THE WEAK SPOT

A mysterious young woman moves to a mysterious village to serve as a pharmacist.

One day, an unnamed narrator arrives in an unnamed village to begin her apprenticeship as a pharmacist. It’s a remote village, vaguely European, and though there are a few references to texting and the internet, the time period is likewise vague: In her debut novel, Elven has created a timeless, placeless world like something out of a fairy tale. The narrator spends her days at the pharmacy listening to the stories of the customers who pass in and out. There seems to be something slightly off about her boss, August Malone, and whatever that something is, it grows larger as he runs for mayor. Various people tell the narrator not to trust him or say that he has told them not to trust her. It’s all rather difficult to track. Elven’s voice can be intriguing, even captivating, but sentences don’t always seem to follow from one another: “She talked of ten-year plans,” the narrator says of her colleague, Elsa. “She couldn’t sleep. Her house was spotless.” Then, too, Elven litters the prose with images that startle but don’t always convince: “Twigs stuck up like microphones from the oily mud,” she writes, and then describes “a number of people like walking baguettes.” There is a weightless quality to this story that makes the stakes seem not only low, but inconsequential. Why should readers care about this narrator? Why should we care about August Malone? Elven hints at an answer but doesn’t, in the end, deliver.

Vagaries of setting and plot pile up as this story seems to go nowhere.