Weekend read

Tess, Kirsten McDougall, Victoria University Press, $25

Award-winning Wellington writer Kirsten McDougall honed her craft on the short story form. Having published a collection, The

Invisible Rider, in 2012 and numerous individual stories, she brings us a slender debut novel that is assured and well realised.

Tess can be read in an evening, but lingers in the mind long after, mostly because of the strength and freshness of its lead character, 19-year-old Tess.

Tess is running from Benny, a vicious boyfriend, and as is gradually revealed, from a regrettable past. Drenched and exhausted, she is encountered by dentist Lewis on the road outside Masterton.

She’s walking, not hitchhiking, and at first resists his offer of a ride, then takes a chance.

This could so easily then have slipped into Kiwi hitchhiker horror cliche. But McDougall is better than this. And while there is undoubtedly a building of psychological tension, not least because of Tess’ conviction that Benny will find her, this is not a classic thriller.

Set as Christmas and New Year 1999 approach, the end of the millennium, this is a perceptive examination of two damaged people who respond to the pain and loneliness within each other, their back stories unfolding as Tess stays on in Lewis’ large old home on the edge of town taming his overgrown garden in return for her lodging.

Lonely and depressed, Lewis, a widower whose wife Hannah died in tragic circumstances, is estranged from his adult children, both of whom enter the narrative part way through.

Tess, the daughter of a mother who, unable to cope, took her to be raised by her grandmother Sheila in an isolated rural house, is an outsider with little experience of the world and its evils.

So it’s unsurprising that she fell into bad company when she moved from the countryside to Auckland. Circumstances bring this pair together; it’s a love story, but not the love story we think it’s going to be in the opening chapters.

The claustrophobia of the setting, mostly Lewis’ home and garden, adds to the hothouse atmosphere which becomes even more heated when Lewis’ daughter Jean arrives to stay. And when son Jonti, who lives away from home for reasons gradually revealed, visits the family dynamics become even more strained and complicated.

The children are less successfully drawn than the two main characters, as is the lurking Alan, ostensibly Lewis’ friend.

But while they fail to engage in the same way as Tess and Lewis, McDougall understands well the advantage of the gradual reveal, teasing out her story yet leading inexorably to some kind of denouement and keeping the reader off balance, never quite knowing what comes next.