Katy Robinson: The Linoleum Room

This novel starts with the tension, pace and storyline set-up of a story by, say, Elmore Leonard, the American crime writer. Then, sadly, it becomes what is now too common in New Zealand — a "literary novel" which expends itself in a surfeit of detail, too many irrelevant visual observations and too much pointless chatter. The denouement arrives as a shock but any tension has long ago dissipated.

That may seem harsh, but Robinson is one of a number of recent novelists who may write well but who ignore the adage that action is character, in preference to the belief that the talk and internal musings of a small group of characters, plus pointillist descriptions of place, are enough to carry a story.

Mia and her good-looking, sadomasochist, photo-grapher-partner live in a large house in the country where he exercises a malign control over her and takes their sexual relationship to psychopathic extremes in what he claims are the interests of his art. Then he disappears.

A group of Mia's relatives and friends — two half-sisters and the lover and brother of one of them — come to stay over Christmas, drinking, drugging and opening up the sores of the past. The dialogue reads mostly like reportage of the conversations of people with under-developed personalities and stunted sensibilities who have nothing to say that is entertaining or edifying.

This is the sort of irrelevant detail that abounds: "We cross a bridge, spanning silt and rivulets. The tyres rumble. The dry riverbed flickers ochre through the slits in the railing with the speed of our passage. On the other side of the bridge there is a ramshackle graveyard and a pedestrian crossing. Wilted field flowers in jam jars. Bleached box houses. Black rainbow arches of half-buried truck tyres fencing off the dust gardens from the road. LSZ. Tombstones jutting out of the earth at wry angles." And more. This is not creating mood. It is an aside. Nothing happens here. We just pass it. It has no relevance to the story.

Or this: "I tilt my head, resting it against the soap dish, so that I can see the map of the world. So flat. I count the countries I've been to, making a list in my head. Hard to believe that, centuries ago, people set out to navigate the world. Funny that all these squiggles, the blue and the green, the tonalities of mountain ranges, rivers and lakes, have been exacted by cartographers. Once upon a time there was only a blank space, horizon. And maybe, if you journeyed too far, you could fall off the end of the world into the dark galaxy out there, into nothing."

Whatever happened to lean and tensile narrative that feeds your imagination with understatement and brisk innuendo?

Picking on Robinson alone is probably unfair because this sort of writing, with indulgent set pieces — what one reviewer called "Look, Mum, no hands writing" — is becoming more and more common, a contagion.

Does literary fiction have to be dull? The answer lies not so much in rapid-read novels like Jenny Patrick's Denniston Rose — although there's much in that story that is admirable — but in the work of the many established New Zealand novelists who write high quality prose, tell good stories, and take their readers with them.

Too many writers are not thinking enough about the reader and too much about demonstrating their amazing powers of observation and expressing their inner selves in their version of Sunday-best prose.

So, as in The Linoleum Room, too many stories by new local writers lie under the rubble of affected irrelevancies. It is perhaps too easy to blame this trend on creative writing schools, because too many good books have emerged from those places, but one thing that seems common to so many is the mandatory image that often seems contrived or puzzling. For example, two on one page in this novel are: "I'll leave tomorrow," he says. "Okay, then," I say. "My words are as casual as those of a checkout operator to a customer." And then: "When morning comes to me it is as bright as scissors."

I take no pleasure from this criticism because writing a novel is so arduous and materially unrewarding, and especially because Robinson has talent. The evidence for this comes when Gary, an unsophisticated country boy neighbour, sneaks over to the house and watches the main characters through the window. This passage has narrative drive, is funny, and sad, and is a superb piece of characterisation and storytelling.