Australian author Miranda Nation’s debut, a modern love story between two medical students, takes inspiration from Sally Rooney’s influential Normal People, a book said to have “defined the decade” in the 2010s. New Skin, set in Australia, is touted as a love story but has a cover image of a sleeping woman’s upper body that’s sliced into 16 pieces.
Alex and Leah meet at university and have an immediate physical attraction, but neither is ready for love, or anything beyond infatuation and sex: Alex is “not good at liking people, and even worse at loving them”, and Leah is involved with a possessive fellow medical student, Amir.
Somehow, though, Alex and Leah find their way to each other and establish an obsessive relationship. Over four years, they cleave together and separate repeatedly. They abuse each other’s faith and trust, and fall victim to misunderstanding and bad timing. They do a lot of drugs, drink a lot of alcohol and smoke endlessly. If you had any illusions that medical students treat their bodies well, New Skin will teach you otherwise.
This is Nation’s first novel, but she is a qualified short-film writer and director, winning an award for best short film at the 2014 Sydney Film Festival. Her six-part original TV series, Playing Gracie Darling, will screen this year.
New Skin adeptly portrays two people pulling themselves apart from the inside out. Ultimately, the characters aren’t endearing: Alex is dismissive and arrogant. He is at med school because “he got the marks and wants to make lots of money”, and because his “immigrant parents’ … banal struggle was an inspiration of sorts” that he attempts to distance himself from. He’s conscious of Leah’s “easy privilege”, comparing it with his own life, where his parents didn’t wear designer runners and their cramped house was filled with his father’s pain.
Leah fights to be the perfect doctor daughter her parents want but falls short. She wants Alex, but surrenders to Amir when Alex is emotionally unavailable, neglecting her studies and spiralling out of control. Loss in both Leah’s and Alex’s families at different times causes them to disengage and fragment, one reaching out, one pushing away.
Normal People was an instant hit, winning multiple awards and being adapted for television. It portrayed a tangled and intimate relationship between two students from different class backgrounds, but also encompassed their Irish world view, politics and society. It’s possible to clock its similarities as both a novel and TV series in New Skin, occasionally to the level of similar scenes and situations. Ultimately, though, Nation has aimed for a tighter but less philosophical focus, largely excluding the political and literary depths to put emphasis instead on her characters’ individual struggles in the medical school setting.
The wide cast of secondary characters come and go: Leah’s friend Helen, who she bonds with over a similar history of disordered eating; possessive Amir, who invents many lies to keep Leah under his spell; Tom, the uncomplicated sidekick who plays foil to tortured, cynical Alex; Jamila, who argues with Tom about the patriarchy while they flirt. They all exist in an orbit around Alex and Leah.
Later in the book, the pair muse how each is the one person to the other who “fits you like a missing half and fills you with so much passion that it burns you up inside”. At times it’s difficult to see what pulls them together, or why they treat each other the way they do, but overall the novel has an understanding of how damage can manifest in people, disturbing happiness and causing self-destruction.
New Skin, by Miranda Nation (Allen & Unwin, $36.99), is out now.
