Book Review: Vacuum in the Dark by Jen Beagin

By Simon Demetriou

If you’ve read Jane Eyre, did you ever wonder why as readers we cheer Jane on when she refuses Rochester’s proposal to live in a faux marriage, but then as soon as her tedious cousin proposes to her, we start to see the remainder of the novel as a choice between the two men? Why can’t Jane say screw you to both her flawed options? Well, in Vacuum in the Dark, Jen Beagin’s protagonist, Mona, does just that.

Now, I should point out that a couple of reviews ago I claimed that I was rationing my Jen Beagin reading so as not to get through her three novels (this is my last!) too fast. And I had intended to not read Vacuum in the Dark for at least a few more weeks. But I made the mistake of opening the book to discover that the first chapter is called ‘Poop’. What can I say? I gave in to the inevitable and am extremely glad I did.

If it feels like you’ve just read two introductions to this review, it’s because you have. Both are accurate to my experience of reading Vacuum in the Dark. The same joyful, precise lack of restraint that allows Beagin to describe a spitefully secreted turd as ‘sweating. It seemed a little shy. It was as if it had been onstage and had suffered an attack, and was now recovering in the wings’ (and if you’ve read a better simile this year, please find a way to send it to me) allows her to put together a heroine who can employ the gloriously simple act of defiance that has evaded so many more glamorous literary females.

This sequel to Pretend I’m Dead is just as funny, and just as serious, as its predecessor, though the need to wrap up – sort of – Mona’s story makes the episodic structure seem a little more compressed and sped up than Beagin’s first novel. The upside is that there is no let-up in the introduction of past and present characters to both captivate and traumatise Mona – from her pervy granddad Woody to her poop-hiding fellow cleaning lady Maria Maria to Dark, the Mr Rochester to Mona’s Jane, whose knuckle tattoos read MORE LOVE and whose interactions with dogs pose ominous questions.

Mona asserts that she ‘had been setting the women’s movement back for years’. But her realisation that ‘I haven’t said no to enough in my life’ and the final decision to say no to the obvious and yes to what matters to her stands to teach us a great deal, both about how to live and about how we might represent women on the page.