Worry Level novel for our times
The sad part of the internet, cam-sex, longdistance desire, global time-zone coordination, dog-farms, and microwaved baked beans. The beginning of Eamonn Marra’s 2000ft Above Worry Level is a potent introduction to the Brave New World of the 21st century, where it seems that human consciousness has become more of a burden than a means of apprehending the world.
Perhaps ‘‘slacker fiction’’ – perhaps something much, much more, Marra’s discontinuous novel is a portrait of a time that doesn’t feel like it should be on anyone’s ‘‘10 best eras in which to live’’.
It’s not that life is really bad or anything, it is just so disconnected and so aimless that simply brushing your teeth requires more intent, more choices and more yuck-factor than anyone really deserves. And let’s not even start on sex.
The world of 2000ft Above Worry Level is one of student-flats and anti-depressants.
It’s a gig-economy world, and fulltime employment is an unattainable imagining – along with a satisfying relationship, at least in the flesh.
Childhood memories are part horror-movie and part wistful longing for something that never really happened.
Marra’s verbal delivery is that of a comedian on Prozac, where an offkilter laugh-track echoes oddly behind each doleful confession.
The title ‘‘story’’ is a dystopian updating of Katherine Mansfield’s
At the Bay.
A family takes the summer holiday in a small self-made tent city in a camping ground near Naseby in Otago. There is a plague of wasps. The awkwardness between childhood and adolescence is acutely conveyed. It’s embarrassing, weird, alien, very New Zealand and incredibly vivid.
It is an excruciatingly awkward NZ On Airfunded TV sitcom in the Twilight Zone of nostalgia.
Flatmates is centred around the oddness of people sharing intimacy and living arrangements in student rental accommodation.
Marra effectively communicates the uneasiness of enforced proximity, the strange rituals involved in everything from food to nudity, along with a stack load of inept interpersonal engagements. It’s a rite of passage from which no-one graduates.
In Home, flat-pack furniture is assembled successfully, but the painting of a fence with the advice of a neighbour becomes an absurdist and endless action.
Syndrome could variously be read as an accidental overdose of antidepressants, or a call for help.
The rituals of hospital visiting, worrying about phone-chargers and a tearful climax analysing a Kanye West song are all part of the sign-up.
2000ft Above Worry Level is a real sign of the times. It is polite, non-assertive and devastating. Marra’s tone is simple and declarative, but his content reveals a world where you don’t want to laugh, but you do because the only other option is to cry – and you don’t want to do that.