Paddy Richardson reviews an extraordinary short story collection, longlisted for the Ockham fiction prize
Emma Neale’s The Pink Jumpsuit is an extraordinary collection of “short fictions and tall truths,” situated within a reality which twists and slides. Imagine if, after being jilted five days before your wedding, you turned the experience into an art piece. Imagine if you displayed your wedding dress as an "interactive canvas", inviting anyone passing by to write a message on it. Imagine wearing the dress to your former fiancee’s wedding. Imagine a future where, without animals, and burdened by our guilt and grief, "we carry hutches, aquariums, terrariums, some filled with sand, rocks, bone; others with genuine pelts." Imagine if the tiny door you find so magically, sweetly installed in a garden wall becomes the stuff of a horror movie.
Neale juggles with our concepts of safety, truth and reality; characters are jolted from what they consider as the certainty of their lives by a replay of reality. In the story "Apples and oranges", Pip tells her brother Nick, that the boy they played with every summer during their childhood is their half-brother, that the violence they experienced that day on the lake was directly linked to that secret. In the story "In confidence", Emma meets Tod, a seemingly chance meeting at a party. Tod tells Emma he comes from Arizona, was raised in University City. Astoundingly they have the city in common; Emma’s family also lived there for a while. Even more astoundingly, they went to the same schools, although at different times; Tod is younger than Emma. It's at this point that the story changes from a light, pleasant meeting of two people at a party into something dark and disturbing. Emma’s father worked in immunology. He was involved in an “experiment involving both sperm donation and research into cloning.” Tod tells Emma his father is Emma’s father- Emma tries to avoid staring, “at the cleft in his chin, which - if I could just show you a photo - was exactly like my father’s.” Emma later discovers that Tod is a scammer; he has swindled trusting people out of thousands of dollars. But, even so, is Tod her brother? This story not only twists truth for the story’s characters but for the reader. The main character has the writer’s own name. We know the writer also lived with her family in the California.
Neale coaxes us to share fantasies with the characters of her stories. In "Party Games" [published first in ReadingRoom], Jillian holds a birthday party for her son, Bevan, which evolves into the kind of nightmarish event all parents fear; “Jacob bashed Gregory, Gregory bashed Mohammed, Mohammed bashed Manish, Manish biffed Nakale and Turoa.” Jillian snatches their pet guinea pig from certain death, bashing and hysteria run riot. Bevan is hurt. Jillian invents a game of blind-folding then securing the children with duct tape to chairs-there will be a prize! –. She escapes with her son to seek medical help. But is Neil asking us to believe in this narrative as a ‘truth’ or is she asking us to engage with her in the kind of imagine if any suffering adult managing a birthday party comprised of a group of children gone feral may fantasise?
In “Obitchary” the fantasy is revenge. A junior lecturer is bullied by a professor. On the occasion of his death, she writes her own obituary for him, which, through the inexperience of a young sub-editor, is published. “I greet Prof Teasdale’s death with great relief - this Sunday, all welcome! South Hill Cemetery. I’ll be capering on his grave.”
Neale is, of course, a poet and these stories sing with the cleverness and sharpness of carefully-honed language: second-hand wedding gowns hang “in cling-film cauls.” Imagery is rich and vivid: “a man cycled through the rain with an open umbrella held ahead of him, a jousting lance, his unbuttoned, damp surgical gown flapping like newly hatched wings.” We are invited sometimes into the intimacy and emotion within families, at others into meetings with past lovers. There is darkness but also wry, dry humour; we take surprising, surreal, sometimes alarming turns; a budding child pianist who, following an accident, has a finger removed grows two others as a replacement; a little girl is invited to the neighbour’s house to play with her visiting grandchild who places and ties a plastic bag over her head; “I learnt a friend might make you never-come-back from lonely.”
This is an exceptional collection of short and long stories to be paused over, thought about, returned to. I was intrigued, fascinated, totally and utterly engaged, but two, in particular, stay with me. “The Fylga,“ so sad, so dark and disturbing, evocatively and sensitively tells the story of a miscarriage. “The Pink Jumpsuit” tells of the complexities and misunderstandings of a marriage. There are no judgments made which, in a way, adds to the poignancy of the story as the narrator, the couple’s daughter, brings the perception and understandings gained in adulthood to reconsider past events. Her father gives her mother gifts; a flamboyant pink jumpsuit, jade and silver jewelry, which she and her sister are excited and impressed by, they want their mother “to be wedding-day glad.” Now, as an adult she sees the significance of those gifts; ” they were a kind of hush-money. Or an apology -They weren’t time. They weren’t companionship.” She remembers her father’s devastated expression, she remembers him holding her mother, she remembers the “detonations of silence, anxiety, disapproval, contraction, retreat.”
As in other stories within the collection, Neale reveals to us something so personal, yet so universal as she reflects, analyses and probes beneath the fragile shell which protects and guards against intrusion.
The Pink Jumpsuit by Emma Neale (Quentin Wilson, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide. It has been longlisted for the 2022 Jann Medlicott Acorn prize for fiction at the Ockham New Zealand national book awards.
