Normal Women is a novel about a depressed and unfulfilled new mother who seeks meaning in sex work that is spiritually designed to heal wounded men and restore their “crucial feminine”. It’s an outlandish and laughable premise, and that’s before you get to a possible murder – our protagonist, Dani, investigates the disappearance of Renata, the brothel owner. Ainslie Hogarth’s previous novel, Motherthing, was a mashup of horror and humour about a woman being haunted by the ghost of her mother-in-law, so the tone and subject matter of this new work perhaps come as no surprise.
It seems to be set in the present day, but there’s a Black Mirror-esque dystopian filter, alongside the kind of cynical, alienated account of female experience so common in recent North American fiction (Hogarth is Canadian; the action takes place in a fictional town that could be either there or in the US). Like many of her fellow heroines, Dani is what critic Jess Bergman in 2020 described as a “remote avatar of contemporary malaise”, bored with marriage and motherhood but with seemingly no real drive to do anything about it other than offer critique. But then potential liberation arrives when she discovers The Temple, a brothel-cum-yoga studio that has managed to escape the attention of the authorities by classifying itself as a religious organisation.
