Chris Else
The Waters by Carl Nixon (RHNZ Vintage, 2023), 288pp, $37
Carl Nixon is one of our most successful writers of short fiction, winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield and twice winner of Sunday Star Times short story competitions. His first collection, Fish ’n’ Chip Shop Song and other stories, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. He is also a successful playwright and the author of novels that explore the limits of convention in mystery and thriller genres. He is first and foremost a storyteller, more interested in the dramatic dimension of fiction than the poetic.
His latest work The Waters is something of an experiment. Billed as ‘a novel in 21 stories’, it explores the lives of two generations of a New Zealand family—siblings Mark, Davey and Samatha, their father, Pat, and mother Marika. In about two-thirds of the stories the protagonist is one of this group. In the remaining third the narrator or leading character is a friend or acquaintance, and the contribution to the picture of the family is a secondary point in the story. For example, ‘Almost Like a Husband’, the second story in the book, is a first-person account by a woman called Cathy remembering a trip with her self-centred, boorish fiancé to Hanmer Springs. There she had met a depressive woman in a hot pool who had unburdened herself about her stultifying marriage to an unfaithful husband with a drinking problem. Shocked by the possibilities in her own future Cathy had walked out on her relationship and caught a bus back to Christchurch. Just a few details in the woman’s story make it clear that the drunken husband is Pat Waters and that the unnamed woman is, therefore, Marika, Mark, Davey and Samantha’s mother.
In general, the stories move back in time, which gives the writing a forensic quality. A more recent situation is examined and its causes exposed by delving deeper into the past. This and the technique of using one story as a lens into another makes for a layered narrative, which gradually reveals the principal characters. Mark is a loner and emotionally damaged, full of repressed anger at his father and unable to form intimate relationships. Pat is a no-hoper full of talk and big plans and with a booze habit that sometimes erupts in violence. Such tensions between father and son are a feature of Nixon’s work, and he provides two convincing portraits here, subtle and insightful.
The pictures of Samantha and Davey are less satisfying, however. Samantha is the youngest of Pat’s children and the most successful in escaping his influence, but she is barely present in the book. We see her as she meets her artist husband, Scribbler, and later, as they deal with an anorexic teenage daughter, but this gives us little more than a sketch. ‘Something Old, Something New’, the story set at her wedding, is less about her and more about Mark’s stormy relationship with their father. Davey, I found blurred. We are told several times that he is ‘beautiful’ but quite what this means for him is unclear. The chief feature of his journey is the abuse he suffered as a little boy, which is hinted at and finally revealed in ‘Slide Show’, the last story in the book. This piece gives a sharp and moving picture of the plight of an abused child and retrospective insight into Davey’s somewhat vacant personality, but it felt too little too late when it came to engaging fully with his character.
Most absent of all is Marika, an invisible woman who killed herself when Samantha was still a baby and whose life and death seem to have had no lasting impact on anyone other than the stranger, Cathy.
In any case, interesting characters alone do not a novel make. If it is to appeal to anything other than a niche readership, it also needs an overarching story. This is difficult to achieve when there are four or five protagonists and we catch only glimpses of them. In addition, a number of the pieces have strong themes and storylines, which draw attention away from any unifying narrative. For example, in ‘Asian Pinball’ Davey spends a boozy night out with some yobbo mates that escalates into a moment of horrifying racial violence. The story tells us little about him other than that he has a moral compass not possessed by his companions, and the events in it are so shocking and moving that any more subtle contribution to our understanding of his character is overwhelmed. This and a couple of other stories made me wonder whether they had been conceived without thought of an overall scheme and later tweaked to fit into the collection-as-novel project.
The structure of the book feels awkward, too. The stories are grouped into four parts—Part I covers the years 2001 to 2013, Part II 2013 to 2019, Part III 1986 to 2001 and Part IV 1979 to 1985. However the second piece in the book relates events in 1981 and would seem, therefore, to properly belong in Part IV.
Overall, the book seemed cobbled together, an impression strengthened by the Acknowledgements, which indicate that the stories were written over a period of at least sixteen years. I wondered why it wasn’t presented as a collection of independent stories, only some of which involved the Waters family but which nonetheless cohered thematically.
A clue perhaps is to be found in the blurb, which includes a quote from Philip Matthews writing on the Academy of New Zealand Literature website:
[Nixon] is an enormously competent, highly skilled and accessible writer who successfully straddles the gulf between literary and commercial worlds.
Several things here seem odd. For a start I wouldn’t have thought the epithet ‘enormously competent’ was all that flattering. It smacks of the oxymoronic: a bit like ‘remarkably satisfactory’ or ‘astonishingly adequate’. And then there is ‘the gulf between literary and commercial, which Nixon ‘straddles’ like some acrobatic horse rider in a circus. I am not sure that such a gulf exists, or if it does, I suspect that it is created by a confusion of categories. Commercial, in the sense of selling lots of copies, and literary, in the sense of showing evidence of originality, insight, innovation, subtlety, richness and depth, are not mutually exclusive. Many of the novels we consider to be classics sold in large numbers in their day and in recent times Booker and Pulitzer Prize winners continue to bring in profits that keep their publishers very happy. At the other extreme, there are many literary works and books written principally for profit that are financial flops. There just isn’t any easy correlation, positive or negative, between literary quality and sales.
The quote from Matthews suggests a fit of nerves in the Penguin Random House marketing department, an attempt to reassure potential readers that although this might look like a collection of short fiction, which we all know is a literary form that doesn’t sell, this is actually a novel written by someone who has all the skills of a successful writer of genre fiction.
Such fudging does the stories and their author a disservice. Nixon is a fine writer worthy of stronger epithets than ‘competent’ and ‘skilled’, however qualified. His prose is clear and subtle and always in the service of the story. Unlike some of our younger writers, who seem to want to play it cool, he is not afraid to tackle big emotions and dramatic actions on the page. These stories vary considerably in narrative technique from straight third-person prose to a range of first-person voices and even one—the Katherine Mansfield Short Story winner ‘My Beautiful Balloon’— written in the second person. Overall they feel as if they belong to a tradition that was once mainstream but has now fallen out of favour—the social realist style of Sargeson and company. Set as they are in and around Christchurch, they are for the most part Pākehā tales based in an unsophisticated milieu. These days our literary preoccupations are increasingly grounded in a postcolonial point of view that tends to emphasise multiculturalism, our disaffected youth and the evil rich, while downplaying any cultural debts to a European past. Nixon’s work is a reminder that we also have a distinctive Pākeha culture that can’t simply be subsumed into a general notion of Empire.
All in all I found myself wishing that The Waters was a much more substantial book—a conventional novel that explored the lives of its characters and the world they lived in in much greater detail, a full-blown family saga, perhaps. Nixon would be up to it for sure.
CHRIS ELSE is the author of nine novels and two short story collections. He is a former President of the New Zealand Society of Authors, and with wife and author Barbara Else he currently runs the TFS Literary Agency and Manuscript Assessment service.
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