Books: Stumbling through grief to a new life

The Possibilities, by Kaui Hart Hemmings.

Is the unhappiness of beautiful people more significant than that of real people? Thousands of magazine covers shriek YES! Common sense says the opposite.

Well done, then, to Kaui Hart Hemmings for not only making us like the lovely, lost Sarah St John, but for making her grief authentic and affecting.

Sarah lives among the tans and tossing hair of Colorado's tourist ski belt. She fronts infomercials on a TV hotel network. Her home town is just as phony: lodge after souvenir shop after craft gallery after sauna.

But her loss is immediate and terrible. Her 22-year-old son is killed in an avalanche. (There's an utterly harrowing scene early on when rescue dogs appear to have saved him, but of course they're simply trained to find bodies). Sarah sees the rest of her life as sterile shards.

She blunders through the jolting stages of grief. The pretending to be someone else, anywhere else. The compulsion to empty out her son's room and the constant touching of his photo. The obsessive list-making to hold days together; brief flares of hope; dreaded "looks of reverence" from others.

Painfully, she begins to reassemble herself, watched by her glum, sturdy dad. But people intrude: Suzanne with her first-world problems; Kit, who arrives in the driveway with a truck-load of secrets. The past changes shape; the present remains tenuous; the future is unimaginable.

Things move towards redemption. You want them to. Hemmings ensures the movement is halting, flawed, exhausting. You want that as well. Sarah's crawl back towards some form of acceptance, and the reality of her guilt "for feeling hungry ... dressing nicely ... not buying him the most expensive urn", is powerful and poignant.

But there's much more to the novel than sorrow. There's a wicked awareness of incongruous details: a lipstick called Shop Teal You Drop; the way a woman's buffed fingernails can make you feel a failure.

And there's irresistible, daring humour. Imagine making jokes about a group called Parents Against Avalanche Disasters, or escaping from another bereaved mother by feigning diarrhoea. Imagine being a writer and not making those jokes.

My word, Hemmings can write. She's quiet and clear; moves the plot boldly; manages stinging flicks and nuanced meditations at the same time. She makes bromides sound true; can't quite make some little homilies get beyond trite.

Like her earlier The Descendants, this will probably become a movie. In the meantime, it's a book to read with admiration and close with contentment.

The Possibilities
by Kaui Hart Hemmings
(Jonathan Cape $34.99)

David Hill is a Taranaki writer