Frankie McMillan is one of our best flash fiction writers: this is a genre that stretches from traditional short stories condensed to a few hundred words, all the way to prosepoetry. The 57 pieces in McMillan’s fascinating new book — her sixth — are split into five sections, organised loosely by theme, forming a genre-bending collection of prose, poetry and essay-ish creative non-fiction.
McMillan’s 2016 collection My Mother and the Hungarians, longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, was intensely personal; the title of McMillan’s most recent book, The Father of Octopus Wrestling (2019), suggests her trademark wit and imaginative embrace of the surreal. Once again, there’s a delightful streak of surrealism in this collection — Mr Whippy is a recurring character, framed either as an icecream salesman or a sentient cartoon mascot — and the thematic link of water, with settings that include lakes, rivers and an inflatable pool; and roles for swans and a taniwha. One piece, Steadfast’s Breath, a particular standout — introduces the reader to the fairground/travelling circus that provides a setting for several of the other works here.
McMillan’s publisher calls these “small stories”, but The Wandering Nature of Us Girls sits at the lyrical, poetic edge of flash fiction, with a skilfully managed, deceptively loose approach to punctuation. For this reason, the collection is best savoured a bit at a time — read it all at once and the edges of the individual narratives get a little bit blurred in the string of 300-word sentences.
An example of this is the final piece of the first section, Explaining the Sputnik dog to my child. This uses full stops sparingly, its long-running sentences evoking a sense of complicity both from the narrator and in the reader: “Whatever else Laika was thinking as they strapped on her harness and whatever else they said except ‘Please forgive us’ and ‘You have enough oxygen’ and ‘You’re going round nine times, Laika, nine times around the Earth,’ and whatever else happened.”
As the title suggests, several of the stories are told from the point of view of children or young women. The “girls” crop up at intervals, usually wild, sometimes cruel, and almost always defined by their relationships to one another. The way McMillan uses her child narrators is exceptional — there’s no sentimentality here.
The unthinking cruelty of children is on full display, and their understanding of the adult world shows no irritating precocity. Actually, many of the adults in The Wandering Nature of Us Girls don’t understand children either. The boy who grew antlers is a particularly vivid story, told from the point of view of the boy’s parents, who insist that they are “fine” with the occurrence: “We raised our hands in the air, it was a stage, we explained, yes, just a stage our son was going through.”
The Wandering Nature of Us Girls
This is a book written in sepia, though without any suggestion of a rose-tinted lens. There’s a feeling of age to the entire collection — almost every piece comes across as being set in the past. Contemporary events and hints at modernity are there, but each feels conspicuous. Going backwards to the industrial revolution, or the Edwardian period, feels more natural than coming forward to the 21st century. One of the few pieces which truly feels modern — Coming toward her, a thoroughly decent man from Bumble — might be narrated by a bird as easily as a woman. In another, McMillan recalls a real-life stunt from 1901, when one Annie Edson Taylor went over Niagara Falls in a barrel (and survived).
Although the title refers to “wandering”, this is a collection where the disparate pieces, and sections, flow from one to the other. McMillan’s exceptional touch with each story means it’s unlikely that a reader will end up lost.
Jack Remiel Cottrell’s first book, Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson and other very short stories, was published in 2021. A longer version of this review will appear on anzliterature.com
