David Geary: A Man of the People

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

Reading David Geary is a bit like being mugged. With the first sentence of the first story in his debut short-fiction collection, he captures your attention completely. You immediately start constructing plausible ways the story could go - is there a murder coming up? Are we in a church setting? Possibly it's science fiction?

Geary's next sentence throws most of these guesses into the recycle bin and sets off a whole set of new ones. Entire worlds are blossoming and dying behind your eyes, and you're only two sentences in.

Is this the accidental cleverness of someone who doesn't really know what he's doing, or is the whole story going to be this sharp?

Geary knows what he's doing, and he's very sharp indeed. Reading him takes all your concentration. That initial story, especially, allows you to make sense of it only if you put it together like a jigsaw or a particularly fiendish connect-the-dots puzzle. It's an absorbing, challenging process, rewarding both as an abstract intellectual exercise - read David Geary, build your mental biceps - and for the poignancy of the story which eventually emerges.

"Poignant" is a word you could apply to most of these stories. A lonely man pondering the collapse of his marriage after a meaningless fling. A secretly gay politician musing on life in the closet. A tow-truck driver trying to deal with his best friend's death. Not merry tales, but not monotonal either.

Geary writes wonderful dialogue, and he has a dry wit. My favourite throw-away line is: "I prefer smoking to suicide. It's like paying the mortgage - a bit each month and one day it's all yours."

Considered at the level of individual sentences, individual images, there's no unusual beauty or grace in Geary's use of language. The power of his writing lies in his astonishing capacity for building up linguistic and conceptual patterns, so that each story becomes a complex web of interconnected motifs.

This being so, it's curious that the one major weakness of the collection should be its interconnectedness. It comes as a pleasant surprise, the first time you notice that the main character in a story is a minor one from an earlier story, or that one story's house next door has become another one's central location. But as these links build up - and they do, to the point where you're reading something about a third of the way towards being a novel - it starts to feel oddly claustrophobic.

The stories are powerful precisely because each one shows you the inside of someone's mind. There's a sense that Geary is playing with endless possibilities, drawing random patterns of language together to sculpt the unique and unpredictable idiosyncrasies of his characters' thoughts. There's no logical reason why it should undercut that to have the characters be continually bumping into each other, as though they were walk-ons in a low-budget soap - but I found it did.

It came as a relief, after this overdose on the "six degrees of separation" effect, to put the book down for a couple of days and then read a story at random.

Suddenly the structural tricks that tie the book together were irrelevant. David Geary is a major talent, and this is superb writing.

VUP, $29.95

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.