Short stories have always been a mainstay of New Zealand literature, from the short-form icon Katherine Mansfield through the years of Frank Sargeson, Dan Davin, Maurice Duggan and others. Many anthologies have charted the progress of New Zealand short stories. The Penguin New Zealand Anthology is a little different. Penguin NZ is celebrating its 50th anniversary of publishing local fiction. Harriet Allan, formerly fiction publisher of what is now Penguin Random House, has chosen 50 stories spanning those 50 years. She does not choose one for each year, but rather those she regards as Penguin’s best. We start with Patricia Grace’s And So I Go (published 1973), a short poetic vignette about a family who have to leave their tūrangawaewae. We end with Evana Belich’s gutsy story How to Get Fired (2023), about employment negotiations in a retirement home. Belich, a steadfast unionist, is one of the few current writers with the nous to take labour disputes as worthy of examination in literature.
Allan has chosen exactly the same number of female writers as male writers. There are now more Māori and Pasifika published short-story writers than there were in the 1970s. Patricia Grace, Albert Wendt and Witi Ihimaera were already being published then, but as we get nearer to the present day we have stories by Ngahuia te Awekotuku, John Puhiatau Pule, Kelly Ana Morey, Alice Tawhai, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Tina Makereti, Frazer Rangihuna and others.
Attitudes have changed, too. In the matter of sex, Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s Cross My Heart and Cut My Throat (1974), about a boozy male piano teacher ogling a pre-pubescent girl, would now be seriously frowned upon or regarded as rank paedophilia. Conversely, Victor Rodger’s Like Shinderella (2016), with its very explicit gay sex, would probably not have been published just a few decades earlier. More writers now take notice of lost or delinquent young people loose in the city, as in Ben Brown’s Graffiti (2010) and Bernard Steeds’ Home (2022). Just a few of the older contributions haven’t worn well. Frank Sargeson’s Making Father Pay (1975) was written long after he had been in his writing prime. It reads as a rather silly anecdote. But there can be no blanket judgment on the older ones. Janet Frame’s They Never Looked Back (1974) is still a relevant and slyly witty piece of satire about a couple who delude themselves that they are being back-to-nature when they live out of town.
In reviewing an anthology, one trap for the reviewer is trying to honour the writers by name-checking every item in the book. I’ll skip that and rush on to my favourites.
Best writers with a sense of humour: Shonagh Koea with The Widow (1993) and Sue McCauley with Said Linda (also 1993), both dealing with absurd people who misunderstand things or take themselves too seriously.
Most unexpected story: CK Stead’s Brightness Falls from the Air (1997), which begins as an ironical examination of a poet in an academic environment but which ends with an O Henry-like sting in the tale.
Most elegant prose style: the late Peter Wells’ The Good Tourist and the Laughing Cadaver (1993), wherein a gay man wanders around Naples fretting he might have Aids, but still has the time to take in the art and culture like a mature connoisseur. Henry James would have approved the linguistic choices.
Best depiction of ecological collapse: Tina Makereti’s Taonga (2012) is a genuinely scaring image of the seas being so polluted that the beaches stink with all the carcasses of dead sea creatures.
Best depiction of a father-son relationship: Carl Nixon’s Weight (1999) is almost clinical in its style, with a deadpan narration making us more aware of the tension and competitiveness between the two generations.
Best deceptively straightforward narration: Charlotte Grimshaw’s Going Back to the End (2007), a classic example of a story well told, at first giving us what seems to be a mundane event in a woman’s life but subtly moving into deeper territory.
Best awareness of the process of writing itself: Selina Tusitala Marsh’s Afakasi pours herself afa cuppa coffee (2009).
Best story set in another country: Paula Morris’s False River (2017), one of the longer stories, entwining a marriage break-up with Hurricane Katrina, which battered New Orleans.
It’s worth reminding readers that the collection and all its contents come from one publisher. It’s edited by an insider – in a role now redundant – rather than a commissioned outsider. Of course there many fine New Zealand short stories beyond the covers of this book and outside the walls of Penguin – and not only the university presses. All of this means that The Penguin New Zealand Anthology is not the definitive collection of local stories of the past 50 years. But what anthology is? It still gives us much good kai to chew on.
