With her first novel, Arleen Paré wants to tell you that office life is bleak. It’s monotonous and unfulfilling and you do the same things over and over and … well, you get the idea. This experimental, meta-fictional novella does, to its credit, convey the dull lot of bureaucrat Frances Keegan very well – after some of the more descriptive paragraphs, I needed a drink.

Unfortunately, recreating a world defined by identical offices and grey carpet doesn’t mean reading the story should induce an analogous effect. While the carefully chosen descriptors and samples of poetry do get the point across, Paré’s book suffers because this theme has been covered so much recently, in fiction and elsewhere. The fact that office jargon is silly, that the consumerist cycle keeps us at boring jobs, and that the average drone leads a life of quiet desperation has been noted many times before.

The narrative occasionally lights up like streetlights on a stretch of highway, such as when the focus touches on Frances’s childhood, or her meetings with the ghost of Kafka, or the story-in-a-story where Frances loses parts of her body. They’re told in the same dreamy, sombre style as the main storyline, but are infused with a clarity and humanity that is lacking elsewhere. While Frances seems painfully real, she stands in sharp relief to the other characters – even Kafka. Her officemates seem to be the same character under different names. Her workaholic dad and long-suffering mom fare better, but while they’re drawn in careful, painstaking detail, it’s obvious how their story will end the second they’re introduced.

There’s a compelling read here, buried under a thicket of self-conscious, stylized language. Paré describes a universe to which too many of us can relate, but fails to take advantage of it. Frances is a fascinating and vital character, but as the novel reaches its inevitable conclusion, her story feels only partially told.