Into the core of memories
Peter Wells put the final burnish on this engrossing, hugely satisfying family memoir and personal exploration as he was recovering from major cancer treatment. How’s that for commitment — and courage?
In his previous fiction and non-fiction, Wells has been much concerned with identity, secrets, stereotypes and definitions. Dear Oliver has all these. Partly it’s the narrative of “an ordinary Pakeha family . . . not notable for anything in particular — except its quiet genius in being itself”, whose members the author lifts from “the background of Dickens’ novels” into faceted, textured lives.
The Northes/Norths/Northeys/Northys emigrated to 1850s Napier where they flourished financially, if not socially. They became prosperous coal merchants, which gave them a certain . . . dusty prominence. From them came Wells’ mother, who stands at the centre of this book. Bess lived to 100; was fragile yet enduring, yoked in a marriage of emotional terrorism to the author’s war-damaged and emotionally absent father, carrying a weight of illogical guilt at having borne two gay sons.
Like many of the best memoirs, this is also a meditation on self. In this case, it’s from someone who almost from the start was aware of “not being as others were”; who knew that his mother was sometimes troubled by him and his father disappointed in him.
Dear Oliver is framed around letters. Wells quotes Deborah Lutz on a letter’s “ability to hold a spiritual or physical portion of the self” and praises the form’s “humane qualities . . . slow communication”.
So we get his pages to his parents when he comes out as gay (and what a 1970s haircut he had), the ones between him and brother Russell and an archive recovered from the latter after his sundering death from Aids.
There’s the author’s letter to his little San Francisco great-nephew of the title, as Wells explains to him earlier lives and worlds, exchanges from court archives,
Bess’ message from her
American lover and a quite marvellous textual post-mortem on an “epic” from his imperious grandmother and Wells’ reply, eight years after her death.
You don’t just read this memoir; you feel it. “Hindsight is an erratic, even a duplicitous gaze,” concedes the author but he takes us unerringly into the core of memories and their implications. It’s a meticulously written story, pitch- and pace-perfect most of the time, a tad fulsome once or thrice, generous, forgiving, yet forensically unflinching when necessary.
Well done to Massey University Press for a clean and elegant job. Several ticks for the abundant illustrations: photos, memorial messages; chocolate box covers; business cards.
The captions are often short stories in themselves: “Some part of my father never came home”; “A white wedding at last”.
And very well done to Wells. Very best wishes, too, from all of us who care for words as good as yours.