The Pyramid of Needs, Ernest Price’s debut novel, has two alternating narrators. There’s Jack, a wry and weary high school teacher who hides his “bitterness” and “existential dread” behind a “display of bonhomie”, both in his classroom and his life. And there is Linda, Jack’s 70-year-old mother, a longtime devotee of a range of lifestyle supplements – sold through a multi-level marketing scheme – who is intent on revitalising her own position within its pyramid of sellers by becoming a wellness influencer on social media. Jack is accustomed to watching his mother’s videos and livestreams, mostly for the wicked sense of schadenfreude that they bring him – but this is the limit of their relationship. The pair have not spoken since Jack’s transition, now over a decade ago, although the rift between was much longer in the making.
Linda takes pride in, even insists on, her good health and capacity – she is, she claims, “routinely mistaken for a 65-year-old” – and considers this evidence of the efficacy of the supplements she spruiks. But when she breaks her hip in a sudden fall, Jack and his sister Alice are forced to fly to her Noosa home to help out while she recovers, and it quickly becomes clear that all is not as it seems. Not with Linda, nor with her business, and definitely not with her husband Peter, whose vague forgetfulness is veering into a steep decline.
