Review: Poor People With Money by Dominic Hoey

Poor People With Money by Dominic Hoey. Image / Supplied

Reviewed by Louise Ward, Wardini Books.

In this novel of Aotearoa New Zealand, we meet Monday Wooldridge, a smart person with great personal ambition, hampered by outstandingly poor impulse control. Her chaotic adult life is an extension of her chaotic childhood which was full of love, violence, struggle and poverty.

The story is Monday's monologue to her lost little brother, Eddy, gone for many a year. Not too long after Monday saves him from a house fire and is hailed a hero, lovely, clever wee Eddy goes missing, destroying the family. Dad, a big, happy, often drunk fighter, fades and withdraws. Mum, a functional, hardworking drinker with book smarts, is lost to early onset dementia.

Part One is all Auckland. Monday flats with JJ, a sweet, introverted boy who has a research job and smokes a lot of weed. Monday's days are spent working at a bar for an absent boss, struggling to pay for her mum's care home, and training at the gym. Monday is a fighter, she nails her Muay Thai bouts, her winnings supplementing the minimum wage that is sometimes accidentally spent on drink and drugs, to her horror the next morning.

Part Two is set in Northland, in a "village so small it is not on most maps". There is, fittingly, a map in the front of the book that made me very happy. This is JJ's home and to where he and Monday flee when she seriously messes up their life in Auckland. They live in a shack surrounded by poverty, hope, good humour, love, native birds and a subsistence lifestyle. Monday and JJ are in hiding with a load of money that is not theirs and there are some very bad people on their trail.

Monday is mayhem personified. She radiates love and goodness but finds life such a struggle that a quick win in the form of a laugh, a hook up, a few drinks and a few lines are irresistible moments of light in what is mostly a lurch from one disaster to the next. Her reactions are immediate, sometimes rational, mostly in the moment. She has massive talent and works hard for the opportunities that come her way, then self-sabotages. Everything that happens is her fault, or she thinks it is.

This is writing of raw and shining brilliance. Monday is luminescent: rough as guts, a non-reader due to unsupported dyslexia, sharply observant. On a posh bar in the city: "Everyone drives big Jeeps and cries if you look at them wrong." On her boss: "His face looked like a drawing someone had started and then given up on."

There's a great scene where Monday and JJ have scrabbled together enough change to get a takeout. They sit on a bench outside a funeral parlour, chatting amiably enough until Monday drops some chicken and swears at the top of her voice. With her mushed up fighting face "like a broken dinner plate" she comes across as every inch the crazy, loud, care in the community lady, yelling "What?" when passers-by stare at her. "You're really not helping my social anxiety," says dear, sweet JJ.

Dominic Hoey's writing can veer from spare, raw prose to the most poetic pieces of whispering beauty. It leaves you feeling like Monday just kicked you in the guts and followed up by enfolding you in her strong, crazy arms.

Structurally, there are three parts and not so much chapters as short sections, headed by Monday's left-field, sweary observations. It gives the narrative urgency, Monday dodging and weaving through the pages, dragging us in her wake.

I haven't even told you about the really big chicken (it's a rooster), Romeo the handsome psycho and his dog Pickles, the vampires, the feral Webster kids. Poor People With Money is so rich and madly entertaining that I'm just going to read it again, immediately, as should you.

Poor People With Money by Dominic Hoey (Penguin, $37)