Review: "Wet Paint" by Chloë Ashby

Wet Paint by Chloë Ashby
Published April 2022 via Orion Publishing Group
★★★★

In London, Eve is floundering: working jobs that make her miserable, paying part of her rent by doing all the cleaning in the flat, using a painting as her weekly therapy appointment, and compulsively stealing from the people around her who seem more put-together than she feels. So when her latest job falls flat and she stumbles across an opportunity to work as a life model, she takes it—it can't be more chaotic than the rest of her life, surely? But new experiences can't stop her from spiralling down, down.

This fits into a subgenre of litfic that can perhaps be described as Woman Displaying Less and Less Executive Function as the Book Goes On (there must be a catchier way to phrase that, surely). It's a whole thing, but I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit at the moment—we'll see how long that phase lasts—and Wet Paint fit the bill quite nicely. Because Eve is...well, she's not functioning too well. Grieving and lonely and dissatisfied with her lot in life but also not sure what she really wants, or how to get it. I read the later parts of the book in pretty small chunks, because by then Eve is not just spiralling downward but spending part of her time caring for a young child, and it was not hard to imagine all sorts of ways in which that could go terribly wrong. But...I love that I could be invested in Eve's life, and invested in the life of the friend she's stealing small things from, (and less invested in the lives of her erstwhile flatmates, from whom she also steals small things,) and both want her to find fulfillment or confidence or adventure or something as a life model and want her to get out, get out as soon as she can. A satisfying read.