‘Wildly imaginative, sometimes blackly funny’

The Pink Jumpsuit: Short Fictions, Tall Truths by Emma Neale (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $30)

Reviewed by Carole Beu for Kete books

The Pink Jumpsuit is a stunning collection of short stories and flash fiction from highly regarded poet, novelist and former editor of Landfall Emma Neale.

It opens with The fylgja (I needed to look up the meaning of that word), a story so extraordinary that you feel you have been punched in the stomach.

It’s followed by Apples and Oranges, in which a brother and sister come to a new, revelatory understanding of a terrifying incident in their childhood. You’re still digesting its complexities, subtly explored with economy and precision, when you find yourself attending a grungy Dunedin student party in Stray. Here a young woman tries hard not to notice the necklace being worn by the liquorice-black-lipsticked young man talking to her: ‘‘a grotesque pendant made of a dead seagull and green twine’’.

Some of these stories cover several pages, some of the flash fictions just one page. All are powerful. Some are wondrously bizarre and surreal. They explore relationships, including young women disillusioned by their early, exploitative interactions with men; the impossibility of really ‘‘knowing’’ another person; the unreliability of memory; the triumph of revenge; the possibility of the inexplicable.

Two stories in particular delighted me. In Worn Once ,a bride is jilted five days before her elaborately prepared wedding. An art student, she places her white wedding dress on a mannequin in the main street, with a selection of fabric pens, and invites the public to express their thoughts about marriage on it. As this story develops, the humour turns beautifully to tenderness.

The other is Party Games in which a mother tries desperately to control the chaotic behaviour of the 8- and 9-year-old boys at her son’s birthday party.

At the crisis point the mother feels, ‘‘an instant full-body surge of tingling shock, as if her entire nervous system had been rolled in wasabi’’.

Neale’s beautiful way with words and her stunning imagery make these stories exceptional. A few more examples: wedding gowns on a rack in a secondhand clothing store hang ‘‘in cling-film cauls.’’ (This is in Offcasts, a brilliantly brief piece in which clothes are not the only things finally cast off); a child with a plastic bag over her head is, ‘‘trapped behind a seethrough pane of suck and blow’’; a man pushes his glasses up on to his head so they ruffle, ‘‘two tufts of hair like rock-hopper penguin head-feathers’’; legs are clad in ‘‘torn black tights peepshowing lucky pennies of skin’’ and a smell is described as being, ‘‘similar to the fridge bottom drawer when the last of the spinach has been believed in for too long’’.

Stimulating, wildly imaginative, sometimes blackly funny, often very challenging, the contents of the suitcases carried aloft by the pink jumpsuit-clad girl in Sharon Singers’ cover painting are precious gems, some smooth, some deliberately rough-cut. I can’t help wondering what weird and wonderful creature is inside that animal cage she is holding.

This review was originally published on ketebooks.co.nz and is reproduced with kind permission.