There’s an exercise Bill Manhire used in his creative writing courses called “Five Things”. Writers are given a list of objects, settings, characters and ideas, chosen at random, and asked to write a story including all of them. I can imagine someone being given the five things exercise, seeing that the list includes Wellington in the 2010s, menopause, property development and a homeware store, and concluding it would be impossible to make an entertaining story along these lines.
But from the opening scene, this novel quickly turns up the heat, and remains at a scorching level throughout. Perkins’ background in theatre and scriptwriting is evident in her masterful handling of dialogue, and also in the constant flow of drama. There’s enough here to rival a season of Shortland Street: a kayaker needs rescuing, a young woman walks out on her husband in hospital, kids get lost, a valuable painting catches fire, family members fight with sustained viciousness. The novel succeeds in prioritising character development and voice without sacrificing narrative. Politics don’t overwhelm the story, but they certainly suffuse it. There is an ongoing sense of activity, and scrutiny.
Therese and Trevor Thorne are a wealthy Wellington couple. We meet them just before their life of unchecked affluence begins to unravel. Therese is a woman in her early fifties, but what she is experiencing is more than a few hot flushes. While playing the devoted wife to her husband, and the serenely disinterested observer to the people around her, Therese is gradually coming to question everything in her world.
Owner of a homeware brand, queen of bougie Instagram décor and Pinterest boards, champion of constant consumerism, she’s inspired and somewhat awestruck by her downstairs neighbour, Claire, who has given away her furniture, thrown out her makeup and skincare, stopped dying her hair, and started hosting spontaneous dance parties in her apartment. Is Claire having a midlife crisis, or undergoing a genuine spiritual quest? Possibly both. In any case, she isn’t straightforwardly converting to hippiedom.
At a gathering of women of various ages, one of whom is heavily pregnant, Claire rails against natural childbirth: “Motherhood as a fetish, kids as another branch of ego. Pointless pain because you think it’s authentic. The accessory husband, the dried stick in a vase, the hushed voice that suppresses psychotic rage.” There is a sense that what Claire and Therese are looking for is true authenticity: something neither of them quite knows how to approach.
But is this all a predictable white woman’s response to ageing? Can Claire and Therese undergo a transformation without being merely performative? In a particularly memorable scene, Claire argues with her sister Melissa, who is horrified by her “tide mark” of grey hair. Melissa tells Claire, “Don’t be so – oaty about all this. So puritanical.” The thing is, Melissa explains, “if we put white men up against the wall, aren’t we next in line?”
Men are a constant, unresolved problem throughout the novel. Trevor might not be a wholly bad husband, but his courting of Therese when she’s a penniless graduate in her early twenties and he’s a wealthy investor twice her age feels very uncomfortable. The predatory older-man theme continues to reverberate: a creepy paediatrician who hits on a young waitress at a fundraising event, Therese’s memories of being groomed as a teenager by a friend’s father, Trevor’s layabout son Heathcote who is almost 40 but dates women under 20. Although Therese has benefitted from Trevor’s support for 30 years, she finds herself reacting against his ilk: “I felt a heave of rage towards older men. I hated them at the gym, with their aftershave. I hated them on bush walks, panting … I hated the ones who had been beautiful and were now floury in band T-shirts and the ones that stood in waiting areas and loudly discussed roads and travel routes and weather, confident in their right to be boring.”
It’s not just older men, or wealthy boomers, who are under scrutiny here. I began reading this novel with a strong hunch the property developers would turn out to be the bad guys, but it soon became apparent that we’re all the bad guys. Climate change and social justice issues frequently rear their heads. Rob, Trevor’s “alien” son who works for the Green Party, responds to the family’s financial predicaments with the statement: “Humans are terrible. The sooner we wipe ourselves out the better.”
As a narrator, Therese continually notices things that other people in her position might consign to the background: striking rubbish workers, unhoused people in sleeping bags on the street. Ultimately, it’s her ability to self-reflect that makes her such a likeable character. She may be questioning the values of the world around her, but she also turns the lens inwards: “I couldn’t shake the feeling that with the contributions to scholarship funds and marine sanctuaries and so on, we were somehow trying to buy something, or clear a debt that could never be paid.”
The main work of the novel is less about how to navigate ageing as a woman, and more about how to navigate hypocrisy. Therese comes to describe her website homepage as “a still from a horror film”. There is no neat take on menopause and feminism; instead, she realises her own complicity in commercialising a power imbalance: “Female rage was breaking the surface, swiftly being packaged by the culture and commodified.” Perkins’ novel manages to be discomfiting and wholly enjoyable at once: it’s a refreshingly honest, piercing take.
Lioness, by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury, $36.99)
