have a novel that portrays the thoughts of one working man on his own terms, without artifice or condescension. James Clammer pries open the head of a plumber to reveal the portrait of a fracturing mind taking us closer and closer to the edge.