Staying afloat in a sea of loss

Superb stylist: Writer Elizabeth Smither.

Lola, Elizabeth Smither Penguin Books, $30

Relevant offers

LOLA DEARBORN has spent most of her adult life surrounded by death. It wasn't meant to be that way. When she married Sam Dearborn, he was determined not to follow his father into the family business of Dearborn & Zander. And there was no need: Ben, the other partner's son, was proving to be perfectly suited to undertaking, along with his well-chosen wife Alice. But then a car crash killed Ben and crippled Alice, so Sam and Lola had to come home and take their place.

Since this is a Smither novel, the telling of this story and its consequences is far from straightforward. It unfolds piece by piece, moving forward and backward through time, and between New Zealand and Australia, in a complex dance which requires the reader's full attention.

Smither can get away with this structural complexity, on the whole, because she's such a superb stylist. Her writing flows vividly along, conveying exactly what she wants it to without any sense of straining for effect. And she needs all her skills here because she's taking on that terrifying duo, death and ageing, as well as the usual pairing of love and sex.

Yet this book is far from grim, and sometimes it's hilarious – as when Lola's former daughter-in-law, Rhiannon, finds her niche in running a pet cemetery, or her new lover's appalling daughter, Brandy, throws tantrums over her divorce.

While Rhiannon takes up no more room than she needs to, Brandy looms a little too large, especially as she arrives so late in the piece. It's as though Smither had the idea of this character and couldn't resist bringing her to full-blown life, even though she's a distraction from the central story.

That story seems to fall into two parts. Everything holds together and moves along very effectively, with the past linking convincingly to the present, until Alice dies. After that, the novel seems to fall apart and lose momentum.

This is to some extent a consequence of losing Alice, who is exceptionally finely drawn and appealing. But maybe it's also a deliberate effect, mirroring Lola's own loss of place and direction as she tries to work out how to live what is left of her life beyond the confines of the family business, even of the family itself. Even if that is what Smither wanted to achieve, it's a dangerous ploy. The power of the writing alone isn't strong enough to hold most readers.

There are other problems too. The account of Lola's six-month sojourn as a resident in a Napier hotel (which it seems rather hard to believe could actually happen at all, in anything like modern New Zealand), and her encounters with the Sylvester Quartet, are somehow pallid and bloodless, compared with the strength and depth of the intermeshed family stories that precede them. The reappearance of Charles and the transplanted Italian, Luigi, stir things up again, and the open ending seems entirely right. But the lack of forward movement is a stumbling block.

Overall, then, I didn't find this book as compelling or well built as Smither's earlier trans-Tasman novel, The Sea Between. But it is attempting to do more difficult things – exploring how women, and men, try to stay afloat on the perilous seas of later life, how their course relates to what has gone before, and what new directions they may find when it's almost too late. Despite my reservations, I'm very happy to have had the pleasure of voyaging with Lola.

Finally, I couldn't help noticing the production values. The paper looks cheap, the ink density appears uneven, the setting can be erratic (unevenly spaced dashes, for example), and the cover is wishy-washy. Though I realise it must have been hard to come up with an appropriate cover image, those pallid "feminine" pink-and-grey flowers and feeble title font don't work, and belie the book's strengths.

But Lola is impeccably edited, and it's great to see Smither paying tribute to the superb skills of distinguished fiction editor Jane Parkin by dedicating the book to her.

Anne Else is a Wellington writer and reviewer.

- © Fairfax NZ News