SEPTEMBER 14 2019 LISTENER 53
G
ET
TY(^) IM
AG
ES
by DAVID HILL
L
iterary fiction in a big, handsome
hardback: that’s an expression of
confidence from any publisher.
And it’s thoroughly deserved.
Stewart O’Nan’s third novel of Pitts-
burgh’s Maxwell family is a modest,
masterly narrative
where hardly anything
of worldly import hap-
pens, while everything
that really matters
does.
Protagonist Henry
is 75. He carries too
much weight and his
cholesterol count is
stratospheric. He’s
retired from the
engineering company he served all his
working years. He walks the dog each
morning, goes to his local Presbyterian
church every week. It’s been and still is
that kind of life. And O’Nan does splen-
did, affecting things with it.
Henry is a good man – he
hopes. He’s committed to
his edgy wife, Emily, and
their kids and grand-
kids. He’s stoic, diligent,
decent. Yet he’s troubled.
Have his decades meant
anything?
This is an intensely
domestic novel.
The quiet
rhythms
of seasons and celebrations frame it:
Thanksgiving with shrimp cocktails,
spring golf with buddies, annual vacation
at a lakeside cabin. The Maxwells’ house
becomes so familiar (you even learn their
brand of shower soap) that you share
Henry and Emily’s feelings of reassurance
as they pull its vulnerable warmth up
around them.
Alternating with this quotidian present
are memories of much earlier times:
Henry as reluctant altar boy, piano
student at – humiliation! – the YWCA,
soldier in the last stages of World War II.
Now he favours his wonky knee, worries
about his daughter’s drinking, reads the
obits and checks ages against his own.
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh is also fraying.
A shooter has violated a yard party. Some
shopping malls don’t seem safe. Kids on
Halloween arrive in vanloads, carrying
pillowcases into which they stuff candy.
Henry, meanwhile, holds to his
untrendy virtues: reticence, acceptance,
fidelity. He and his
Oldsmobile aren’t as
good on the roads as
they used to be; his
doctor’s death is a
fright that he’s strug-
gling to handle. But he
perseveres with living
and loving. He’s still a
romantic, even though
he and Emily have
been married long
enough for her to buy him an electric
sander for Christmas. (The minutiae is
perfect.) He glints with gallows humour.
Try the church pageant where the
congregation sing Joy to the World as
an elderly parishioner is carried out by
paramedics.
Time slows. Eternal verities and
universal frailties shape and deepen.
Quiet lives proceed in quiet places.
Jane Austen would nod approv-
ingly. l
HENRY, HIMSELF, by Stewart O’Nan
(Allen & Unwin,
$32.99)
He’s still a romantic,
even though he and
Emily have been
married long enough
for her to buy him an
electric sander for
Christmas.
Time of
their lives
Gallows humour
glints in this modest,
masterly third novel
about Pittsburgh’s
Maxwell family.
Freshness
and sincerity
by NICHOLAS REID
N
ikki-Lee Birdsey’s debut collection
focuses on the poet’s identity as
someone who has lived in both New
Zealand and the US (especially New York
and New Jersey). The title, Night as Day,
refers to the way the poet often reflects on
one place when it is night there, but day
here.
Identity is defined in the seven longish
poems that make up the section called
“Naturalisation”. This is followed by 12
shorter poems, focusing on objects that
trigger memories of a particular locale.
And, finally, there are the 12 poems of
“Cartographic Life”, which tend to speak
more of childhood, relatives and New Zea-
land, without ever losing that dual-identity
theme.
The blurb describes the collection as
“balancing artistic experimentation with
frank expression”. A fair description. The
“artistic experimentation” side means
there are a number of obscure allusions
and self-references, which would be hard
for readers to pick up without the 20 pages
of endnotes.
Thankfully, there is also the “frank
expression” in Birdsey’s best poems, where
she is looking through a window in New
York or watching girls play in a park or
visiting Piha with a nephew. Cryptic refer-
ences may still appear, but these poems
have a freshness of expression and sincer-
ity, which make them the best things in
the collection. And you can’t help saluting
someone who writes,
“I throw my phone
in the bin, too many
images – it’s just a
piece of junk aglint in
the plastic folds of the
liner.” l
NIGHT AS DAY, by Nikki-
Lee Birdsey (Victoria
University Press, $30)
Stewart O’Nan:
perfectly nails
the minutiae.
This debut collection
balances artistic
experimentation with
frank expression.