Victoria McHalick: The Honey Suckers

By PENELOPE BIEDER

The 15 stories in this first collection of fiction from young Wellington writer Victoria McHalick are polished perfection - each story has been buffed and cleaned of every unnecessary word until it positively gleams. And polished with the wisdom of a born writer.

Here is someone who can as truthfully portray the sadness in the heart of an old man as the confused sensations of first love rushing through the veins of an adolescent girl. Here is a writer who has so closely observed the human condition that every page with its crisp dialogue is alive and immediate.

There is a fearlessness too; not only in the stories about outrageous youth, such as the soaring tragedy of friendship in Pythagoras and the Mail Order Girl (with its great opening sentence: "School had finished and me and Paul Walters were heading for a long summer getting wasted"). McHalick is just as unafraid of tackling the emotional constipation of a repressed, peeved widow in Why Violet Dusts.

It is exciting to read the stories of a new talent, who was noticed in Emily Perkins' award-winning collection of stories by new writers, The Picnic Virgin. The title was a McHalick story, which is included here.

In the bio blurb it says McHalick "briefly flirted with the idea of practising law, qualifying as an English solicitor before returning to New Zealand in 1993." Thank goodness she has turned to writing instead, a far more solitary struggle than the law, made more complicated, no doubt, by her two young children. She has made the right choice. I salute a great new local writer, whose clever stories are all of ours, so true, so funny and so honest.

From the first story, Manfall, a wry look inside a marriage that is battling complacency, to the last, The Honey Suckers, a gorgeous, brief breathful about the suffocation of families, and 13 wonderful stories between, the reader is entranced.

HarperCollins

$24.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.