Dilemmas cross generations

2000FT ABOVE WORRY LEVEL by Eamonn Marra (Victoria University Press, $30)

There are few times in life when you feel more at sea than when you are in your 20s. It’s the most liberating and confusing time you’ll ever have. You’re old enough to get in trouble, young enough to flail. You could be anything, you might be nothing.

Eamonn Marra’s 2000ft Above Worry Level may be the first great comic novel of New Zealand’s Generation Z, filled with jokes about flatmates and “the sad part of the internet” but still building up to a surprising emotional depth.

Wellington comedian and writer Marra has smoothly translated the rhythm of stand-up shows into his first book. He’s got an engaging sense of timing, with short, staccato sentences that build on one another just like a good comedian’s riffs.

2000ft is an interlocking set of short episodes, charting Marra’s unnamed narrator from youth to maturity, skipping around in time and place. He’s consumed by anxiety and poverty, surrounded by baked beans on toast and credit card bills. Stories hinge on everyday moments as simple as buying three pizzas for your flatmates or a meeting with a WINZ counsellor and how they can go astray.

“The Wart” follows a kind of slow-motion breakdown of the narrator at university, with a grotesquely funny climax, while the title story spotlights one summer at a wasp-infested family campout in Naseby, where Marra captures the kind of surreal conflicts and drama 11-year-olds can get into away from home.

But perhaps the most affecting story is “Home”, where the narrator returns home to live with his divorced mum for a time, aimlessly filling up space by painting a fence and helping his mum navigate social media. “Sometimes you have to do the same thing over and over again,” an older neighbour tells the narrator. “Like if you ever want to finish painting a fence.”

2000ft is also quietly about mental health. The snapshot approaches to the storytelling take the narrator from his nihilistic low point to a gently hopeful climax. Occasionally Marra can throw the reader off — characters come and go; time jumps about but generally 2000ft leaves you with a collage impression of a life, from aimless tween hijinks on bicycles to a job where you wear collared shirts and “only own five shirts but make sure to mix them up”.

It is often dazzlingly funny but there’s a melancholy that lingers and a sense of purpose that gradually comes into focus. Narrowing in on the mundane moments isn’t innovative — see also James Joyce’s Ulysses, just to start — but Marra’s clear-eyed forensic prose and humour helps him carve his own path.

He’s got a knack for a witty turn of phrase

— one character wears a “depression beard”; another debates buying fair-trade bananas or “unfair bananas”: “I was on a student budget, so I put two unfair bananas in my basket instead.”

2000ft may be a novel of Generation Z but what makes it more than that is Marra’s ease in showing a little of his narrator’s aimless, often hilarious dilemmas in all of us. “I always assumed I’d be famous by now and I wouldn’t have to deal with this kind of thing any more,” he muses while working at a coffee shop where demanding customers suck away his energy.

Does that sound like a privileged moan from the Instagram generation? Or is it a lament pretty much everybody comes to voice at one point in their lives, no matter what generation they’re from?

“I’m eating lots of beans,” he tells a doctor at one point. “I’m trying really hard to be better.”

Aren’t we all?