The Lodgers by Holly Pester review – sharp end of the housing crisis

Holly Pester, a poet whose 2021 debut Comic Timing was shortlisted for the Forward best first collection prize, cut her teeth at disorderly open mic nights and has, as a result, a keen interest in the difference between delivery and performance. Both are essential, she says, “whether it’s at a poetry reading or on the page”. They might be considered synonymous, she told Frieze magazine in a 2021 interview, “but I like to remember that the text is always there, it’s like a score, a contract”. No surprise, then, that The Lodgers, her fiction debut, performs so well on the page; it’s a poet’s novel in that sense.

“As a bored and nervous young girl,” Pester’s unnamed and disorganised narrator relates, without stopping to find out if she should open up to strangers like us, “I often imagined myself climbing inside a small case or container, like a piano stool or matchbox, a washing machine drum or bread bin, and living in there.” She’s tired. She’s been travelling all day. She’s moving into a new flat, which resembles a triangular sandwich package, sublet from “a paranoid boy” she’s never seen. The details of the arrangement have a wry, playful quality, but there’s an underlying nervousness; the room doesn’t feel real to her. A glass smells of dirty hair, a window affords nothing “except the stillness of a town at night”, the “origin point of boredom” in her life.

From now on, everything – from the possibility of being joined without warning by a second tenant, to a contract that reminds her to pay the rent direct to the stranger’s bank account, carefully describing it as “birthday money” – will seem temporary, unsettled and unsettling. She doesn’t seem to be able to make a plan and hold to it. We discover all this inside the first two or three pages. It’s comic, but it isn’t. Her adulthood has been marked this way, she’ll admit later: “Each life I had before was just a short story to put inside me.” Her return to this town – not the first – will be marked by all those other failures.

Having arrived and introduced herself, she immediately begins to write about someone else: a woman who will in her turn be arriving to take up the room the narrator recently vacated, in another street in another town, where she will live uncomfortably with a single mother and a charming but raucous little girl with a “nearly animal brain”. This woman is not quite a figment, but neither is she composed entirely from the narrator’s own experience. She, too, is never named but addressed throughout as “you”. It’s not so much a gesture of empathy as a slipping between personalities. Before we can get comfortable with this second narrative, a third has been introduced, the story of the narrator’s relationship with the mysteriously absent Moffa, her mother, a chaotic narcissist who ignored her own child and, as her neighbours put it, “lived like a pig”.

The women’s stories are organisms in themselves. They tumble about like the little daughter with the animal brain. From the outset they’re entangling, interleaving and mirroring, triangulating, explaining and overexciting each other. Just as you think clarity might emerge, they change their minds and tumble off downhill, accelerating towards conclusions we read as funny, nightmarish and diffuse all at once, but always as sharp as a knife. Every so often they line up along some shared axis, then fly off again to fetch something from upstairs. It’s a briefly disconcerting narrative style but easy enough to accommodate, fizzing with the life it reflects and played for the blackest of laughs.

Pester’s structural shifts – past to present, present to alternative world – are, like her prose, blunt and lithe at the same time. She favours inventories of objects absurd or broken, personal failures, contractual extras you can enjoy as a paying guest – an intruder, an unsettling necessity – in someone else’s house, including “unlimited biscuits from the purple tin”. Early on, on the MDF table of the sandwich-package flat, an actual inventory appears (it includes “a stain”). Later a wry accounting of day-by-day interactions will lead to a list that might be a poem full of the smells and feelings of occupation.

Related: Poem of the month: Doctor! by Holly Pester

While the settled world goes on, the lodgers subsist beneath the surface of events “like sunken boats, wobbling between mud and water”. To the precarious – compressing themselves into an “irreducible non-existence”, the cheapest space they can find – homeliness is “the most expensive of things”. But precariousness, Pester points out, can often be a true trickle-down effect. In this system, the rentier, as hard-pressed as the lodger, passes her problems along. As a result, the narrator’s fantasy self must vacate her room during the day so it can be used for her landlady’s side gig as a wellness massage therapist.

Thanks to Moffa’s parenting methods, the narrator has never experienced anything that resembles family – only a kind of emotional precariousness. She’s thus able to describe living at the edge of other people’s lives as “unalienating”. The whole book is, in a sense, about the complexity or wishfulness of judgments like that. What is it like to wish – and at the same time not wish – to live near but apart from the lives of others? The Lodgers is a serious, sad and darkly comic confrontation with that central question.

• The Lodgers by Holly Pester is published by Granta (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.