Evan Hughes writes:

The protagonist is Lucinda, the bassist. She has sex with Matthew inside a cubical sculpture at a museum in the opening chapter, before they split up for what they swear will be the last time. Her peculiar new day job is the engine that drives the plot. Lucinda answers the telephone at a contemporary art gallery owned by Falmouth, a friend she briefly dated in college and the creator of the cube. But she isn’t giving out information or selling tickets. Hired for a larky conceptual art project, she is one of a few young women who field calls from anyone who has a grievance. About anything. On payphones across the city, Falmouth’s interns have posted stickers with a phone number beneath the word ‘Complaints?’ The lines at the gallery are blinking red. One frequent caller, who wants to talk only to Lucinda, is an intelligent and enigmatic older man who interests her ‘entirely too much’, his words ‘like a pulse detected in a vast dead carcass’.

(LRB 5 July 2007)

Faber | paperback 224 pp. |ISBN: 9780571235629