Queer love, family secrets and building the lives we want
Greta and Valdin,” the newly-released novel from Maori writer Rebecca K Reilly, follows two 20-something siblings as they navigate family, romance and early career hiccups in New Zealand.
The story is narrated alternately by Greta, a broke bisexual master’s student looking for love, and her brother Valdin, a formerly-mute TV show host who is still hung up on his ex. Queer relationships and their various forms are ever-present, rendered with intensity, complexity and passion.
Reilly lets younger characters with fluid sexuality explore their desires without discrediting the strong social stigma that older queer characters have experienced. It’s a delicate balance, affirming bisexual characters while allowing the more decidedly gay characters their own space, too.
A back cover blurb indicates the inciting plot incident is Valdin’s trip to Buenos Aires, where he rekindles a relationship with an ex, but this doesn’t happen until roughly page 150. Until then, the lover exists only in descriptive conversations to other characters. The closest glimpse of their life together is shown when Valdin is briefly caught in a reverie brought up by the mention of Buenos Aires.
Nearly all the book’s major plot points are revealed to readers through dialogue between characters. The entire novel is a series of conversations, with short interjections from Greta and Valdin’s anxious inner monologues. Rarely are characters alone, or reminiscing, or doing anything but actively engaging in conversation.
It’s an odd choice for a novel, a medium which has unlimited access to narrative tools to relay information to readers. Yet characters give screenplay-like exposition dumps. This isn’t necessarily bad — The family lore, covering secret romances and multigenerational escapes from behind the Iron Curtain, are intriguing and full of life.
The book is boosted by the farflung roots of each character, which run the gamut from the former Soviet Union to Spain, Germany, and, of course, their native New Zealand. These complex histories could only be drawn by someone with an intimate familiarity of these cultures.
But the reliance on dialogue can become tedious. These intimate conversations also undermine the alleged secrecy of certain family members — nearly everyone spills after another character’s vaguely probing question, sometimes before the reader even has time to find out that a mystery exists.
Some of the dialogue is also clearly meant to fill readers in, rather than establishing a plot point or a character arc. For example, late in the book, two characters who may be growing a little too close reminisce about a past birthday by telling each other exactly what happened: “It wasn’t your fault that the ferry tickets blew away and that aggressive vendor pretended he didn’t remember selling you them. Even though he saw it all happen,” he says. She replies: “Who cares what the Sicilian ferry ticket salesman thought of you.”
None of these are necessarily flaws, to be clear. But they are certainly storytelling quirks and they shape every part of the novel.
The back cover blurb is accurate in at least one way: all of these conversations do build to an “exuberant conclusion,” when the narrative opens into the minds of other characters in a final sequence that beautifully brings the idiosyncratic little family together.