Generational divide
Pip Adam’s second novel The New Animals is about a clutch of Aucklanders who work for a fashion label. It takes place over a single afternoon and evening, and its characters are divided by generation. Of the older set, there is Carla, a pre- menopausal malcontented hairdresser who owns a dog she suspects of being demonically possessed.
Sharona, an equally put- upon seamstress at the label, compulsively masturbates in the workroom. Circling them is Duey, whose popularity is put down to height and tattoos.
What unites them is a palpable sense of failure; becoming servants to a new surge of millennial youngsters who didn’t have to struggle for their lot, for their name in lights. They include Tommy, who runs an apparently hip label, his cronies Kurt and Cal, and a frumpy, forever- smiling makeup artist called Elodie.
Adam spends 200- odd pages wandering through each character’s head, meditating on their seething resentment or their entitlement, before passing on. The content of their brains is reflected in the prose — a stultified colloquial patois free of humour or poetry.
Some passages consist of nothing but a barrage of names: “Then Carla had gone away. And then June had become Duey in plain sight, slowly, week after week. Duey had become Duey. Sharona had been there, Carla hadn’t. Sharona would see Duey out…” and so on.
Other sentences are barely comprehensible: “Carla was old now, comfortable and smart and quiet, but not weirdly.” Or: “Black sculptures of humans and animals shone from the walls and floor, the only roundness and body.” ( Black, you’ll notice, doesn’t shine.)
There’s a fundamental misunderstanding at its heart, too. The book’s blurb tells us that Tommy and Kurt et al represent “the new sincere, the anti- irony”. Generation X rebelled, in other words, and the millennials will save everyone with their intense seriousness. The truth is the reverse. To spend any time with a typical millennial is to be exposed to supersardonic language and ultra- ironic sentiment — none of which is present here.
All of this might be forgiven if it can be conclusively proved that Adam is aiming for satire. Why else should we be made to care about the venality, the pointlessness, the self- absorption and the narcissism of the fashionista and the mock- aesthete?
I suspect Adam really isn’t intending satire at all. Nothing pierces the intense seriousness of her study and no one emerges any less contemptible than when they first appeared.