Fiona Kidman: A Needle in the Heart

By PENELOPE BIEDER

In her first book since 1996, but her 20th overall, Fiona Kidman has produced six longish short stories. After finishing the last, titled Soup, a particularly good story about an affair, it is possible to look back and see that all the stories have a theme of isolation - or perhaps solitude.

While the somewhat lonely central character in each story may be surrounded by family and friends, she learns (and it is always a "she") that her life does offer choices, no matter how tough her circumstances. While this may sound a bleak foundation, these stories are so well-crafted, so lucid and wise, that to read them is ultimately uplifting.

Kidman has said she planned for them to "be written as a linked collection" and they are.

She has also said "each story takes as long as it needs to be told, not bound by conventions of length, not straining to be more or less than it is". And so she has time to paint in a vivid backdrop, to linger on a setting, be it a small North Island town or a farmhouse in the Far North.

Napier, Wellington and Kerikeri all feature, but never by name. Kidman drops just enough hints to establish these possible locations.

The stories are studies of character, as each woman deals with either a dysfunctional family, death, betrayal or a deep friendship.

Kidman's acute observations arise from a deep affection and compassion for humanity, and consequently there is something universal in these stories.

Kidman, 62, has seen it all and her unshockability serves her well in her writing, noticeably in the story Mister Blue Satin about a pimp and a court case where justice is not sitting that day.

In Families Like Ours, a suitably ironic title introduces a family like no other. On the first page Patricia's brother blows his hand off in a science laboratory accident, and this explosion reverberates down the years of her life. Unexpected twists and turns, where a seemingly minor character looms up later, are a luxury allowed by Kidman's longer format, which also means lives are more thoroughly explored than in the conventional shorter short story.

My favourite was Soup, a clever title alluding to a tomato soup recipe passed between two women, one of whom is having an affair with the other's husband - and of course to being deep in it. The ennui of marriage and dangerously comfortable suburbia is perfectly captured by Kidman. The two lovers are "contemptuous of those who live here, because they don't believe others experience love the way they do". Liese thinks she has discovered something nobody else knows.

The first story, A Needle in the Heart, starts at the races in 1925 with Queenie, who is getting too hot in her raceday finery, but it quickly jumps a generation to Esme, her daughter, who brings in her own precious income with skilled dressmaking at home.

She marries a railway signalman and they go to live in Railway Row in a small, claustrophobic central North Island town with a view of the mountain.

When the emergency sirens to denote a railway accident go off in the town, Esme breaks a needle on her machine and a piece gets lodged in her thumb. Throughout the rest of her life she feels at times as if the needle is passing through her heart.

It is the ordinariness of lives that Kidman renders dramatic, the daily suffocation that is suddenly replaced by a shattering letter, the subtle shifts of power in families as generations take each other's place.

Kidman's style is completely her own, distinctly local with its reluctant respect for communities and the silent pressure they exert on people to behave, which of course, thank goodness, they never quite do.

* Random House $26.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.