An appreciation of the great Wellington novelist
In a short story called "This is Better", from Pip Adam’s collection Everything We Hoped For, Lloyd works at his parents’ Dollar Ninety-Five Store. He spends his days unpacking boxes and cleaning shelves. At night he lies awake in the dark, “counting my teeth with my tongue and stroking the nail of my pointer finger with the pad of my thumb trying to catch my body working; exploring the machine of it, trying to be surprised”. Everything We Hoped For was published in 2010 and won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. Since then Adam has published four novels – I'm Working on a Building (2013), The New Animals (2017), which won the 2018 Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, Nothing to See (2020), and now her latest book, Audition (reviewed by Sarah Laing). Adam’s project across all of these books feels much like Lloyd’s; with each book she presses down further into the world to see if she can catch it working. What is this place? she asks. What are buildings? What are bodies? What are humans?
The stories in Everything We Hoped For begin with the birth of a baby and end with a toddler pushing a little wooden trolley through her small world. In between, people work, drink, apologise, go to parties, imagine things great and terrible. She writes in a style Carl Shuker has described as so “spare and hypersimplified” that reading her work “makes you ask the question: wait, can you write like this? Can you just say that? Is this...prose? So unadorned, so breathtakingly literal. And then you realise it’s not you that’s asking these questions, it’s Pip herself."
Adam’s first novel, I’m Working on a Building, unfolds backwards. The narrative opens on the West Coast, where Catherine, an engineer, has joined a project to build a replica of Dubai’s Burj al Khalifa. From there we move back in time through her working life, through a catastrophic earthquake, through divorce, to marriage, then all the way back to childhood. Readers must assemble the plot with each chapter, re-evaluating what we know with each new piece of information, building the story in our own heads. We do this while reading descriptions of concrete and steel which make the structures we spend our lives in feel entirely new and strange. Mid-way through the novel Catherine looks up at a building she has just finished seismic retrofitting: “They’d done an amazing thing. They’d broken it and held it and fixed it again so that it could be different." Catherine could be describing Adam’s own process; she breaks things apart to look at them more clearly, and then she puts them back together to see what might happen. It is impossible, reading I’m Working on a Building, to not feel the presence of the author moving things around, asking herself does this work?
Adam’s second novel, The New Animals, is built from parts so entirely distinct that for some readers the book shifts from one genre to another. The first section follows Carla, a hairdresser contracted to the clothing label of three young moneyed men to cut hair for a hastily arranged fashion shoot. The stakes feel very high—there is not enough time to prepare, the clothing samples haven’t yet arrived, the aesthetic is not quite there. Adam has said that she wrote this part of the novel so she could write what follows it, but that doesn’t mean that this first section isn’t rich with particularities of place and scene and character. At the end of the first section we leave Carla catching a taxi home from the workroom. We do not yet know that the event toward which the novel has thus far been propelled will not be shown to us. Instead, Adam gives us Elodie, a make-up artist for the shoot, a minor character, who walks out of the workroom and takes the narrative with her. She walks to the sea, gets into the water, and does not come out again. The effect of this change in narrative direction is, as Philip Mathews has written, genuinely shocking. It is an experience of the ground falling away beneath the reader, an experience repeated several times in Adam’s next novel, Nothing to See.
People in her novels work as pattern makers, make-up artists, engineers, architects, soldiers, sex workers, real estate agents, content moderators, coders
Told in three parts, Nothing to See opens with two young women “just learning how to spend time” after coming out of rehab. Like many of the characters in Everything We Hoped For, Peggy and Greta are only just holding on to the world, a world which would prefer not to see them for a variety of reasons not least the fact that Peggy and Greta were once one person. Eighteen months earlier, in the small hours of a stormy night, “a handful of women, among four avenues, who’d been very drunk and blacked out and probably split inside themselves – conflicted, broken – split into two identical women." Twelve years later Greta and Peggy become Margaret again. And twelve years after that they split again. Each time it feels like Elodie walking into the sea. Each time I drew breath at such wild daring, at the feeling that I was watching a curious mind testing the limits of what might be possible. Adam’s work is propelled by questions that are both writerly and ontological. Can I tell a story backwards? she asks. Can I change genre halfway through a book? Can I promise to show a reader something and then walk away? Can I ask a reader to look at things they might not want to? And, quieter, a whisper underneath each narrative: What are we? What is this place? What if we were different?
The worlds Adam builds in each of her books are simulacrums of the real; people eat and sleep and get dressed and, most particularly, they work. They cut hair, clean shelves, sit in office cubicles on a Saturday night talking to tech support. They work as pattern makers, make-up artists, engineers, architects, soldiers, sex workers, real estate agents, content moderators, coders. One of the certainties that Adam builds into her worlds is that for most people the rent is due, and for most people there is no money without work. The reality of that work—who does what work and for whom, who is called in to the manager’s office, who must watch people half their age with twice the power making bad decisions—is political. If Adam’s books are about work then they are necessarily also about class and gender and bodies and economics. In The New Animals Sharona holds up a t-shirt for six pages while Tommy and Cal and Kurt stand around and look at it. “Sharona’s arms were getting tired. She sank into the pain of them. Let that become the new normal. That was the problem, she thought to herself. Everything becomes bearable. Eventually."
In an episode of her podcast Better Off Read, Adam explains that she is angry all of the time. The world is unjust. Reading her books in succession I saw how clearly her writing lays bare the workings of this unjust world. She writes about the differences between people—about those who have and those who do not—again and again. In "Ghost Story", a recent story in The White Review, human beings cannot stop growing bigger. But this condition does not affect everyone equally: “All the people that were getting bigger were normal people. None of the rich or powerful people were getting taller. None of them.”
Adam collects up the small facts of our lives in order to reveal the ridiculousness of the world we all live in
Things are not like other things in Adam’s books. Her worlds are built from the hard facts of things; their weight, form, structure. Exactly how much money tom yum costs. What happens to skin after being in water a long time. What it sounds like to slice through a column holding up a building. There is no detail too small to be worthy of description, and no detail too small to be without consequence. Daisy, the toddler of the last story in Everything We Hoped For, drops pumpkin on the rented carpet, a fact which will ripple into the life of her parents—landlords and carpet cleaner and bond and stress.
Adam collects up the small facts of our lives in order to reveal the ridiculousness of the world we all live in. In "This is Better", a mystery shopper comes into the Dollar Ninety Five Store on the last Wednesday of every month and asks how much a set of three plastic boats are. $1.95, Lloyd replies. The man then asks how much the glass orbs are: also $1.95. The coffee mugs? $1.95. “Everything in this store is $1.95”. Month after month Lloyd must play his part in this play. The scene is narrated with a deadpan humour which runs through all of Adam’s work; Catherine’s father trades “other people’s money for the possibility of more money”, an office worker sits in his cubicle and “while the others went to a health and safety meeting he googled: bleeding anus.” Nothing actually makes sense, Adam is reminding us, we are just used to it. It is as if she is commanding her readers to look. The effect is more uncanny than didactic, the everyday made strange on every page: what is ordinary about animals in a truck, waiting to be eaten? Should we keep potatoes in the fridge? How often do people wash their clothes? Will my body change if I stay in the water for ever?
Adam often explains that she is “all about the body”—“the body in motion, the body at work”. Reading Adam’s work produces a visceral sense of humans as bodies in space, constrained and affected by the material worlds they live in, worlds that press up against them and flow into them. In I’m Working on a Building the seismic retrofitting of the university library produces almost imperceptible vibrations which feel like an illness to the students studying in the library. The vibrations “came out of the students’ pores because that’s what waves do, keep travelling”. Noise is material; it has force. When the earthquake comes, the event at the centre of the novel, it arrives as the sound of tectonic plates pushing against each other and rupturing.
In Nothing to See the body is a problem. Peggy and Greta try to make themselves look smaller: “All they ever wanted was to be smaller. Smaller in the body. Smaller in the world. They wanted to take up less space.” Adam reverses this idea in "Ghost Story"; if ordinary people cannot stop growing they will take up more and more space until … what? Perhaps that is the haunting of the title, real live bodies haunting a world determined to deny much of the population with the things a body needs to live—food, shelter, care. A world where people can no longer fit inside buildings is perhaps very similar to the world we already inhabit, where some people are invited inside and others are not.
In ‘When You’re Sick’, from Everything We Hoped For (published seven years before Elodie walks into the sea in The New Animals), a woman imagines herself underwater, "sleeping on a bed of bull kelp. Everything was exactly the right temperature. When she moved her arm, or her head, or pushed her hair behind her ears, the whole ocean – all of it – moved to adjust things so she stayed completely comfortable; every part of her supported and held by the perfectly temperate waters."
What an extraordinary dream, to be a body comfortable in the world it inhabits. Adam has explained that she is “obsessed with how external factors can change our bodies (sunburn, hair-loss, freckles, the way sucking your thumb can change the shape of your jaw) and the idea that these external factors change our bodies into new animals really appealed”. In the first section of The New Animals it is Sharona and Carla who are changing; getting older, needing glasses. “It was like she was growing into some new, strange species”. The second section of the novel takes this idea and runs away with it. When Elodie walks into the sea she sets off a process of change; the further she swims the closer she gets to becoming something new. This aquatic Elodie is “residually hairless, descended larynx-ed, encephalised – her fingers were wrinkling right now. She was of the water.” The material world is changing Elodie, recreating her. Her ears get sharper, her eyes get weaker, something dormant starts to come alive again, all her senses shifting gear to respond to the new material she lives in so that when she encounters an octopus she feels it coming before she sees it. The body, in Adam’s work, is unstable, indeterminate. The edges of bodies and things blur into each other. People grow bigger and bigger, or split into two—the corporeal self is not singular.
While I was writing this essay I waited for my thoughts about Adam’s work to cohere into something which made sense. Philip Mathews has written that The New Animals “has an uncanny topicality. It was not reacting to events, but somehow anticipating them, as though Adam had plugged into some deeper field of knowledge.” I felt this deeper field of knowledge just beyond my reach. I made lists of clues: a replica of the Burj al Khalifa, a single self, made into two. A ferocious dog, the endless sea, a terrible earthquake. Margaret, in Nothing to See, is also looking for clues. She writes everything down in a notebook; all the messages she receives from a mysterious Tamagotchi phone she finds under the bed, all the things that appeared from nowhere just when they were needed—the grater, the liquorice, the exact change. As the notebook fills up she resolves that everything points in the same direction; that nothing is real, and that Peggy and Greta’s existence was nothing but a glitch in the matrix. When Margaret divides, once more, into Peggy and Greta, no one in the room notices. “It was like all that had happened was someone had sneezed. A function had run over the top, making it all normal again – settling it all into place. New task: now she is two.”
Life in the simulation has perhaps something in common with reading and writing fiction. Maybe I am Margaret, keeping notebooks of uncanny clues while Adam runs code telling me to do just that. There is, of course, nothing strange about an author leaving clues for her reader, breadcrumbs from which to build a story in our own heads. And yet there is something about reading Adam’s work which invites us to go a step beyond the usual acts of collaborative world-building that happen when we read fiction. Adam’s books are full of disappearances. The New Animals circles Carla’s disappearance again and again: where did she go? Why is her body different now? What does she know? In Everything We Hoped For Lyall leaves and returns, days and nights disappear for Lucy in black-outs. The world is full of hidden, invisible things: “The air was thick with microscopic things: the measles virus, encephalitis, tuberculosis”. The world is full of things people do not want to see. Describing the origins of Nothing to See, Adam has written that she began by thinking “about the things we wilfully ignore in order to be able to keep going as ‘normal’”.
There is something about Adam’s work that reminds me of Laura Jean McKay...Both writers seem to be chasing the idea that there is something (a virus, a glitch in the matrix) that will make us see things as they really are
This line of thinking can be found all through her work. In the story "A Lightness", a man sits in a comfortable chair and thinks over everything he has killed or been complicit in killing: "Small winged insects he’d injured mortally going about his everyday business. A few he’d slapped on his arms and legs while at the beach or picnics. Larger flies and cockroaches patrolling the higher surfaces for crumbs and flakes. Then birds, sitting on the sills and bookcases, caught under his car or flung against the windows of his house. A house that would not have been there if it wasn’t for him. Poisoned mice, rats and possums shuffled and fought with each other both in his sight and under things so he could only hear them. Family pets – put down, run over, crawled away to die – now wiped themselves on his legs and purred. And the food ones, lambs, cows, chickens, the monkey he’d eaten in Thailand, the horse he’d eaten in France, some of the cats he didn’t altogether recognise. Pot plants left to flounder. Then, more abstractly, rabbits from Draize tests. Silkworms. The long extinct and almost extinct because of the constant tramp forward of the human race."
There is something about Adam’s work that reminds me of Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country, where the effects of a zoonotic virus allow humans to understand animals. Both writers seem to be chasing the idea that there is something (a virus, a woman walking into the sea, a glitch in the matrix) that will make us see things as they really are, that will finally make humans reckon with where we find ourselves, right at the very end of the world.
In Nothing to See the world is revealed to be artifice, productions of the mind, or a mind. “Does that tree look the same as that other tree? Are they running out of tree designs?” Margaret asks in the final section of the novel. Anna Smaill has written that The New Animals “is willing to leap into the surreal in order to capture the weird violence and strangeness of being alive in this post-colonial island nation in the twenty-first century”. The same could be said of all Adam’s books, where the surreal is a feeling of the ground giving way, the recognisable world tilting slightly. For Adam, this approach is ‘hyperrealist’—this is what real life feels like: “Sometimes like you’re splitting in two, sometimes one, sometimes turning into a sea monster”. The idea that Elodie can swim to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and make a new life after the end of the world, or that Greta and Peggy are proof of the existence of a grand narrative called The Simulation, are thinkable precisely because our endless neoliberal present, our late-capitalist-end-of-the-world-existence, our Covid-19-climate-change-world is a madness.
Margaret, in Nothing to See: "The atmosphere was full of carbon and the sea was full of plastic. Everything was where it shouldn’t be. Whales had stomachs full of rice sacks and snack bags and tangles of nylon rope. There were orca in the harbour. When they tried to swim in the sea it was salp-thick. Everything was possible – it was infinitely replayable."
Smaill has noted that there is little mercy in Adam’s work. She does not let her readers hold on to the idea that possibility might mean hope. Even in the simulation things itch and snag and cause pain. “Everything was fake but it was all they had. If there was no food, they would starve. They’d lived on the streets in this world, been beaten within an inch of their lives. There was no peace in knowing it was manufactured.” Perhaps, though, there is some small hope to be found by tracing the seams of the world. There is in fact something to see, if only we cared to look: it is the world itself, pointing away from its own entrails…look over there! Adam’s work advances from two positions; that there is something to be found inside the everyday—in the relentless grind of work, in the peculiarity of bodies, in what we call ordinary people’s ordinary lives—and that anything is possible.
What if we were surrounded by water instead of air? What if our lives began as lines of code instead of a heartbeat, instead of a breath? Being immersed in Adam’s worlds has made me realise that it takes nothing less than reimagining the very substance of the material world we inhabit to break what feels unbreakable—economic and social systems inside our very bodies. But if those very bodies are not as distinct as we believe, if they are more mutable, more blurry at the edges, more intertwined with the material world than we like to think, perhaps the scope of what’s possible is bigger than we imagine.
Of course, it’s hard to keep looking. She has to be very careful, Adam explains to Kirsten McDougall: “I can get really frightened.” Often while reading Adam’s work I have wanted to stop. Please, I think, it’s so cold, let’s get out of the water, let’s let the dog live, let’s look away from it all for just a minute. But even as I think these thoughts I know there is no relief to be found by shutting the book. Although there are many ways to read Adam’s work; as satire, or speculative fiction, or high realism, I am attached to the idea of it as experiment, as philosophy, as video game. The game doesn’t stop just because you stop reading.
What each of Adam’s books reveal about their author is a sensibility acutely attuned to our ability to look away, to commit to the game so successfully that to draw attention to the seams feels like cutting through the fabric of the world with a knife. Adam’s books make such cuts feel easy; all you have to do to reveal the random strangeness of being human is to think about the blood inside your body, let yourself smell the animals in the trucks, or, yes, feel each of your teeth with your tongue like Lloyd. What do Adam’s humans need to survive? They need to know that the hills are bigger than them, as Greta and Peggy learn in AA. But they also need money. Food. Shelter. Care. Adam’s humans are damaged by the world we all live in, each one of them caught in the relentless routine of getting from one end of the day to the other in a world which decides who gets to live, and what sort of life. They are lonely or drunk or bored or tired of the whole goddamn thing. There is a refrain in Adam’s work of women having fucked up, and sometimes feeling sorry but often just feeling tired. Because the rules are written against them. Because it’s impossible to just be, let alone be with any kind of integrity, and perhaps the only way to push back against it all is to just lay down and get high.
Still, often the people in Adam’s worlds are trying to do better. Trying to be better friends, trying to see things more clearly, trying to find a way of being a body in the world among others that feels okay. In the story "A Bad Word" a woman passes a note to a friend which explains that it was her who stole the money, but she is clean now and she is sorry: “I say, ‘It’s all in the note,’ and I’m sorry again and the money’s in the envelope, I adjusted it for inflation. I’m trying to do better and sorry and happy birthday.” Real life is work. Friendships are hard!
All Adam’s books are in part about learning how to live—sober, older, with other people and alone
But there are small moments of magic, like when Greta and Peggy go to the Botanical Gardens and the light shifts and everything looks different. Their sponsor, Diane, makes a speech which is as good a manifesto for being alive as I can find: "Terrible things happen. Not as part of any plan. There’s no reason for terrible things to happen, but every now and then there’s the tiniest bit of grace that gets us through. No one’s more deserving and no one’s less deserving, and we can’t make ourselves more deserving or less deserving. It’s not that kind of thing. All we can do is make ourselves available to that grace. If we get too caught up in ourselves, in what should happen to us, or what we deserve, we might miss it. The grace – it’s quiet. And if we miss it, life is much harder to get through."
All Adam’s books are in part about learning how to live—sober, older, with other people and alone. What are humans? We are each of us a mind in a body roaming through a world that feels real, that constrains and produces us. Margaret knows that “their lives meant nothing, and they could disappear in a heartbeat”, and, yet, there is still the possibility of grace, still the possibility that meaning can be found in the drudgery of work—in how the treatment of the occipital bone might shift a haircut from last time it was in fashion to the next beautiful thing, or how a building becomes something from nothing, bit by bit. There is still the possibility that we may find something in the relationship between ourselves and others. The messages from the Tamagotchi phone reveal something of what most of us want to know of other humans: Are you awake? Can you hear me?
When Daisy, the small child in the final story of Everything we Hoped For, first learns to push her wooden trolley it keeps getting stuck, and has to be lifted up and repositioned so there is once more a clear run ahead. The idea that there might sometimes be a clear run ahead? That’s enough for me. It may be a very small mercy but it feels nonetheless powerful: keep going, keep pushing the trolley, keep swimming through the ocean, keep trying to be better, or different, or just awake enough to survive everything the world will throw at you so that your eyes are as wide as possible to see what happens next. Audition (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35), the latest novel by Pip Adam, given a rave review by Sarah Laing, is available in bookstores nationwide.
