Pick a Colour, the first novel from Laotian-Canadian poet and short-story writer Souvankham Thammavongsa, takes place over one summer’s day in a nail bar; implicitly in Canada, but it could be in any city. The narrative potential of such businesses, where customers pay for a particular service and expect to receive other kinds of care, has been explored in films and novels set in taxis, hairdressers and, in Katja Oskamp’s Marzahn, Mon Amour, a chiropody clinic. Such settings open rich questions: who has the power, the one who pays or the one who shapes the customer’s body, often with alarmingly sharp implements? How human can such exchanges of cash for care or “beauty” be? What do we buy and what do we sell in these transactions?
The novel sets out its stall plainly. Narrated by Ning, the salon owner and a retired boxer, the prelude ends, “Looking at the two of us, them sitting on a chair above me, and me down low, you’d think I am not in charge. But I am. I know everything about them, whether or not they tell me.” All first-person narrators are unreliable, and we are implicitly invited to question this assertion. With more certainty at the beginning and less at the end, Ning thinks she knows everything about everyone, including her employees. The workers judge and mock their customers, relying on clients not understanding “our language”. (Which language is not specified, and perhaps doesn’t matter, certainly not to most of the customers.) Seen through Ning’s eyes, everyone is trying to get what they can for as little as possible in a system with small room for humanity.
The salon’s rules exaggerate, almost parody, those of the service economy. All the workers, including Ning, wear name tags that say “Susan”. “We all have black shoulder-length hair and wear black T-shirts and black pants. We are, more or less, the same height too.” It’s just easier for everyone, and a good selling point: “Dear Susan is always available and at your service! Susan never takes a day off and Susan is never fully booked if it’s you who called for her.”
The business, called Susan’s, is Ning’s kingdom. There are five chairs, four workers, serving clients three at a time; “any more than that and I lose track of who is doing what and when”. Ning lives in a “tiny apartment … right above the shop” and “can’t remember the last time I spent any time away from it”. And so the book’s impressive constraints are set: one room, one day, one business.
One of the challenges of the circadian novel, especially when it’s also a closed-room novel, is to channel enough backstory through the present moment to establish the significance of what might be dismissed as too routine or trivial for literary attention. The premise of this kind of writing, paying close attention to humdrum daily life, is that the real stories lie in the opening and closing of doors, the making of tea and sweeping of floors. The writer has to make the reader see such acts anew, to recognise that life arcs, shaped by war and colonialism and migration, play out in thoughtless transactions and small impulses.
Thammavongsa achieves this, though there is one threadbare moment, where a dead pigeon becomes the focus of more mourning and tenderness than quite fits the character or situation. Ning tells us early on about her former life in boxing, and her recollections of this career filter through her reflections and instincts in the salon. Violence, aggression and self-defence are never far from her mind, the fighter’s deep sense of contingency and insecurity amplifying the vigilance of immigrant experience. Every time the door opens or the phone rings, Ning is alert to risk. She notices the sharpness of her tools, the flaws and vulnerability of skin.
But kindness, also, seeps through in the end. There’s no disgust at tired feet or oily skin. Proudly child-free, scornful of clients’ desire to talk about their babies, Ning nonetheless keeps drawings made by the children of an employee whom she allowed to exploit her. There are developing moments of sympathy and even affection for her longest-serving worker, and beautifully understated sadness at the end.
The constrained setting, deep investment in a feminised and minoritised experience and disengagement from plot will alienate some readers. They will miss a highly crafted, layered and clever novel.
• Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
