The novel is about Reginald “Ox” Lorde, a Black Jamaican American sanitation worker in New York who dreams of becoming a novelist. It is framed as a manifesto-memoir written after everything has collapsed: Ox wants to tell the truth about sanitation work, friendship, labor, ambition, publishing, guilt, and the dreams people are told to abandon. The book wants to be a defense of invisible workers and a satire of literary capitalism, but it is so overstuffed with inspirational speeches, topical scandals, publishing-industry jokes, family trauma and melodramatic reversals that its emotional power is often buried under its own noise.
Ox works for the DSNY, the Department of Sanitation of New York. He loves the job. He and his partner, Claudia Castillo, known as La Reina, drive a collection truck she has named El Elefante Elegante. La Reina is Dominican, fierce, funny, brilliant at reading trash, and one of Ox’s closest friends. She is the “Queen of Mongo,” able to find treasure in discarded bags. For Ox, sanitation work is not humiliating; it is civic, physical, intimate and noble. He sees the city from below, through garbage, routines, elderly neighbors, kids on stoops, gates that need oiling, bags that leak, and mornings that begin before most people wake up.
Ox is also a writer. For years he has been working on a manuscript called Waste, a novel about literal and symbolic waste: garbage, history, slavery, work, dreams, shame, and the lives people discard. He grew up on a farm in Florence, Wisconsin, with religious parents who value work, discipline and God more than literary dreams. His father distrusts writing as impractical and maybe ungodly; his mother loves him but is cautious. His late grandmother Martha and especially his Aunt Abilene were the family members who first encouraged his writing. Aunt Abilene once made herself president of the “Ox Literary Fan Club,” and that memory keeps him going.
