The Maid

By Nita Prose, Ballantine Books, 2022, 304 pages
Reviewd by Ted Streuli, March 17, 2022

You must meet Molly.

Molly Gray, 25, is a maid at the Regency Grand Hotel, where she goes about restoring rooms to a state of perfection with the grace and ethic to which we wish our employees and high-schoolers would aspire.

During one unfortunate shift, Molly discovers Charles Black, a frequent guest in one of the Regency Grand’s suites who is always accompanied by the second Mrs. Black, dead in his room. That sets up the locked-door, Agatha-Christie-sort of mystery Molly the maid finds herself embroiled in, but neither the whodunit nor the howdunit matters one whit; the mystery — clever enough — is merely the vehicle that lets us fall in love with Molly.

Quirky, naïve, guileless, obsessive, awkward, probably on-the-spectrum Molly tries to hold on after the death of Gran, who raised her, and whose guidance continues to influence Molly’s decisions. The brilliance of this story is the way Prose leads us from feeling sorry for Molly to understanding her and, ultimately, adoring her.

Molly has a lot to teach us. She embraces the hotel manager’s motivational speeches with gusto,

knowing that every job at the Regency Grand is important, that everyone has a part to play that’s crucial to success. Molly makes us understand how much pride one can feel about a perfectly made room and the dignity she finds in a job most of us would deride.

Her humble station and modest accommodations, although she’s aware they’re not regal, are cared for as though they were the presidential suite. If you don’t believe that work is its own reward, you will by the time Molly’s done with you.

But her lessons go well beyond pride and work ethic. Molly teaches us a lot about trust, honesty and, most importantly love. And she reminds us just how apt we are to judge that book by its cover and how much we miss when we do.

Consider how tidily she explains friendship: Isn’t that what friends are for? To help each other out of binds?

And as she says later in the book: For the first time in my life, I think I understand what a true friend is. It isn’t just someone who likes you; it’s someone willing to take action on your behalf.

Prose uses Molly to do that over and over, to state bluntly and clearly a truth that makes you wonder how you could have lived to be this old without ever seeing it that way.

Read how, in two sentences, she captures the nature of agony:

That’s the trouble with pain. It’s as contagious as a disease. It spreads from the person who first

endured it to those who love them most.

If you’ve lost a parent or two early enough, as Molly did, you know they talk to you every day:

They believe I can do this. If Gran were here, she’d say, “See, Molly? You can do it if you put your mind to it.”

And you know that a lot of your decisions are made to please them, to somehow show them that you turned out to be the person they believed you could be, that in the end, you didn’t let them down. If you’re in that group, you understand more deeply an extra level of what makes Molly tick, and you appreciate more fully what it means to her when the erstwhile Regency Grand doorman, Mr. Preston, gives her a bit of validation.

I’m about to step out of the taxi when Mr. Preston puts a hand on my arm. “Molly, your gran would be proud of you.” The mention of her makes my emotions bubble up, but I will them back down. “Thank you, Mr. Preston,” I manage before slipping out the door.

Molly, a character so vulnerable you want to wrap her in a blanket and drag her home for Thanksgiving, teaches us a bit about keeping our chins up, too: Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

I might get that tattooed on my forearm so I can refer to it as needed.

“The Maid” is the aptly named Nina Prose’s first novel, but if you look her up you might fall in love with her too. She started in the publishing business as an intern, “photocopying edited manuscripts and secretly snooping the fascinating margin conversations between editors and writers.”

She’s now the vice president and editorial director at Simon & Schuster in Toronto, and says this about herself: “I love books the way Lennie in Of Mice and Men loved his pet mouse. For this reason, I don’t advise you ever to lend me your prized first folio edition of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies as I may return it dog-eared and enhanced with a shabby chic patina of Scotch tape.”

Too bad she’s been editing all these years. They should have let her write.

What more can we ask of a novel than to reveal what we know, to teach us what we don’t, to entertain us as it does, and to introduce us to an unlikely, beguiling heroine we cry over and root for? Not much, in my view, and when a debut novel does all of it, you should probably buy it immediately.