Some insights in tales of envy
GHOST LOVER
Lisa Taddeo
By JESSIE NEILSON
Lisa Taddeo is known for 2019’s bestselling Three Women, which is being made into a television series. Her fiction has been much acclaimed. Ghost Lover is a collection of short stories featuring dissatisfied American women, envious of the seemingly successful lives of those around them.
The collection takes its name from the first story. It opens with a newly wealthy public figure in line at a trendy sandwich place by the shoreline. Despite her success with an app and a selfhelp show, she is constantly preoccupied with her appearance. While she chooses a crouton, she pictures it in her mouth ‘‘the size of a nightmare’’. Young, pretty things flit around her with their amours, reminding her of time past.
The narrator states that the idea of her app, Ghost Lover, a forwarding system of text messages intercepted by ‘‘experts’’ on love, came to her easily, as ‘‘ideas borne from pain the way moths go to light’’. This holds true for many of Taddeo's characters: they are drawn towards disappointing lifestyles and people while they seek some mystical qualities beyond that.
In the second story ‘‘Fortytwo’’, for example, Joan is obsessed with looking beautiful, for she has an important party in Brooklyn to attend. She exercises furiously, to ward off ‘‘degradation’’. Selfpityingly she labels herself ‘‘an older woman’’, the group that, she claims, rules the city on certain days of the week, eating charred octopus in stylised indulgence.
Lisa Taddeo
There is little real empathy for others in these stories, or even the ability to look outside of their carefully presented facades and personalities held down within borders. There is one wife, married to a Wasp who she does not love, models and their deaths by heroin, and suntanned women with tight, tight faces. Even in their light moments the superficiality is depressing.
The more interesting stories leave a vapid world of white, privileged, wealthy America and its pool parties and tennis clubs. ‘‘Air Supply’’ takes two young women on their way Puerto Rico, in a comingofage story of vulnerability and selfdoubt. Beyond immediate events, it is a reflection on enduring friendships and dynamics through the ups and downs of time.
‘‘Grace Magorian’’ is a perceptive piece, about an estate manager for a wealthy couple, and her experiences on the other side of this, though impressions such as the rich smell of vodka and sunshine do trickle their way over. Grace is one of the envious, with an abusive past, craving a gentle touch, yet unable to negotiate successfully. Like all of Taddeo's writing here it contains quirky, sometimes awkward imagery, of young people, gym addicts, with ‘‘muscles [which] grew out of air conditioning’’.
Though this collection is not pleasant and feels uneven, Taddeo at times injects her characters or narrators with rare insight. They are able to step outside their glossy lives and see a wider world. So, for all Taddeo's glimpses of the ‘‘tufted Bambi plush of youth’’, wealth and privilege, at least in these American scenarios, is just not all it has cracked up to be.
Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant
Some music autobiographies are brilliant, some are mediocre.
Some are clearly penned by a ghostwriter with minimal input from their famous subject, timed for the preChristmas market in an obvious cash grab.
Good Pop, Bad Pop by
Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker is none of the above.
As he points out from the get go, this book is not a life story in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a loft story — a haphazard trip through the life of one of Britpop’s finest, via a series of random objects he finds while clearing out his loft.
Anyone familiar with Cocker’s lyrics will already be aware of his dry wit and his ability to find inspiration in the seemingly mundane.
This is, after all, the man who wrote hits about supermarkets, houses with woodchip on the walls, and getting absolutely loaded at a music festival.
That uncanny ability to make the everyday seem extraordinary is on full display in Good Pop, Bad
Pop.
Surprisingly introspective, Cocker reflects on how his dislike of change led to him keeping a sliver of soap with the old
THE SEAWOMEN
Chloe Timms
BY CUSHLA McKINNEY
Esta, the narrator of Chloe Timm’s dystopian debut, has always felt out of place on the remote, stormy island where she was born; marked by scars on her face from the fire that killed her parents and tainted by suspicion that she will take after a mother whose crimes are an unspoken but constant subtext. The novel follows to adulthood as she tries and fails to stick to the strict rules of her religious
Jarvis Cocker.
Imperial Leather logo on it; a serious childhood bout of meningitis; and growing up without a father in Sheffield.
He does not shy away from difficult subjects, loading his anecdotes with selfdeprecating humour.
There is also plenty here for those seeking the Pulp origin story. An old school exercise book details how a community, finding truths that motivate an escape.
Although wellwritten, The Seawomen deviates little from the genre’s familiar religiomisogynistic tropes and seems designed to engender outrage. Men may travel offshore, but women young Cocker painstakingly developed everything from his band’s look (short hair, rancid ties, unpatterned shirts) to its early logo on handdrawn tickets (a praying mantis).
At its heart, Cocker’s book reads as half memoir, half love letter to growing up in Sheffield, and a heartfelt example of how much the objects we treasure can tell us about who we are.
If you can make it to the end without rushing to watch Pulp’s legendary 2011 Reading reunion in full on YouTube, you are a stronger person than I.
‘‘Disco 2000’’ really just hits differently now.
ODT are forbidden from even looking at the sea, lest they be corrupted. Marriages are arranged and when a girl is deemed worthy to be a mother, she has a year to conceive or be drowned: ‘‘some men . . . marry godless woman after godless woman and never have any children.’’ Even its open ending feels derivative. Esta may not find ‘‘nolite te bastardes carburondorum’’ carved into a closet, but might as well have. Such similarities outweigh the more original aspects of an otherwise welltold tale.
Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist