As soon as Martha Grover opened her new book, The End of My Career, with a story about cleaning, I knew we were on the same page. People make fun of me for liking David Sedaris, but at least he understands how to clean a hardwood floor. Grover does too, as a seasoned custodian. “Cleaning Jack’s House” breaks open an observational mystery about the home of a “total bachelor slob.” She finds the “truly messy” home breathtaking: “A thing of wonder,” she writes fondly, “you so rarely see it. Messy people don’t host dinner parties.”
The first short story in a collection is always a clue about what’s coming next. In this case, Grover sets herself up as the non-judgmental observer of a client who, she gradually begins to discover, is not messy out of laziness but an illness from which he is recovering. This echoes Grover’s own situation—she has idiopathic Cushing’s disease.
