Stead-fast production

The vigour and variety of Karl Stead’s writing remains remarkable. At the age of — well, he’s been voting for a fair while now — he last year finished a term as Poet Laureate; the essays and reviews continue to flow and there was a well-received book of short stories in 2016.

I won’t call him prolific — the term suggests ease and a certain superficiality — but I’m very happy to call him productive.

Set in 2014-15, The Necessary Angel is insistently specific to those years. There are Brexit rumbles, Isis, the Ukraine, global warming, Charlie Hebdo, Obama’s dignified but struggling presidency. It’s set with equal detail in and around the Sorbonne University; Parisian restaurants, shoe shops, funeral etiquette, politics, social proprieties and nuances: we get them all.

As you’d expect from Stead, there’s a highly literate and literary set of parameters. Characters quote and/or reference Balzac, Apollinaire, Dickens, Puccini, “a classic French Movie” (all these in the first 20 pages) as naturally as we’d mention a cafe — and those are named as well. It’s like eavesdropping on an intellectually gymnastic university staffroom or reading Aldous Huxley without the longueurs.

NZ-born Max Jackson (a nod to Stead’s old varsity here?) is a professionally mobile, personally “somewhat estranged” academic with a WWI poetry project. His upstairs wife Louise is finishing her book on Flaubert. Sylvie has a TV producer partner, whose channel screens Strindberg’s plays. Helen, whose lithium medication provides the novel’s title, is growing an obsession with Edward Thomas. Even the dog is bilingual. Oh, and the sex scene includes semantics.

They’re faceted characters, new sides constantly glinting into life. Stead glides from

THE NECESSARY ANGEL

by CK Stead (Allen & Unwin, $37) Reviewed by David Hill one to another, with relationships that are intense yet tenuous, always growing and shifting. Personal idiosyncrasies are deftly rendered: a traditional professorial tantrum, a standing black coffee for breakfast, a cleaning lady with firm moral views.

Eloquent individual scenes take us to the grave of Katherine Mansfield’s shonky mentor, a tattoo parlour, Martin Amis’ latest, more cafes, more literary quotations. Events move towards a theft, an outrage, a march and a controlled explosion.

Dialogue is vivid, springy, occasionally resembles cerebral ping-pong. Prose is honed, precise, sometimes surprisingly playful. It’s a narrative quickened by cleverness and rooted in craft.

I predict it’ll be the only NZ novel of recent times which features a seminar on Nabokov. I predict also that it will give Stead followers the familiar experience of being guided by an author as “lucid and persuasive” as his protagonist, one who knows exactly where and how to take you.

● Hear CK Stead at the Auckland Writers Festival on Friday, May 18. He talks with Lloyd Jones about European connections.