Why would you say Vitória is so drawn to them, and more generally, to inhabit what she sees?Īmina Cain: Vitória is drawn to the paintings for that very reason, because she wants to inhabit them, wants to go inside. Jessica Payn: I’d like to start by asking about paintings: Indelicacy is a book compelled by the narrator’s desire to write about them – not with any defined aim not to explain them, but to notice them, and translate their signs into a parallel set of verbal signifiers. The novel explores the opportunities and constraints that her new life brings, meditating on gender and class while also asking questions about aesthetic experience: the subjective meanings of art, the juncture between painting and writing and the expressive power of objects. I spoke with Cain over email in late February, just as Indelicacy was shortlisted for the Rathbones Portfolio Prize. In an undefined past and place, Vitória’s lot changes dramatically when a rich gentleman decides to marry her. Indelicacy is her first novel: a slim, lucidly imagined account of a cleaner who is captivated by the paintings at the art museum where she works, and by the idea of writing about herself looking at them.
Her second, Creature (Dorothy, 2013), was likewise interested in the weirdness of being in the world.
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