The Cleaner: A Novel

by Brandi Wells

Overview

“So inappropriately fun to read.” –Booklist, starred review

“Welcome to the office building at night, an eerie ship helmed by one woman desperate for connection.” —Julia Fine, author of Maddalena and the Dark

Every night, she cleans. On the fourth floor of an unnamed office in an unnamed city, the night cleaner comes and does what she does best—sorts out the messes of the daytime employees. None of them know her, but she knows everything about them: Sad Intern’s dreams to get promoted, Résumé Woman’s nasty flight-risk behavior, Mr. Buff’s secret smoking habit (not very conducive to his fitness journey).

She’s the office mastermind, the one everyone needs, and no one even knows she exists. And tonight, while scrolling through your emails, she’ll discover the secret you’ve been hiding—the one that will put everyone’s job at risk.

After all, protecting the employees is her responsibility: whether it’s from rats and window smudges or from the sinister CEO who may be driving the company into ruin. And you’re about to find out that, sometimes, your most powerful enemy is the one you don’t even see.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781335018106
Publisher:	Hanover Square Press
Publication date:	01/30/2024
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

BRANDI WELLS is the author of a novella, This Boring Apocalypse (Civil Coping Mechanisms), and a chapbook of stories, Please Don’t Be Upset (Tiny Hardcore Press). A native of Georgia, they teach creative writing at California State University, Fullerton.

Editorial Reviews

"Sly and satirical...Rarely has cubicle culture been depicted in such griminess or with such glee." –Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“Darkly humorous and sharply observed satire…Wells has brilliantly crafted an obnoxiously opinionated, delusional, yet sympathetic raconteur, tightly holding the reader's attention while exposing existential dread gleaned from petty human drama. And it's so inappropriately fun to read.” –Booklist, STARRED review

"A suspenseful... examination of one woman’s delusion. This gripping, sometimes shocking novel relies on quiet twists to keep the reader guessing."–Kirkus Reviews

"What total delight it is to roam this (almost) empty building with Brandi Wells’ cleaner who is always peering (and neatening) the surfaces of people’s lives and finding so much depth in there to mess with. Here’s a new and key addition to office fiction and a thrilling novel debut by a propulsive voice."
–Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Is it just office trash or the ephemera of a life? Bursting from the cleaning closet of meditative workplace novels like Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine, Wells masterfully invites the reader into the beating heart of a workplace, uncovering secrets, fantasies, and sorrows with every cleaned cubicle and vacuumed hallway. An unflinchingly honest and often fanciful mediation on people through the lens of an invisible worker who clocks in after five.”
—Sequoia Nagamatsu, bestselling author of How High We Go in the Dark

"A richly crafted delusion of a novel. I couldn’t put it down — one hell of a book!"
–Sarah Rose Etter, author of Ripe


“Brandi Wells’s The Cleaner is a sharp and toothy portrait of a life devoted to the convenience of others. Told through the perspective of an acerbic and lovingly conniving night-shift cleaner, this novel skillfully satirizes the workplace novel, offering cutting insights on the hypocrisy and empty ambitions of grind culture, where friendship takes the form of alliance and love seems an impossible task. Wells’s narrator embodies that most confounding human contradiction: the desire for closeness, the impulse to push it away.”
–Isle McElroy, author of People Collide


“The Cleaner is a fantastic office novel, a keen evocation of our deep desire for dignity in the workplace and for recognition of a job well done. It’s also a smart thriller about what the essential workers you choose not to see might right now be thinking about you—and a sharp reminder that you ignore the people upon whom your good life depends at your own peril.”
—Matt Bell, author of Appleseed



"Brandi Wells has created a biting, witty, pitch-perfect novel about one woman’s desire to connect with her office co-workers—the only problem is, she cleans the office during the night and they work during the day. The Cleaner is funny, slyly moving, and totally weirdly wonderful, and Brandi Wells is a gloriously bold writer. I adored it." –Annie Hartnett, author of Unlikely Animals

“Welcome to the office building at night, an eerie and yet totally mundane ship helmed by one woman desperate for connection and valiantly, perhaps delusionally, striving for meaning in her work. Brandi Wells‘ The Cleaner is laugh out loud funny, but its project of validating unseen labor is totally serious. This is a book that celebrates humanity, even while tearing down the corporate culture that denies it in the drollest and wittiest of ways.”
–Julia Fine, author of Maddalena and the Dark

"Suspenseful, obsessive, and scalpel-sharp, The Cleaner is an ultra-vivid and profound parable of contemporary work life imbued with the soft blue glow of a middle manager’s computer screen at night. In other words, Wells brilliantly documents all the ways we make each other feel small and unseen at the workplace (and the tactics we may use to dismantle these hierarchies) in this electrifying, singular debut."
–Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace


"There are people who pass unnoticed, but who nevertheless quietly shape the worlds that others occupy. The Cleaner is about one such person, about someone who, secretly, without being noticed, subtly tugs on the strings that remain unseen to so many others, changing lives that even after the fact often don't know who or what has changed them. The Cleaner is a clever portrait that scrapes away the slick veneer of the everyday to reveal the rough grain of the wood beneath."
–Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

From the Publisher

2023-12-06
An unnamed cleaner cares for an office building and the people who work there in this quiet thriller.

The woman comes to the office every night, diligently cleaning four floors under the unofficial supervision of L., the security guard. As she works, she develops elaborate personas for the people whose desks she cleans: Yarn Guy is a mild-mannered knitter who leaves his projects in his drawers, Sad Intern is a frazzled young woman struggling to make herself noticed, and Mr. Buff is most concerned with working out. In her way, the cleaner tries to help them, sometimes by invading their privacy; when she finds cigarettes in Mr. Buff’s desk, she douses them with cleaning solution before putting them back. She sees her role as a shepherd, all-knowing because of her access to their desks and eager to help ensure the employees of the company are at their best. She reads their emails and tries to drum up relationships by putting one person’s belongings on another’s desk. She also steals, re-creating elements of the office in her own apartment. But when her spying reveals that the CEO is having numerous affairs, she begins to fear his indiscretion could threaten the well-being of the company, and she takes things into her own hands to save it. Reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh’s work in its excavations of a troubled woman’s descent into more and more uncomfortable behavior, this novel is a suspenseful, though slow-paced, examination of one woman’s delusion.

This gripping, sometimes shocking novel relies on quiet twists to keep the reader guessing.

Kirkus Reviews