The girl doesn’t have a name. Or, rather, she does, but not one we are privy to. We meet her first in the hazy world of childhood memories, as she drifts through and refines her recollections of brief, seemingly insignificant moments. She doodles in class, badly, because she doesn’t want to draw resemblances, only what things are “really like.” She is usually “I,” often “we,” rarely “she,” and even, sometimes, “you.” And she is, finally, the narrator and heroine of Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Checkout 19” (Riverhead), a novel that is deliberate in its construction, down to the individual word, and yet aggressively resistant to definition.

“Checkout 19” is a coming-of-age story in which no one comes of age, a domestic novel with no fixed address, and a depiction of someone who, for good and for ill, both clings to and disowns her life. Dissected and reconstructed, it yields a conventional enough story: that of an intelligent working-class girl, in southwest England, who is encouraged to write by one of her teachers. She goes on to a depressing university in London, and dates men who are poorly suited to her. One, who “liked me being a writer, but didn’t very much like me to write,” destroys a manuscript she’s working on; another reads tiresome biographies about “very eminent men.” In this lacklustre world, our narrator’s closest friend is Dale, a poet, a fellow working-class transplant, and a budding alcoholic. He, too, eventually betrays her.

Bennett, an English writer living in Ireland, seems to draw many of these details from experience. But to place them in order, or to match them to autobiography, is to miss most of what makes “Checkout 19” singular. Bennett is interested not in the shape of a life but in its substance. Her début, “Pond” (2015), was a collection of linked stories about a woman who abandons her academic career, moves to a cottage in Ireland, and putters about, composing odes to tomato purée. Bennett’s narrators are sensualists, exquisitely attuned to taste and to texture, with appetites they prioritize over their own well-being. (In “Checkout 19,” the narrator drinks gin “until it came back up into my mouth . . . as if I really was filled to the brim.”) For them, life is found in sensation: long baths, the sharpness of an orange, underlining their books in jewel-toned inks. They have no clear story to relate to us, but in their strangeness, their sense of ritual, their inability to respond precisely as needed, they draw us in.

It’s this last quality that’s most on display in “Checkout 19,” from the narrator’s musing that the color of her menstrual blood is “very pretty—it’s a shade of red I’ve been looking for in a lipstick since forever” to her saying, to Dale, who has raped her, “Don’t dwell on it, I don’t, I hardly ever think of it—I think it’s OK.” Detached from what should matter and attracted to what should not, she exudes a particular charm. Even her namelessness seems apt. If she had a name—Alice or Janet or Stephanie, say—it would evoke other people we’ve met, whether in life or in literature. Because she doesn’t have one, our experience of her is pure.

But unfiltered experience is hostile to expression. Like our doodling protagonist, we are stuck with the problem that representation remains representation, no matter how much closer we think we’ve got to the heart of a thing. Even the vivid colors of abstraction are choices. There is no way to cut to the real, no way to show us a beloved teacher or a long-ago friend without choosing what aspects made them who they were, summed them up, and—in the emotional sense—named them.

Of the many containers into which we fit the stuff of life, “Checkout 19” concerns itself with two: the book and the home. Bennett’s women have an anarchic, almost feral domesticity; their abodes are full of moldy cups of tea. But these are not places of neglect. The objects inside them are fastidiously observed—treated, in fact, as subjects, exerting their own will and agency. “Things hold life in place,” the narrator tells us. She goes on to describe some memories from childhood: “Party dresses with smooth sashes. And oxblood loafers and argyle socks and a rosebud pitcher and bowl and croissants on Sundays . . . ”

Yet even as she tells us about these things she lets slip that she is always losing them; and the life the things were meant to hold in place has been lost, too, “wrapped up in newspaper and put into separate boxes.” Much is invested in robes, a silver lamé skirt, eggplants “tightly sheathed in a shining bulletproof darkness.” Still, like a spider that builds its dwelling between a chair and a wall, our protagonist has a relationship to these items that is not one of confident ownership. Things are necessary, totemic. But she is not their master, never at home.

Homes recur constantly in “Checkout 19,” whether in idiom (things are often described as being “at home”), metaphor (“the dark, where sleep has its house”), or in their literal and solid form. Bennett knows that, for most of us, these are structures to which we adapt, not places we build from the ground up. We ditch the furniture we thought we’d have for years; if we rent, we are going to find nails in the wall, small installed improvements. We are always to some degree interlopers, harnessing somebody else’s designs for our purposes. (One of the stories in “Pond,” for instance, is dedicated to the knobs on the cottage’s stove, which are breaking and impossible to replace.) To be at home is also to be dislocated, in between.