Sarah Quigley: Shot

By PHILIPPA JAMIESON

The vibrant cover of Sarah Quigley's latest novel is a photo of a young woman, skirt billowing against a blue sky, and a small jet plane high above that seems to fly from her hand.

It conveys the essence of Shot, someone snapped in an instant of action - and from this image we can speculate about who she is and the nature of her journey.

Set in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Alaska, the novel is both frolicsome and reflective, and features a memorable heroine.

Lena Domanski, the youngest of a Polish immigrant family, is a professional comedian. In the opening paragraph she is shot in the head by a stray bullet - wrong time, wrong place - and her life flashes before her eyes.

The novel is structured in three parts: before, during and after the shooting.

In the first part Lena recalls her childhood in the seedy Tenderloin district of San Francisco; the second part, all of three pages, her fleeting thoughts when the bullet hits; and the third part, how her life changes after that moment.

It's a neat framework, allowing her to set up the characters and setting, the story then gaining momentum after the shooting.

Quigley affectionately portrays Lena's family as an idiosyncratic bunch, with a tinge of the surreal that reminded me of Salman Rushdie.

Lena's doting father, Mr Domanski, is preoccupied with amateur theatre, full of bad jokes, and sets up a chain of Polish restaurants.

Mrs Domanski is an unfulfilled housewife yearning for Poland, who takes up dancing and then a career in cosmetics.

Lena's stroppy sister Bella is a taxidermist, critical but loyal. For her brother "Delayed" Davey, a childhood obsession with making tinfoil rockets evolves into its logical adult equivalent.

Lena herself is a mix: she's very much her own person - she becomes a vegetarian at a young age - but is also influenced by others.

Her career in comedy begins at age 7, in a hilarious episode when she performs a dance at the Polish Sausage (her father's eatery) and accidentally sets her backside on fire.

From then on this rather solemn and thoughtful girl is "forced into a lifetime of funniness" - people find humour in her very seriousness.

Each character has a distinctive voice, and indeed even the voices have lives of their own: "a voice like a dying wave on a stony beach", or "her voice was so tiny that it rolled under the wheels of the traffic and was gone". And every now and then the bullet chimes in, alternately whispering, whining, threatening, asserting itself in the text.

Lena's brush with death changes her life dramatically - she realises with stark clarity that she can no longer be a comedian, and takes up photography instead.

As a child she coveted her brother's camera.

"For if she knew one thing already, it was this: to see differently is everything. An escape, a gift, a burden, but always valuable, and the reason that poets and dreamers wake up in the mornings. And so she began to train her eyes to do the job instead. Snap! A blink with both eyes, or a wink with one, and in that instant - for an instant - life would be stilled."

Scattered through the book are "freeze-frame" paragraphs, describing a person as if in a photograph. Of course, the title refers to both gunshot and snapshot.

Perhaps as a way of coming to terms with her own loss, Lena takes pictures of others who have suffered a loss.

Her journey takes her to Alaska, where she stays with a tracker and a mute child found alone in the wilderness.

One by one, all the characters lose something - a career, a wife, a family, an ear - but against the backdrop of silent snow Lena comes to realise that loss can give way to gain.

Shot is an adventurous development in Sarah Quigley's fiction. It is set entirely in the United States, with no connection to New Zealand, and it's as if the author's imagination was set completely free to roam.

Apart from the odd out-of-place phrase (referring to US dollars, for example), the language hums and sparks, rich with metaphor and simile, wrapped around fluid dialogue and propelled by plenty of action to keep readers on their toes.

Quigley will be a guest at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival, May 16-18.

* Virago, $34.95

* Philippa Jamieson is a Dunedin freelance writer.