Cleaning Nabokov's House by Leslie Daniels

Cleaning Nabokov’s House

by Leslie Daniels

Guest post by Tarren Young

I bought this book from Leslie Daniels herself at our local writer’s conference in March 2017. Our theme for the month of April was a book that was recommended to you. At first I was going to read one my husband suggested (and currently am reading—my goal for two books this month was a bit far sighted) and I debated if this could be counted as a recommendation. Since the thesaurus lists endorsed, mentioned, advocated as just a few words that encompass the recommended theme, I feel no guilt in having read this one for our book club this month.

Cleaning Nabokov’s House never struck me as one that would be peppered with metaphors pertaining to my life at the moment. Ah, but that’s how the universe works, and I gave myself the proverbial face palm for not picking up on the metaphoric  and symbolic meaning of the title from the get go. This quite sucks to admit because I love symbolic and metaphoric(al)  meaning—even when I don’t go searching for it, it usually finds me.

Leslie Daniels ability to combine both sadness and humor on a human level right from the beginning entranced me. Her writing style feels similar to my own memoir-ic  style (and if that’s not a word, I’m going to make it one—if Shakespeare can, than I can too) where the melancholy and humor crash together like a tsunami in one sentence. If I likened her to real life, it would be like laughing at a funeral—you know it’s inappropriate, yet your brain and emotions are making light of the situation. Someone usually comes along and actually thanks you for being real, being human and brave enough to show it.

Although I did feel the ending (the last three or four chapters) felt rushed and abrupt, there was much more than made up for the slightly disappointing ending.

Right from the first chapter, when her main character clambered toward the lake to retrieve a blue pot and thought that the local newspaper of the small town Onkwendo could use the headline “Mother of Two Drowns, Apparent Suicide,” I was drawn in. Insert admission here that I laughed at this sentence when I probably should have shaken my head or felt sad for this character. Yet this exact sentence was when I knew the book was for me.

Why?

The main character, Barb, doesn’t follow directions well, especially her husband’s, as she is more of a free spirit. And this is particularly frowned upon in Onkwendo. This drives her husband bonkers—and he can’t understand why she can’t just comply with the rules. 

Though Onkwendo is a fictional town, I liken it to Ithaca. (Sorry, Ithaca, nothing personal, and I do enjoy your city very much.) Barb, the main character, is a transplant from NYC, who moves to this town with her husband. He lives by a certain set of rules and believes that’s how others must, because that’s just how it is done. Although he is not physically abusive, she can’t conform to his rules of cookie cutter society—loading the dishwasher a certain way, raising children a certain way, keeping house a certain way, having reached certain goals by a certain time and age in life—it all becomes too much for her, and loading the dishwasher wrong was the final straw not only for her, but their marriage.

Without giving too many spoilers away, through several heart wrenching incidents of losing her children and everyone agreeing (insert judge and the rest of the town because her husband has them eating out of his back pocket) that the kids are safer with their father because he is more stable emotionally, Barb even wonders if she can stay in the same town as him.  But a blue pot floats to shore on the and this is her sign.

Barb lives in a hotel room for a bit, also not following the rules (ahem, using hot plates to cook dinner) and for some reason, I appreciate the boldness of her personality for doing what needs to be done—even if others frown upon it. At this time though, she doesn’t realize that breaking this rule is actually putting into action what will save her in the end.

On a whim, after deciding the blue pot needed more than a hot plate to cook on, (my favorite scene in the book, pg. 15) Barb buys a house. A house that the blue pot led her to (from unseen forces) where she stumbles across something magical while cleaning her daughter’s bedroom. She was told when she bought the house that Nabokov once lived there and that brought days and nights of comfort to her throughout the story.  Even though she was told Nabokov once lived there, nothing prepares her the adventure that finding a few single index cards would lead her to.

I underlined several sentences and passages in Cleaning Nabokov’s House. I laughed and even had to put the book away while in a restaurant because I started to cry, and if I continued reading, I would have been a blubbering mess for all the world to see. (Not that that hasn’t happened before.)

Overall, I give Leslie Daniels Cleaning Nabokov’s House a four out of five stars and truly would recommend this book to everyone, really, but if you are a free spirit and have been asked or told one too many times, “why can’t you just follow the rules?” then this book is not only a must, but a hope for those of us who don’t.