Reading Eugene Marten’s Waste (Ellipsis Press) is like reading the margins of Then We Came to the End, or inspecting the after dark corners of the corporate office building where Waste’s cleaning crew protagonist Sloper works. Everything in his life is waste, from how he makes his living to how he stays alive, retrieving thrown away food once the office workers are gone for the night. His world is dirty and dusty, and “Sloper had heard that dust was nothing but dead skin,” everything made of and coated in waste.

But from his minimal sustenance to the wheelchair-bound paralytic he admires because she “speaks” only with efficient yes or no electronic beeps, Waste is a story of life stripped to its essentials, without artifice or civilizing veneers. Sloper’s world is free of excess and far from the careful layers of image and distraction surrounding him in the office building where he works. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t a romantic story of the underclasses, but Waste is as honest and direct and disturbing a novel as its protagonist is a character, revealing the lie of those romantic stories as clearly as the lie of downtown buildings and daylight jobs.

I was reminded of Hrabel’s Too Loud A Solitude, with its protagonist responsible for trashing a city’s books, but while Hrabel’s Hantá finds some significance in saving as many words as he can, Sloper (we’re told more than once) isn’t much of a reader — too much artifice to fit in his life, which makes simply reading Waste feel like an accusation of sorts in itself. That blankness of Sloper brought Kosinki’s Being There to mind, only instead of watching characters project their desires and deceptions onto Kosinski’s Chance, Waste seemed to catch me out for doing that projection myself, trying to make Sloper into something more noble than he turns out to be.