PICK A COLOR

A day in the life of a weary, and wary, nail-salon manager in an unspecified North American city, whose past struggles inform her insights about her staff and clients.

At this shop, each nail tech’s badge reads Susan—although their real names include Noi, Annie, and Mai. They all wear their straight black hair at shoulder length, and the 41-year-old manager, Ning, wields scissors if necessary to make her employees almost indistinguishable. “Faces give so much away,” she says at the beginning. “Feelings, especially.” Ning, who during the day is also known as Susan, was once a competitive fighter with a hard-driving coach, Murch. Her lessons about shadowboxing helped her parry endless verbal jabs from her first salon boss, Rachel. Rachel and her brother Raymond extract a great deal of labor and wages from their employees. Ning’s current near-monastic existence outside of work—she lives in a tiny one-room apartment over the salon—is indisputably a reaction to that trauma, even as she glosses over her loneliness and trades jokes with her colleagues: “How many does she seat?” Ning deadpans in their shared language about a woman named Vanessa who asks to be called Van, and all the Susans laugh discreetly, accustomed to pretending they’re not gossiping about the customers. Ning tells stories about clients who include a pro baseball player, a youthful bridal party, and a brittle businesswoman, but in the style of Rachel Cusk, this narrator’s observations tell us even more about her own history, longings, and loneliness. Chapters pass with the rhythm of a broom sweeping the floor, punctuated by the twice-repeated instruction to “pick a color” that greets each person who walks through the door. Suddenly Ning’s keen observations make sense, her way of ensuring she doesn’t succumb to the numb hypnosis of her repetitive and undercompensated work.

This exceptional novel, honed sharp as cuticle nippers, contains great wit and quick turns, up to the last sentence.