Jenny Powell
Dream Girl by Joy Holley (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 252pp, $30; Signs of Life by Amy Head (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 128pp, $30
Joy Holley’s stories in her debut collection Dream Girl offer young women who have to contend with a world of twenty-first-century abundance. A world where their desires, their must-haves—the incessant Instagram-like curation of details: the decor of bedrooms, wardrobes, bathroom shelves— all serve to express unease about identity or status. It’s not cool to be seen to be striving too hard, but the adolescent characters in these stories, located in and around urban Wellington, are questing creatures, well aware that nowadays teenage rebellion is just an option, a posture, pre-loaded with ironic knowingness. The quest is one for spiritual meaning at a time when all the options arrive as cultural hand-me-downs from previous pop eras. There’s a moreish glut of ‘things’ marketed by the consumerism that rules our lives and has colonised every aspect of our existence. Wanting or craving becomes a kind of performance where young people seemingly search for love or one-night stands or romantic entanglements, when really they are in search of themselves. Their lives are ones of self-absorption to the max.
What gives these stories their energy is a kind of confessional immediacy rendered in sentences that create wonderful mise en scènes. In ‘Material Girl’, the narrator writes a kind of bitter-sweet love letter of reminiscence to the object of her desire, another young woman, who is naive and less self-aware than the narrator, and yet with her minimalism is possessed of an instinctive sense of taste, an aesthetic know-how, that the narrator both mocks and envies: ‘The first time you came to my house, I wondered if you would judge me for all my little things: the anatomically correct heart candle, a vintage glass decorated with signs of the zodiac printed on it, the pink telephone I bought purely for decoration.’
In the narrator’s room there are also Virgin Marys, perfumes, and bottles of skincare from Parisian apothecaries. The characters don’t drink plain gin and tonic; they drink gin infused with cinnamon quills, vanilla and tonka beans as if the more sophisticated blend will lift them beyond an ordinary experience. Their desires have an almost religious intensity. The need for more is evident as the sky turns to night, ‘I put on my red, heart-shaped wall light and lit a cedar-scented candle. The tiny plastic ponies lined up on my windowsill glowed in the dark.’
Girls in Dream Girl project fantasies into a future that never arrives as they imagine. In one story, we learn that Alice had desperately wanted a heart-shaped bed ever since she was sixteen. She imagined she would meet some ‘Lolita-loving, Sugar Daddy type who would be completely into the idea of a heart-shaped bed—and pay for it too.’ Instead, she lives with a boyfriend five years older than her, who definitely doesn’t want the bed: ‘I am not letting you turn our room into some nineties brothel.’
In ‘School Spirit,’ Olivia is a Pisces. The other girls are not impressed. Pisces is their least favourite star sign. To make matters worse Olivia doesn’t even know the rest of her chart. This fault must be remedied straight away. Olivia texts her Dad to find out her time of birth. Before there is any response, the girls move on to a new topic.
In the story ‘Compatibility Report’, Maddison and the narrator—university students who met in first-year philosophy and both got straight As—have major Taurus placements, meaning they take pleasure in the five senses. Sub-sections of ‘Compatibility Report’ are identified by astrological details and their application to Maddison. Under ‘ascendant – outer appearance – Gemini (?)/Taurus,’ Gemini risings are curious and inconsistent. This must be true. Maddison finds that people don’t recognise her. The other girls blame her inconsistent hair colour, changing from pink to a varied rotation of colours. Throughout Dream Girl, girls locate aspects of behaviour as proof of star sign validity.
And star sign validity is reinforced by a focus on sweet smells. On holiday in Queenstown, the ‘Compatibility Report’ pair’s caravan is filled with flowers. Back in Wellington the girls are surrounded by ‘sweet vape clouds of strawberry milk, menthol, vanilla.’ During summer Maddison buys ‘a yuzu-passionfruit flavour that smells exactly like Polly Pockets’.
Dream Girl is packed with lush sensory moments. ‘Ghost Story’ switches its thematic motif to sound. During a séance: ‘I heard you choke out a giggle, then cover it up with a loud cough. I bit down on my lip but a squeak of laughter escaped.’
However, direct communication is often kept to a minimum or made oblique. Instead, characters communicate via their digital devices. Continuing with its aural emphasis, girls in ‘Ghost Story’ trade playlists on Spotify to communicate messages through songs. In the hopeful phase of a new relationship, the narrator adds ‘Pussy is God’. Later, as silence replaces hope, she adds ‘How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?’ and ‘Anyone’s Ghost.’
Holley repeatedly creates an atmosphere of sensory overload, as her girls becoming women respond to their circumstances in a kind of hedonistic rush. But just when the dazzle of contemporary detail threatens to overwhelm us with much too much intensity, Holley backpedals and astutely includes a story set in the 1950s. ‘Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents’ moves at a slower pace, allowing dramatic tensions to unfold in a more detached way. Moving from hymns in school assemblies to teddy boys and milk bars, the story shows us how these girls were trapped by dominant parental control. Parents, in turn, were controlled by the conventions of wider society. Even the local church wields its moral sanctity. In this macroscopic view, layers of expectations influence girls and limit choice, providing a contrast to the contemporary girls, driven by technology and a need to intensify or alter experiences. Holley encourages us to consider the impacts of generational evolution.
The contemporary girls flit across life like skimmed stones on a water feature. Multiple versions of the same event ping on social media or echo through Victoria Tunnel, as in the story ‘Girls in the Tunnel’, where Phyllis Symons was murdered by George Coats, who got her pregnant at seventeen when he already had six kids in an orphanage. George was working at the tunnel building site. No. George was working at a site near Phyllis’ parent’s home in Aro Valley and said that Phyllis jumped. ‘Girls in the Tunnel’ is a highly realistic slice of young teenage conversation. There is nothing like a ghostly local history to begin the spiral of who-knows-more.
Comic episodes in Dream Girl bring their own droll dimension—a sardonic jokiness. A squirming humour scuttles through ‘Rat Trap’ with two girls and a rat locked in a wardrobe. There is cringe-humour in ‘Fruit,’ with compulsory attendance at a family Christmas dinner; ‘I spent most of Christmas Day dipping strawberries in melted chocolate, avoiding the rest of the family. I could hear Mum greeting everyone as they came in, her voice strained to a higher pitch when my Aunty Cathy and her husband, Richard, arrived.’
In the story ‘Nightmare Girl’, when Nightmare Girl and the narrator meet, they play ‘Truth’. Critically, the narrator is never sure how much to believe. It is here that Holley directly addresses a persistent girl concern: what is truth? Nightmare Girl is the one whom the narrator loves, but Nightmare Girl herself enjoys providing twisted versions of truth to mutual friends. ‘She tells them I said that I want to be heartbroken.’
Playing around with versions of ‘truth’ can lead to misinformation, anxiety and despair. Is this an age of nihilism? Without a solid core of belief, it is difficult to establish meaning in one’s personal life. Holley’s girls search for meaning in imposed interpretations and altered realities. In their angst-ridden quest for individualism and inclusion, love and dreams, I worry about them. Where will they be in five or ten years?
The stories in Amy Head’s Signs of Life, her third book of fiction, play out as narratives in a more elaborate fashion. As the 2011 post-earthquake dust slowly begins to settle in Christchurch, characters need to establish new routines while being confronted by both external and internal rubble. In this ongoing earthquake weather Head’s survivors are stuck in a phase of uncertainty in an unstable environment—where they are constantly subject to the whim of geological events.
Structurally, there are similarities between the two collections of stories. Both include a core group of characters who appear variously in shifts of perspective. The Dream Girl narrator Eve and a group of close friends form the centre of three stories. Without the sporadic disorientation of shifting from new story to new story, the reader can pay attention to considerations of form and presentation and the effectiveness of weaving a pattern of short stories together. This sequential technique is also utilised in Signs of Life. Central character Flick and her whānau—her grandmother Bette and various boyfriends—appear frequently but not consecutively.
In Head’s stories, metaphorical relationships between surface and depth in a disaster zone stand for ‘signs of life’. A shipping container is digitally tracked to the driveway of Bette’s new unit. For Bette, her most significant upheaval was not the earthquake itself but having to shift from the family home, ‘in some respects even more difficult than her husband’s death’. Following the shipping company request for Bette’s photo and personal profile to be posted, the container receives thousands of likes. That Bette might be struggling personally is irrelevant, and no amount of ‘likes’ will alter an active fault line beneath the city.
In the story ‘Someone to Heart-Emoji’ Carla and her daughter Skye hire a paddle-boat. While busy pedalling Skye is also searching dating profiles to find a match for her mother, who is dipping her hand into the river, which hustles and ripples along beside them. Head continues, ‘It was peaceful on the water, peering into the layers of green, at least it was when they stopped paddling and let themselves drift.’
But stopping and drifting does not seem to be an option for younger characters in either of these two collections. Avoidance of feelings is common. Disaster recovery is required to combat Flick’s ever-bubbling anxiety. In her attempts at self-distraction, at numbing herself to conceal her feelings and seal her personal surface, any experience will do. Flick avoids going home after work. She opts for a glass of house red at a bar then watches fish in a tank. At work, she watches her manager separate two halves of an English muffin. She watches visitors to the new office block. Sleepless, she lies awake listening to midnight cars. A confrontational exchange with a trainee architect almost escalates into a sexual encounter. When he has gone, Flick is keen to remove all traces of him. She changes clothes, bunches up her skirt and dumps it in the wheelie bin outside, not wanting to go back inside. ‘Instead she padded up the driveway, away from the range of the building’s tilt-slab concrete walls, until she reached the footpath and the road, where the night had shrunk the known world into the ranges of streetlamps and car headlights.’
While Dream Girl characters crave the new and seek to alter the known, in Signs of Life Flick craves steadiness and balance as her anxious state becomes ever more intrusive. On her forest run, a man approaches and quickly passes her. But that trigger moment sends Flick into a mounting panic. What if he had grabbed her from behind? What if he had whacked her head? He might even have raped her. Flick rehearses her responses and those of her rescuers. Her inner and outer worlds converge, all-enveloping. She does not feel safe.
There are lighter moments in this book. Eighty-three-year-old June presents a submission to the city council regarding the transformation of a stickered red zone into Pleasure Gardens of a former time. In his story, Tony tries to overturn a bureaucratic bungling of existence. According to Work and Income, he is dead. That is what his file says. Rules are rules.
Amy Head illuminates the importance of the mundane, the quotidian reality, and it is within the courageous minutiae of just carrying on in the aftermath of a major natural disaster that Signs of Life is richly and powerfully located.
JENNY POWELL is a poet, writer and teacher who lives in Dunedin. Her most recent poetry collection Meeting Rita (2021) was published by Cold Hub Press. She was the 2020 RAK Mason Fellow.
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