Diligent Animals
Pip Adam Goes to Work
I have a special place in my heart for novels that pull off unlikely moves. Max Porter’s Grief is the thing With Feathers is a fragmentary, prose-poetic narrative about a man and his two sons dealing with the loss of their wife/mother, with the aid (if you can call it that) of an anthropomorphic crow quasi-deity. If I didn’t know anything about Porter and you recommended the book to me using that description, I probably wouldn’t read it. And yet, it’s one of my favorite novels of the past decade.
The New Animals, by Pip Adam, has a good shot to make my 2020s all-decade list. It’s a novel about working for a living in the Auckland, New Zealand fashion scene in the 2010s. It’s also a novel about climate change and the shifting relationship between humans and the natural world, in a way that’s surprising and strange and which I won’t spoil too much. Suffice it to say that this is a hyper-realistic novel about working as a hairdresser for fashion shoots, right up until it’s not.
The first two-thirds of The New Animals are defined by the clipped self-recrimination of the featured hairdresser, Carla, who is our protagonist for those first two-thirds (but, I would argue, not the final third). A representative sample:
Carla had made poor life choices. The dog would kill something and be destroyed or it would kill Carla. She had no business getting a dog. But no one else would take it. She looked around the flat. It had been a bad afternoon. There was shit everywhere when she’d come home… Doug needed to run. Carla couldn’t control her off the leash, she couldn’t control her on the leash… Bad career choices. Bad money choices. A year later, the dog was impossible. Carla brought out the worst in it.
This is Carla’s reality: Everything going to shit (literally, in the case of the maniacal, scheming pitbull locked in her apartment while she’s at work), while she’s well aware of it and feels unable to do anything. Unable even to walk the dog. Able only to lament, in plain, direct, conclusive statements. No poetry; only bad choices and bad results.
Of course, for all of Carla’s self-punishment, The New Animals makes it clear that, even if she’s made Bad Choices, her world hasn’t necessarily given her the chance to make better ones. She’s spent most of her life poor, scrapping along as best she could, while the world seems to only get worse for everyone who isn’t rich. Even in—imagine me saying this in the most obnoxiously American way possible—New Zealand!
Later on, there’s a knifing moment when Elodie, a character who’s a bit more fortunate than Carla (and who will become our protagonist in the novel’s final third), sees some people sleeping under cardboard along a major commercial street:
Elodie had been to London with her parents tens years ago and there were people sleeping on the streets there and when she came back her mother had said wasn’t it great there were no people sleeping on the street in New Zealand? There were people sleeping in the streets, now.
An observation that is at once objective, individual, and political. Most narration in The New Animals takes a similar form: Concrete-yet-personal observations, made at volume and without relent or adornment, often coming from the point of view of people who are at a power disadvantage in many/most settings in which they find themselves.
In helpful contrast to Carla and her compatriots, Adam also gives us the figure of Tommy, the young man who founded the fashion label for which Carla and Elodie have been working (he also sleeps with Elodie). The scenes that center on Tommy take place in settings such as his father’s commanding businessman office and his parents’ luxurious home, and are full of indirect discourse in which he reassures himself of his merit. The point is hard to miss: There is a type of person much different from Carla, interacting closely with many Carlas, yet whose subjective reality is all about telling themselves they made Good Choices and thus deserve everything they have.
To summarize much further would be to spoil the delightful twist. I’ll just say that, from a pure craft standpoint, The New Animals has one of the more interesting unfired Chekhov’s Guns I can remember seeing. One of many risky moves that pay off.
Almost as compelling as the novel itself is Adam’s acknowledgements section. It works more as an artist’s statement than a barrage of thank-yous. The opening sentence: “In my mind this book is largely about work and I’d like to thank everyone who employed me while I was writing it.” She goes on to praise the creative endeavors of her family members and to inscribe a brief manifesto about art colliding with real life:
There are people everywhere making beautiful things in the small parts of their lives other responsibilities leave them. Sometimes they create these things for others, sometimes they create them for the challenge and reward of making. There are also so many people without work or who work hard for unfair and inadequate financial recompense. This book is also the story of the changing economic shape of Aotearoa and the confusion and sadness the increasing inequity brings me.
You could do a lot worse than that, as a philosophy of creation. Pip Adam’s fiction makes me reflect on how many interesting novels we never get to see, precisely because whoever might have made them didn’t get a chance to take the time away from the work of survival.
I don’t want to leave you with the impression that The New Animals is a miserably didactic novel. It’s an energizing read, line by line and scene by scene, and I steamed right through it. That it manages this while also being so unabashed about the messages it wants to carry is the ultimate testament to what Pip Adam can do when she goes to work.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
We’re back in front of the boob tube:
I’ve said elsewhere that a grownup Calvin (he’s a Millennial, of course, no matter how you do the math) would be a prolific and accomplished online poster. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, this is what a future poster would be doing; marinating in front of the one screen we had back in those hardscrabble days, and then, when approached by an emissary of the flesh-and-blood world, giving a lengthy speech about why he couldn’t possibly do anything else. “You should probably sit down… [I will never log off.]”
One thing about Calvin’s self-centered view of the world is that the stakes of any given situation morph whenever and exactly as much as he wants them to. It helps that a lot of the action in C+H seemingly happens in his imagination, though it’s quite interesting that the text itself rarely, if ever, completely confirms or denies the “truth” of this conceit. So here we have Calvin dealing with interstellar invaders, a situation that isn’t urgent enough to pull him away from the TV. David Foster Wallace would be proud.
A Poem
Hone Tuwhare is in the rain