Myths and Mazola
Writers & Writing By Daphne Merkin
“Consider the thin, crackly, wrapping paper skin of the onion, as I did this morning while cleaning out the refrigerator. It’s like any explanation I can offer him – totally superfluous. He’ll only hear that word, way down the end of any sentence. Orgy.” So begins Cleaning House (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 156 pp., $10.95), a haunting and original first novel by Nancy Hayfield. The narrator, Linda, is the sort of mad housewife we have been reading about in fiction by women for the past decade, a sufferer of low-key derangement who expresses herself in small domestic violations: leaving chickens to rot on refrigerator
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