A few males flap past, but they're fleeting, feeble, "emotionally tone-deaf". It's the Kelleher women who run the house and the book. Eighty-three-year-old Alice is the most complex, fortified by a life of Catholicism, booze, and giving bad advice. Ann-Marie is the most engaging, fizzing with discontent and libido. Kathleen is the most tormented (and spectacularly slatternly). Maggie is the most improbable - I mean, a novelist totally unconcerned that she can't find anything for her novel?
They're all inflated beyond life-size: their actions are operatic; their reactions melodramatic. When they're not examining their own entrails, they're busy tying knots in others'.
It's a long book, and seems longer because of Sullivan's insistence on telling us so much. She's always there, nudging and pointing.
Okay, she points perceptively. She's good on family dynamics and deceptions; shows that there's function within dysfunction. Her characters change and grow, even if Alice can't stop re-using teabags and Kathleen never replaces the sheets. They make various forms of peace, with one another or with rabbits.
There are agreeable individual scenes. Vaunted tomato plants get trampled. So does a priest - nearly. A daughter becomes concerned because her mother appears to be having fun. There's poignancy as people try to recapture magic, or watch their kids grow up to become stockbrokers.
You'll be absorbed and aggravated, intrigued and irritated. You'll look forward to something slimmer and more significant.
David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
