The Maid

Nita Prose

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, March 26th 2022

Despite the review copy’s back cover proclaiming The Maid ‘an Event Publication’ and with a movie adaptation already underway, I did not hold out great hopes for Nita Prose’s debut novel. After all, as a longtime editor and the current vice president of Simon & Schuster Canada, she has an inside line on people of influence. As such, I was pleasantly surprised by the sweetly funny mystery she has created.

Molly, the novel’s central character and narrator, is the perfect maid: conscientious, efficient, polite, discreet, and highly appreciative of her position at the five-star Regency Grand Hotel. Her inability to read facial expressions or behavioural cues means she has few friends and struggles with social situations, but at work she can transform herself into “a bright, unique square, integral to the tapestry…. I love cleaning, I love my maid’s trolley, and I love my uniform…[it] is my freedom. It is the ultimate invisibility cloak”. This sense of identity is particularly important now that her Gran, who has raised her since childhood, has passed away, so when one of Molly’s guests dies under mysterious circumstances and she finds herself the main suspect in a murder investigation, her carefully constructed world begins to fall apart. Clearing her name and differentiating true friends from ‘bad eggs’ will take all her considerable intellectual resources, tasks that require the forging of connection with others and a recognition that the truth – and justice – are subjective.

The nefarious goings-on at the Regency Grand could have been lifted straight out of a B-grade gangster and the action, which unfolds over the course of a working week, is wildly unlikely, but neither matters since the plot is there primarily as a pedestal on which to display the loveable Molly. Like the protagonist of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, she is both precocious and innocent. She is very self-aware and articulate but endearingly child-like in other ways: her attraction to a fellow employee resembles a teenage crush, and she frequently repeats her Gran’s aphorisms – “when all else fails, tidy up”, “clean conscience, clean life”, “when you assume you make an A-S-S out of U and Me” – to herself to calm herself during times of stress. Her desire to please and clear sense of right and wrong make her an ideal employee, but her social blindness and tendency to believe the best of others leave her vulnerable to manipulation. We are further inclined to sympathy by the first-person narration that provides direct access to Molly’s thoughts and emotions, and the careful control of what she reveals conceals a plot twist I honestly didn’t see coming.

Is the story ludicrous? Yes. Is it great literature? No. But The Maid is a light and entertaining read that recognises and celebrates both neurodiversity and the oft-invisible labour of service. The real triumph of the story, however, is Molly, whose delightful character kept this reader engaged and onside to the very end.