Book review: Emma Neale's The Pink Jumpsuit

The Pink Jumpsuit

The Pink Jumpsuit
by Emma Neale
(Quentin Wilson Publishing, $35)

Emma Neale is a poet, novelist and former editor of esteemed literary journal Landfall. Her new book The Pink Jumpsuit is a collection of "short fictions, tall truths", a contemplation of family fault lines and varieties of love. Told in fragmented flash fictions and longer pieces, this collection often takes flight into the fantastical and the peculiar, to great effect.

There's a comforting sense of balance in this collection. The titular story feels essayistic and might be the tallest truth in the book. Placed near the end of the collection, it appears to be the skeleton key that unlocks the rest of the stories, revealing Neale's preoccupations with fathers, broken families, heartbreak and the magic that can be found in science.

The father of these stories is a workaholic, often toiling in laboratories. He's emotionally unavailable as well as physically absent, and he haunts the characters while alive and dead. In "Spirit Child", the father, with his "footsore, wrung-out heart" dies suddenly, leaving behind two grown sons and a new girlfriend. A year after his death, the girlfriend claims to be pregnant with his "spirit child". The eldest son appreciates the absurdity of this idea; yet, heavy with regret, he feels also an outrage at the potential for losing his father once again. ("'He's our dad,' some small voice in me wants to say. 'Ours.'")

Another version of this father appears in the story "In confidence": the daughter meets a young man at a party and he claims to be her half-brother, saying the father's sperm was donated for scientific research. She thinks he's a con man but remains uncertain about who is guilty of deceit and betrayal.

Each story dissects the unknowability of the father in a new way, and examines the impact of this formative relationship throughout their lives. The children are all searching for love, acceptance, truth. However, their inheritance is often something else entirely.

The inheritance in the standout "My salamander" is perhaps the most outlandish. The workaholic father's scientific research results in genetic modification of future generations. With echoes of Ted Chiang, this story expertly slides from the straight into the strange, both believable and fanciful. Another highlight is the story "Old, new, borrowed, blue", a short fiction broken into four meditations. The final one shares the same tensions and emotional depth of E. Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain.

Other flash fictions are whiplash quick and dirty. Neale's inner poet roams free in the shorter work, while in the longer stories her natural inclination for wordplay and subtle rhyme tends to be more hidden, like gems awaiting excavation.

Many of the stories in the collection are ruminations about love and the consequences of broken love—including, in "Worn once", the humiliating dread of the jilted bride. In "Apocalypse shelves", a young boy discovers his grandmother's dehydrated lover packed away for the end of the world Neale studies love like a scientist, intent on discovering its every detail. First love, long-lost love, paternal love; her characters learn that love is far more nuanced than we initially believe.

Throughout the stories, no matter how realist or surreal, there's a biting sensation that Neale's mining the human experience. The Pink Jumpsuit opens up the human, exposing the extraordinary in our lives, our imaginations, our failures, and the ever-present potential for wonder.
- Reviewed by Josie Shapiro

Josie Shapiro is a writer from Auckland. Her short fiction has been published in takahē, Newsroom, The Three Lamps and Ko Aotearoa Tātou / We Are New Zealand (OUP, 2020). A longer version of this review will appear on www.anzliterature.com.