David Eggleton
Lioness by Emily Perkins (Bloomsbury Circus, 2023), 278pp, $32.99
‘Caroline gave a low growl. I wanted to leap on her back, flip her on the ground and roar into her unlined face.’ Lioness is a comic novel by Emily Perkins that asserts we are all driven by animal emotions over which we constantly struggle to assert rational control. The comedy is in the hyperbole of her language and in her up-to-the-minute account of our present condition, rendered as rants and harangues through the megaphone mouthpieces of a variety of characters as they clash and interact. It’s all registered in tones of voice, but as in Eleanor Catton’s novel Birnam Wood, the characters in Lioness are at odds about what moral positions to adopt in an age of doom-scrolling and constant change.
How do novelists gain traction on the slippery surface of the contemporary, when events are so fast-moving and the ordinary textures of life, as reflected around us, have taken on a shiny digital quality that is both attractive and mesmerising, and yet also inherently untrustworthy and denounced as ‘fake’ by various polarised demographics? In a world that promotes rampant consumerism, where everything gets labelled and a price slapped on it, how can you live an ethical, equitable and authentic life, when the social order is based on profound inequalities, corporate manipulation and a culture of fear around protecting wealth?
These are questions that have gradually become front and centre for Therese Thorne, the narrator of Lioness, who is having her own mid-life crisis that chimes with a generalised atmosphere of disruption on New Year’s Eve in 2016, when Trump has surged to power, Brexit has taken place and her husband Trevor Thorne, a rich Wellington property developer, has been charged with financial fraud. Therese is watchful, self-aware and hyper-articulate, and the story she tells is of her own post-feminist consciousness-raising, her belated claim to female agency.
But if she transforms into a ‘lioness’, the novel itself describes a pride of lionesses: women challenging one another with a hackles-raising ferocity; rampaging females engaged in various forms of psychological carnage, while males retreat to the side-lines nervously. Males in this novel tend to be both venal and inadequate: ‘I felt a heave of rage towards older men … I hated them at the gym, with their aftershave. I hated them on bush walks, panting … I hated them in restaurants, with their voices raised and in movie queues, talking … and I hated the ones who had been beautiful and were now floury in band T-shirts … and the ones that … loudly discussed roads and travel routes and weather, confident in their right to be boring.’
Therese Thorne has grown up in a bleak working-class subdivision in the Hutt Valley as Teresa Holder. Thirty years ago, she started out, with her good looks, as arm candy for Trevor Thorne, whose wife, Judith, had just left him for another woman. He encouraged Teresa to change her name to the more euphoniously middle-class Therese, and he also bankrolled her successful chain of aspirational homeware stores. Therese became his trophy wife and stepmother to a brood of four: Annabel, married to John; Rob, married to Maria; Caroline, married to Andy; and the cunning and devious favoured son, Heathcote, squiring a succession of pouting girlfriends. The Thorne clan fuels Therese’s status anxiety; for them, she remains an outsider, a barely tolerated member of the tribe. Then there’s Judith, the family matriarch.
The Thornes are not nouveau riche but old money, with all its attendant snobberies, its private school accents, its sneers, its feuds, its blame-games. ‘It’s not for you to say,’ Caroline admonishes her stepmother, who in turn thinks to herself: ‘I knew passive-aggression was a bad thing, but couldn’t see that active aggression was much better.’
But aggression is a driving force in the narrative: ‘Judith had her own anger … I recognised it everywhere now, on the streets—each woman like a storm in a body, a weather system on a leash. Female rage was breaking the surface, swiftly being packaged by the culture and commodified, appearing in slogans on cushion covers in my shop, Fierce Bitch or Strong Female Character taking the place of Live Laugh Love on the bib of an apron.’
The Wellington in this novel is somewhat phantasmagorical, almost a dreamscape from a cautionary fairy tale, where the windows of downtown office blocks seem to glow and bend magically, the very air has a pulsing, maritime quality, and the centre of the psychodrama is a kind of castle keep: an apartment block owned by the Thorne family, once a sewing factory, which now has Therese’s flagship store on the ground floor, leased apartments above, and Trevor and Therese living in a grand penthouse at the top. And thus Trevor, Lord of the Realm, scheming, over-reaches himself and is pitched headlong into the kind of scandal Wellingtonians love to gossip about.
Yet there are tender nuances, too, to this Wellington warren, as when Therese takes Caroline’s two small boys for a stroll: ‘they opened up another city, one of playgrounds and ice-creams and tiny things to notice as they walked at the boys’ pace down the street’.
Therese, at heart, is warm and empathetic. But as a dutiful wife and stepmother she becomes skilled at self-effacement, at self-abnegation, putting others first. Her mid-life crisis finds her chafing at these gender-defining shackles and wanting to break free. While she sells lifestyle accessories, she is herself a kind of lifestyle accessory: ‘Everything about me felt put-on, fake. I bared my teeth at myself in the mirror and growled, then sat on the edge of the bath, wanting to climb into it and pull the shower curtain around me for the rest of the evening.’
On a business trip to Sydney, she has her first intimations of how to escape her sense of malaise. Visiting a public art gallery, she is startled and shocked by a video artwork by the artist Pipilotti Rist, which shows a smiling and carefree woman walking, almost dancing, down the street casually smashing parked-car windscreens with what looks like a large flower, a ‘red-hot poker’. On the video screen, a policewoman walks by and salutes her. Wilfully transgressive, this female vandal with her emblematic flower symbolises contained rage, feminist anger. Therese is exhilarated by the sight of such creative, liberating violence, this exhibition of both permissiveness and permission.
Back in Wellington, she forms a friendship with Claire, her neighbour in a downstairs apartment who is having her own mid-life makeover. This takes the form of a new-found contempt for conventions, for materialism, for possessions. With her punky, reject-all energy and earth-mother zaniness, her take-no-prisoners verbal zingers, Claire brings an in-your-face scornfulness, underpinned by a comical corporeal immediacy, to the novel’s careening progress through predicaments, its zig-zagging from cliff-hanger crisis to cliff-hanger crisis: a passenger jet’s super-scary descent towards Wellington airport; a biker gang causing a major traffic accident in the Terrace Motorway Tunnel; a prolonged near-drowning in the Marlborough Sounds; a storm of cyclonic force rattling a holiday home; a mysterious penthouse break-in, the financial chain-reaction resulting from Trevor’s fraudulent activity.
Claire signs the air with her vape pen and robustly spouts contrarian views: ‘I don’t go for thin former models hawking natural beauty. I don’t go for smoothies as food and bare feet and big sweaters … self-obsession disguised as ritual, big floppy hats … appropriated tea ceremonies, the word grace … the fucking word radical when applied to self-care, the words self-care, practice, wildness, mentor, fuck off, fuck off.’
With her husband having moved to Auckland for work, Claire chucks stuff out of her apartment and then builds a low stage where she can zone out and dance the night away to doof-doof music with Therese and assorted random younger people in a kind of free-wheeling spell or trance, though her sister Melissa, visiting, cautions: ‘Don’t travel off into the mad place of witchy women, of scrying and mole hair and middle-distance stares.’
For Therese, Claire’s ecstatic and rhapsodic cavorting—complete with daring midnight harbour swims—provides a form of affirmation, while her militant statements resound convincingly: ‘Even if you are a rich white lady whose power depends on the subjugation of others, in this world you’re still not as good as a man.’
The narrative is sewn and pleated together out of many short episodes or scenes. At one point, stepdaughter Caroline arrives unexpectedly with two other young women at the Thorne holiday home in Martinborough, where Therese and Claire have sequestered themselves for a short getaway. The atmosphere becomes immediately confrontational: ‘The three of them had the same long cultivated hair … Caroline and her friends wore floor-length prairie dresses that looked incongruous next to the fall-of-Communism track suit Claire had changed into.’ The trio look like they are rocking a Stepford wives vibe, or else emulating the appearance of traditional womanhood: the heritage option, as seen on ‘social media accounts’. The conversation quickly turns to ‘mothering’ and to ‘the sacred feminine’, and one of Caroline’s friends lists its ‘representations … Maid … Mama … Crone’. They all turn to look at Therese as the supposed embodiment of this last epithet. Is a crone a hag, or, as Claire states, a wise older woman? With the coiffed trio rosy in their smug complacency, Claire provides a scathing response to their faith in ‘the white woman wellness complex’ and birth as ‘a spiritual practice’. Pacing the room, she offers: ‘Motherhood as a fetish, kids as another branch of ego … The accessory husband, the dried stick in a vase, the hushed voice that suppresses psychotic rage.’ One of the trio, who is pregnant, bursts into tears, and the three abruptly leave.
A state of crisis is ubiquitous now and something we must all negotiate on a daily basis, as our points of view and opinions and sense of who we are are challenged at every turn. Lioness shows Therese becoming her own crisis manager when her sense of identity is questioned.
In the end, having become rich, Therese wants to do the right thing. Thinking about the origins of wealth and about ethical philanthropy she embarks on a mission to give something back, in particular to the neighbourhood where she grew up. Like Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister at the time, she seeks to ‘be kind’, even if this is unreciprocated.
DAVID EGGLETON is the current Landfall Reviews editor. He is co-editor of the anthology Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, which has just been published by Massey University Press.
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