Why cheat on someone you love?
Chloe Lane’s new novel Arms and Legs opens a few days after the book's protagonist Georgie has cheated on her husband Dan with Jason, a librarian. Dan senses something is up and asks her: "Are you even attracted to me anymore?" She can’t answer. The book’s strength comes from the dreamlike frankness with which it addresses problems of desire, discontentment, love, and fear. Which betrayals really matter? What makes a marriage? A family? A life? Why cheat on someone you love? Why aren’t we content, even with everything we want? It’s also sincerely concerned with the potential for total loss and disaster.
Her 2020 book The Swimmers was one of the most deeply felt and funny New Zealand novels to appear in recent years. She also founded the beloved literary magazine and press HUE+CRY. I spoke with Chloe about Arms and Legs and asked her about what I perceived as Georgie’s lack of remorse - why isn’t she sorrier for cheating on her lovely husband? Thankfully, her answer was more interesting than my question. She said, "I don’t believe Dan and Georgie would be undone by an affair, that’s not how I viewed their marriage. However, the affair, the time Georgie has already spent with Jason, it has opened her up in a new way, made her question some of her choices, her relationship with Dan, what the future might look like for the two of them.
"And it is into this space, this gaping hole of unsureness, that walks the horror of the burn. So Georgie’s undoing over the course of the book is no longer just about sex, but about every decision she has ever made, ever will make, all the dumb things she has done that she regrets, and her fears for the future, for her son’s future."
Georgie is meeting herself anew in a world subtly but deeply altered by her desperate love for her son, Finn. "The novel takes for granted as understood the total obliterating of self that comes from becoming a new parent, specifically a mother."
Georgie then discovers the rotting corpse of one of her students who went missing weeks earlier. Lane writes, "The thing that made my brain flicker briefly from the horror of the real into the horror of the uncanny was the movement of the body, which itself wasn’t moving, rather there was a sense of movement because of the rolling of the smoke and what I later learned were wasps and beetles not wildly bothered by the last of the smoke and the heat, making a final go of what was palatable, hurrying in and around what remained of the body, navigating its loosening as if the spaces were corridors, windows, and doors." This vision feels like a warning, or a punishment. But of what? For what? Georgie yearns to be at home with her family, and intensely regrets the burn. Still, she doesn’t regret her affair.
The book recounts several comic horror stories of people putting themselves in surreal situations—on whims, dares, or simply to act out against the world around them—and then being unable to extricate themselves. In one, a younger Georgie is caught in the Hataitai car tunnel, and runs one way then the other, caught in a feeling that the tunnel is expanding and she’s staying still. Persistently Georgie searches for a setting at which she can relate both meaningfully and comfortably to the world.
Listening to her son struggle to speak, she hopes that he ‘never loses that willingness to keep trying for something even as he fails, to keep trying. Of course, he would lose it. At some point, maybe when he hit puberty, maybe later, he would turn in on himself and become some degree of embarrassed and ashamed and fearful, as we all do. And a man who didn’t or couldn’t feel those things wasn’t the man I wanted him to be anyway.’
For the women in both her novels, there are sexual encounters with mediocre men
These nightmares are balanced by the novel’s sense of possibility. When Georgie considers her history of lovers or looks at the different people with her on the bus, there’s no one exceptional but the novel expands outwards, towards a huge and complex world in which anything might happen. Chloe, who recently moved back to New Zealand from the US, writes that Dan and Georgie moved from New Zealand to Florida to find lives they couldn’t predict. That the life they’ve found is at once too predictable and frighteningly confusing doesn’t undermine their intention.
For the women in The Swimmers there was, of course, swimming. For Georgie there’s the burn. For both there are sexual encounters with mediocre men. This is one of my favourite moments with Jason, Georgie’s librarian lover: "'Your arms,’ he said, ‘they’re beautiful.’ Then I watched as he sketched a line with his eyes from my hand all the way up my arm to where it disappeared into the sleeve of my T-shirt. At the time, this interaction had been overwhelming. Since then, though, I’d heard Jason use the word beautiful to describe many things, including one of his more boring-looking house plants…" I’ve emphasised the novel’s surrealism, but it’s at its most satisfying when Lane brings the uncanny home to the banal reality of ordinary life.
Georgie is afraid that Dan has seen an aspect of her that he shouldn’t have—perhaps when he watched her give birth to their son, or later when she’s become enraged and spoken to him "low and ferociously with ugly words". Years before the novel Georgie remembers using her body as a means to know herself, and be known: "When I stood naked in front of the mirror in one of those bedrooms of my twenties, I would look at my face and I didn’t know what I was looking at, whereas I could look at the rest of what was reflected there, and know that it was mine and that it was good. Back then it’d been that the faster I could take off my clothes, and the more men who could see me with my clothes off, the less I would be just a plain face with a jaw that was a little too strong." Our bodies are our own, they’re ours to see and make use of, whereas we never see our faces directly—in a way they belong to others more than ourselves. But how much of ourselves do we owe to the people who depend on us? What can we keep for ourselves? Arms and Legs makes this a physical question.
With its puzzledness and tendency for narrative swerve Arms and Legs reads a bit like Murakami. I was thankful for Lane’s thoughtfulness and sense of quiet, particularly at the novel’s surprising ending. She’s a serious swimmer and described her writing process as being like "time spent underwater, for hours a day, everyday for three or four years". I can feel this: There are moments in the book I’m sure she didn’t expect to find.
Arms and Legs feels less structured than The Swimmers. But its urgency and roving attention are part of its honesty. Chloe described it as a knotty book, and said, "I think that’s a reasonable reflection of Georgie’s emotional world—it’s all twisted up, there are a lot of threads, and she is trying to figure out which ones to untangle and which ones to leave as they are." The Swimmers, about a mother’s illegal euthanasia, is unexpectedly comic. Arms and Legs, which is essentially about the mundane problems in the life of a young family—a son’s speech impediment; waning chemistry between husband and wife; husband’s worsening eye infection—is surprisingly fearful. That Georgie can’t be sure exactly what she’s afraid of only makes her fear more intense.
Lane’s talent for the odd, luminous moment carries over, particularly into scenes at music and movement classes at Georgie’s library. I asked her about them—"Yes, this part of the book is based on my own experience. When my son was very young, the weekly baby lap time and music & movement classes at our local library—situated two blocks from our Florida apartment—were life-giving. No matter how sleep-deprived and insane I was feeling, my son and I made it every week. I made my first mum (mom) friends in that small windowless room. Just thinking about it now, it’s making me smile."
Arms & Legs by Chloe Lane (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.
