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.