Stories from the law of averages

Victoria McHalick came late to the career of author, but she soon captured the human condition, writes MARGIE THOMSON.

Happiness, says Victoria McHalick, is the warmest, loveliest feeling that can come from the simplest things, such as domestic stability, or scoffing ice cream while watching a movie on the telly, or lying in bed listening to your children talking and laughing in another room.

But it doesn't make for a very compelling story and like most other writers, and the media itself, she finds that more interesting stories lie elsewhere - in melancholy, loss, the outcast, life-defining incidents that forever shape a person's character.

When McHalick's first collection of short stories, The Honey Suckers (Harper Collins, $24.95), burst upon us in May, it was reviewed both widely and rapturously.

"Polished perfection ... a born writer," the Herald enthused, adding that here was one who observes and truthfully portrays the human condition. Seldom can a new writer have been welcomed with quite such open arms as this one. And she is a new writer.

Unlike so many authors who have harboured their ambitions since they could first hold a pencil, and who have religiously written every day since, McHalick's life has been lived far more impetuously (if you can call a law degree impetuous) than that.

"I wasn't someone who worked out what I was going to be," she says.

But she's done all sorts of things that seem now, looking back, to have indeed been part of a narrative that led her to the day just a few years ago when she decided to write a novel. Life, like fiction, takes shape as you tell it.

She got law and arts degrees from Victoria University in 1988 before heading to London to pursue her real love, which, at that stage, was music. She played the piano and sang atmospheric, soulful works that now mortify her when she listens to the tapes.

Once she got to London she teamed up with a Spanish musician and together they made 80s techno music with a softly spoken ethereal vocal washing over it. Huge fun.

But sometimes, like when she was back in Wellington for a visit, working in a wine bar and serving lawyers she had been through university with, she would wonder if she had wasted her life. Yet stories such as Where to, love?, based loosely on some of her London experiences, prove crises can be drawn on later and made worthwhile through art.

"If you read that story and thought it might be autobiographical you'd think, 'What a total waste of a life'. But then, when you can turn it into a story about dependency and need and that line between love and dependency, then all that heartbreak becomes highly worthwhile," she laughs.

But enough heartbreak. Coming back to Wellington, marriage, children and living in the suburbs pretty much happened at once. She gave up on the music, feeling she was past her use-by date.

"I wasn't going to get the call to join the Spice Girls. We had an old computer here and I thought, everyone is supposed to have a book in them, so I sat down and wrote a novel."

Neither that nor the next was good enough to send anywhere, but somewhere in there she saw an advertisement for Emily Perkins' anthology of new writing, wrote her first short story and sent it in.

To her delight and amazement, it was accepted and, what's more, chosen as the title story for the collection, The Picnic Virgin.

McHalick was on her way. Soon a postcard arrived in the mail from Sam Neill, expressing interest in creating a screenplay of The Picnic Virgin.

Somewhat to her surprise, she finds she has gone down a different path to the accessible literary fiction one she had set herself, and is working on a television screenplay with a contract to write an episode for an upcoming New Zealand series. That's okay: she feels she's got a lot to learn and everything is grist to the mill. Anyway, in among bringing up her 5- and 7-year-old children, she is working on yet another novel. This one is into its second draft and may eventually be deemed good enough to show to a publisher.

She is still at the point of discovering the strengths and weaknesses of her own methods. While some writers, for instance, produce tidy little chunks of text each day, McHalick can churn out several thousand words in one sitting, all before 3 pm when the children come home. Then she stops and won't work again until they are asleep. Writing comes before housework, but nothing comes before the children, she says.

Such productivity puts a huge responsibility on the polishing stage, and possibly creates a new standard for the term first draft.

But, the logistics of dealing with such huge drifts of text aside, McHalick loves writing. Doing it, she is pale, looking like death, not able to eat much, but happy and with the feeling of sick, excited anticipation in her stomach of one who has fallen in love. Writing is like the guiltless affair, she tells her husband.

But what does her law degree have to do with all this? McHalick remembers an American lecturer telling her once that the only reason people studied law was as a meal ticket, something she, who never intended to be a lawyer, disputed.

She had studied science all through school, and at university double-majored in law and English literature.

So, she told that cynical man, she had worked out at 17 that "scientists were looking for rules to apply to phenomena, and artists were looking at the human condition, so if you apply rules to people you perfectly merge science and art. That makes law a wonderful object of study".

The American lecturer twanged in disgust, "Victoria, you're so spacy," but McHalick still feels she was on the right track.

"I do feel very strongly that the law is a series of true, fascinating stories, and they are all about greed and deception and stupidity and depravity and all the things on the fringe of actual human behaviour."

And you often judge the truth by the two sides of the story, so it's actually a wonderful place to train to be a writer.

"It makes you really aware of trying to set the consequences, so at the end you've made your case.

"I think a good story has that wonderful balance of inevitability and surprise, so that you get to the end and think, 'Oooh, so that's what it was about,' but when you go back it's completely satisfying, and you think, 'Of course'."

And that shock of recognition is exactly the sense one has from reading McHalick's stories. Happy she may be now in the suburbs, but her stories stretch beyond her front gate, tapping into powerful rivers of loneliness that may, as she quotes Huxley as saying, constitute the true human condition where we are all island universes.

You won't feel happy after reading McHalick's stories, but you will feel wistful, filled up, satisfied.

You will feel for her characters and their lives, and surely that is the proof of a good story well told.

* McHalick is appearing at the Going West literary festival at 3 pm on Sunday, September 16, in a panel discussion and reading entitled Unknown Landfalls with writers Tim Corballis and David Lyndon Brown and Landfall editor Justin Paton.