A Book As Impossible to Describe as it is to Put Down

By Meg Miller    |   Friday, December 12, 2014 Off the Shelf This holiday season, consider the shop girl. She’s on her feet all day, circling the floor or standing behind the counter, appeasing indecisive old ladies, harried mothers with screaming children, impatient business men, lecherous supervisors. She’s repeating herself, stocking and restocking, bored, waiting, often temporary. She’s apathetic Therese working at the doll counter for the holidays in The Price of Salt, or lonely Mirabelle in Shopgirl, “selling things that nobody buys anymore.” She’s the hot lingerie sales clerk in Christmas Vacation, getting salivated over by a sweaty, breathless Chevy Chase. In Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl, she’s Ruth, a young American ex-pat living in London and working at a store she calls Horrids (more affectionately known as iconic London department store Harrods) selling a perfume named Desire. She lives with her best friend Agnes, a seductive and obnoxious Australian redhead who dresses like Golden Age movie stars and is always calling things “BIZ-arre.” They go to movies and clubs, groom themselves in front of their mirror, and seek out the attention of men who are generally pretty awful and/or mundane. At one point Ruth dates a Horrids coworkers she calls "holy boy," a genuinely sweet guy who worships her and tells her stories about suffering female mystics, but she grows bored and dumps him, then subsequently quits her job. More