Two-thirds of the way through Josie Shapiro’s second novel, Jamie and Riggs arrive at a skatepark in Whangamatā, boards under their arms. They haven’t seen each other for 23 years. They are physically worn, emotionally scarred, worried about their futures.
But the old competitive drive kicks in. One falls, the other has a collision. “How do we handle it, bro?” Riggs asks. He waves his hands around, “as though to indicate this precise moment, or maybe the past or the future – perhaps all of it. Maybe he means all the hard parts”.
Shapiro is a skilled storyteller, carefully spooling out the details of the “hard parts” – the barely-spoken-about events that pulled Jamie, Riggs and his partner Penny together then split them apart – and that now, two decades later, will unravel in a tequila-fuelled, candlelit night in a rundown bach on the Coromandel.
The points of view of these three characters alternate chapters. We first meet artist Penny at home in Los Angeles. She is dealing with Riggs’ absence, the daunting challenge of a blank canvas and the paralysing grief of the loss of her daughter. “How on earth had she ended up here?” she wonders. “A childless mother, an artless painter.”
At a nearby skatebowl, high on painkillers, grief and disappointment at losing his job, Riggs slips, lands hard. He used to be a “little Superman”, he recalls. Now he sees himself as a “dead loss” with a wrecked back and an uncommitted fiancée.
On this side of the globe, Jamie is at a skatepark in Auckland, navigating a kickflip backside lipslide on an A-frame rail (Shapiro’s skateboard lingo is impressive). Skateboarding was always his escape, we’re told. “So what if he has a job he doesn’t find fulfilling? So what if he’s single and is starting to suspect he’s never going to find what he’s yearning for?” Now, as Penny and Riggs board a plane back to New Zealand, the past, with all its secrets and lost opportunities, begins to crowd in.
Two boys and a girl; two men and a woman. From the Bible to Susan Collins’ The Hunger Games, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin, love triangles have been a reliable device for film and fiction.
As Kunzru does in his novel, Shapiro complicates the picture with the longstanding friendship of Jamie and Riggs, growing up together on knockabout Waiheke Island: “Seven years old, eight, 10, haunting storm pipes on cold winter afternoons or scouring beaches for unwanted treasures.”
At the skatepark they meet Penny, the new girl on the island, the daughter of a celebrated realist painter, and learn – at last – that three is a crowd.
Shapiro’s landscape is evocative and instantly familiar. Waiheke, all sparkling waters, winding roads and lush bush. The Coromandel – tussock and oystercatchers, golden sand, the blue-grey ocean, “then nothing, nothing at all between him and Chile”.
Her descriptions of growing up in small-town Aotearoa are pitch-perfect: bonfires on the beach, cheap booze, night swims, spray paint on concrete.
But it is the three central characters that drive this book. While parents linger on the fringes, occasionally looming into menacing or ineffective proximity, Jamie, Riggs and Penny hold the reader close to the plot as it gallops toward the final, frenzied showdown.
There are parallels here with the character of young runner Mickey Bloom in Shapiro’s bestselling first novel, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts. Here again, her protagonists, with all their impetuosity and self-doubt, cut through with utter clarity.
For her epigraph, Shapiro chooses words graffiti-ed on a skatepark in Whangamatā: “Hurting now does not mean your future holds pain.” Anywhere else, the words would sound trite but, in this context, one anonymous voice calling out to another, they are empathetic and hopeful, a fitting inscription for Good Things Come and Go.
A longer version of this review will be published on nzreviewofbooks.com
