Rachel O’Connor
Deliverywoman: Stories by Eva Wyles (Influx Press, 2025), 261pp, $38
Thirteen stories make up this debut collection by Eva Wyles, a graduate of Te Herenga Waka and the MA programme in fiction at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Credit is due to Luke Bird, the cover designer, for the clever choice of an Edward Hopper painting, Eleven A.M., aptly reflecting the odd lives and worlds inhabited by the collection’s many awkward and isolated characters.
The varied settings of Wyles’s stories are carefully considered, always solidly but simply crafted, with fine strokes of specific detail that gradually build strange yet uneasily familiar environments. Like well-designed stage scenery, the settings frame the actions and tensions of each narrative without ever dominating the diverse cast of characters. Laden with anxieties and quirks, the characters themselves are very believable—ordinary enough, while being in no sense clichéd. Human nature, in all its bizarre charm and frailty, is on display here.
The two stories that bookend the collection are particularly confident examples of the author’s restrained yet expressive style. ‘Mother And’, the very short opening work, is a beautifully executed miniature, portraying a quiet yet deeply moving moment that encapsulates both love and grief, connection and isolation. The language is precise, and the setting offers a perfectly selected frame for the action and the continuously revolving relationship between mortality and mundanity. In this closing extract, the protagonist, after viewing the livestream of a loved one’s funeral, returns to her laptop screen to find that the camera at the church is still rolling. She continues to watch silently, spatially suspended between the distant place of mourning and her own domestic world:
To her muted surprise, she had forgotten to exit the window and the service was still being streamed, only the guests had long departed, leaving behind a single cleaner, who looked remarkably similar to the IT assistant, only older, tugging a vacuum cleaner around the floor with a long winding cord … He was consistent in his speed, quiet in his gestures, and not once did he make eye contact with the screen. Twenty, thirty, forty minutes passed. Sounds of the husband departing floated in—a clearing of plates, a closing of his own laptop, a goodbye call. Outside, the gate clicked closed. A rubbish truck lifted bottles into its bowels and let the glass smash. The woman watched as the cleaner pressed his foot down on the vacuum and the cord shot back into the barrel, wheeling it out of view, leaving behind the emptied church, stripped of evidence from the previous service and ready for the next.
Not every story quite delivers on the expectations engendered by the resonance and restraint of this first work, but characters throughout the collection are consistently original and intriguing, as are the contexts in which they struggle to connect with the rest of humanity. In ‘A Little Mess’, the mildly obsessive George brings dedication and despondency in equal measure to the tedium of his tasks at a petrol station. His observation of the familiar-looking young woman who enters, however, reveals the inner intensity and perception with which he views the world. It also neatly delivers the story’s New Zealand setting—where road trips are a well-loved component of cultural identity—and highlights the particularity with which one can be pigeonholed by place in this large yet tiny nation:
When he re-entered the store, a woman was standing by the shelves of oil. She looked familiar to him, something about her hair. She was sipping on a carton of strawberry milk … It was as if she’d been to Bluff and back, the way her face felt to watch. As though she knew something no one else did. Like the beauty of the country’s cold toes. George had never been to Bluff, never made it past Nelson. Apart from her face, she was dressed the way he expected a Lyall Bayer to dress, only her hair was a little purple at the ends, like a Newtowner. Probably a Berhamporer, George thought to himself, and looked out of the window in time to catch Alistair putting out a cigarette.
‘So, Sorry’ is a rambling, self-indulgent letter of apology and confession from a woman who has made good, rising to metaphorical but also seemingly literal dizzy heights of fame, and in the process has necessarily dumped the dear friend of her youth. Perhaps intentionally, the monologue is generally irritating. Towards the letter’s end, however, there is a moment of real poignancy, as the protagonist tries to bridge the chasm between the two ex-friends by imagining what the other might be seeing and doing right then, as lonely people tend to do when they have been too far away for too long:
I wonder what you can see? Maybe it’s your steering wheel because you’re driving somewhere. Or maybe it’s a computer screen because you’re reading something online, or maybe you stay offline and you’re reading a newspaper? … Or maybe you’re asleep, and you’re watching the back of your eyelids as though they’re a movie screen, and dreams of the ocean and your children and overdue chores are swirling together.
The longest story in the collection, ‘Good Boy’, is also a first-person narrative, laying bare the gritty, unhealthy lives of hospitality workers the world over, but particularly behind the glittering scenes of snowy slopes and après-ski venues at an alpine resort. The story describes in visceral detail a life of indiscriminate, voracious indulgence—in sex, drugs and alcohol—and the heady, though temporary, sense of camaraderie and invincibility they offer, as well as the tragic consequences they sometimes bring. As the narrator observes, ‘Nobody cares how much you drink up the mountain, just so long as you don’t pass out.’ In the aftermath of one such consequence, the narrator struggles with what to do with the truth—and the human tendency to rewrite our own stories in order to make our current culpability bearable, and our inability to alter the actions of the past.
The author does not hold back on sexual language or detail, and there were times when, reading this story while waiting at a crowded departure gate to board an interisland flight, I found myself positioning my mobile and glasses case over the open pages. People invariably feel licensed to read over your shoulder in public transport settings, and I wasn’t sure the elderly folk on either side of me were ready for the narrator’s bathroom-stall interludes with the young and impressionable Gabriel.
Sex in all its variability features loudly in a number of the stories that follow but, inevitably perhaps, given the collection’s tone, these encounters rarely lead to greater emotional intimacy. In general, the opposite effect occurs, and one is left instead with a melancholy sense of loneliness and disappointment. In ‘It Waits’, a summer work story set in Bayside, ‘located on the precipice of eternal summers’, the narrator recalls one such ungraceful and unsatisfying union:
Two gulls on the end of the wharf, fucking, the carcasses of shucked seashells splayed out around them, was a little like the first time the beach boss and I had sex. Hot and smelly in the way you don’t know whether you’d rather put your whole body in a bath full of ice—pain and fingers in you, slap me on the ass, put your fingers in my mouth, I might come! Oh, I might come! I need to leave, you all of a sudden smell like a paper bag that’s been holding meat, or—nothing but pain? I chose both, and spent my walk home searching for something, anything, to tell me I was real.
In ‘Deliverywoman’, the final story that gives the collection its title, physical and emotional intimacy finally seem to collide. This was the story I had been waiting for, and it provides an absorbing and satisfying end to my rather protracted reading of the book. In a very nearly real version of life after a pandemic, most of the country’s populace have withdrawn into permanent, fearful isolation and subsistence; the necessities of life continue to be ordered online, and actual human contact is virtually non-existent. Only a few brave risk-takers—the essential workers and delivery people—still circulate freely. The protagonist, living and working entirely inside a pharmacy, encounters a deliverywoman who gently, deliciously seduces her and encourages her to reject the limitations of such self-imposed confinement. Escape is terrifying but exhilarating:
She opens the door and steps outside first. I feel my heartbeat pause as I try to tell my legs to go. It is the same feeling of standing on the edge of a wharf, and trying to jump, but something invisible keeps constraining you. Your heart lifts up, ready to go, and then sits back down again. I feel my mouth doing it too—trying to say something, about to open, about to exclaim it’s not possible—but then it’s happening, and I’m outside. I’m not sure if I take a single breath on my way to Mila’s car. All I know is that I am suddenly at the passenger door, grabbing at the handle.
Despite their highly diverse settings and situations, and the energy with which many of the characters approach life, Wyles’s people share a common sadness gene. Constantly seeking and consistently failing to find satisfaction—in work, in sex, in love or in friendship—they nevertheless never quite give up trying. Individually, these are small lives under scrutiny, tiny, almost mundane pieces of the rather unsatisfactory puzzle that is humanity. Yet the cumulative result of the stories in Deliverywoman is oxymoronic—unarguably melancholic while somehow also oddly uplifting.
RACHEL O’CONNOR was born in Christchurch. Her short fiction and non-fiction have been published in Ireland and New Zealand and broadcast on Radio New Zealand. Her debut novel, written for her Master of Creative Writing, was translated and published by Kedros Publishing in Athens. She holds a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Auckland.
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