Fiction and essays collide
FALSE RIVER
by Paula Morris (Penguin Random House NZ, $37) Reviewed by James Robins
Athread runs through Paula Morris’ new collection of terse stories and interrogating essays False River — a strong current, if you like. Some of the pieces, as an author’s warning note makes clear, began life as fiction but have since morphed into essays, while other essays have been published in the past as fiction. As Morris writes in Great Long Story, a strange negotiation of the anecdotes and folk tales about the death of bluesman Robert Johnson: “Everything I’ve written here is true, apart from the things that are wrong, and the things that are lies, and the things that are misremembered.” Truth is a sinuous and malleable thing, bent to the needs of characters and creators alike.
Stories can be fantasies for the man who gazes at a painting of three noble-born, blond girls and imagines their fairytale in Three Princesses. Or they can be commodities, chopped and screwed to fit a brief, to be repackaged and sold by a faceless committee, as in Premises — a clever riff on the mock-Austen romance.
Stories can be swamped by mythology and apocrypha, ideology and self-aggrandisement, becoming stories of their own. The longest and most astute critical essay here is on the iconic Little House on the Prairie series written by Laura Ingalls Wilder but burnished and polished by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Morris shovels out decades of fibs and opportunisms and “things that are misremembered”, squaring the pioneer idyll of the novels with the more rigorous, desperate existence that inspired them.
Stories, too, can be therapy, as in the three best pieces Morris has collected: Women, Still Talking, Inheritance and Sick Notes. Each of them are riven with the pain and endurance of a family losing its figureheads. Morris’ mother died in 2014; her father two years later.
Sick Notes is especially tender, weaving together her childhood of feigned sick bay visits with literary cripples (The Secret Garden, Heidi), and her own father’s final months. Morris tries to rationalise impending grief, writing in a not dissimilar way to Diana Wichtel in her superlative memoir Driving to Treblinka: clear-eyed, undaunted, strong. But where Wichtel searched rigorously for concrete and documentary fact, Morris examines the stories we tell ourselves as a balm — a palliative bandage for raw wounds.