Helen Brown meets Emily Perkins to discuss her fractal, shifting novel about a family, The Forrests.
Emily Perkins
The novel I would most like to press into my friends’ suitcases this summer begins in a heat hazy garden where a man is handling his family’s prized Kodak Instamatic video camera, “as though it were an undulating live animal, a ferret or a snake, and it was leading him”, while his three children crouch inside a cardboard box. Readers soak up the “sandy and soft” scent of the cardboard, the “trickling” birdsong and the way clover flowers “bumble” against the cheek. The family – after whom the novel is named – are the Forrests. They have moved from “oh my god the hub of the world, New York City” to New Zealand. “At last,” seven-year-old Dorothy thinks she hears her father say, “we live in a cloudless society.” A lovely mishearing in a powerful, impressionistic novel where time “belongs to the sunlight”.
I’d rather slip The Forrests into suitcases than sell it in words because, as its author Emily Perkins acknowledges, it’s not easy to make this book sound as special as it feels. It’s about an ordinary family, with an average share of tragedy and banality. The main characters include an accountant, a florist, a drifting circus performer and a stay-at-home mum. It’s a book in which suppressed passions and sudden grief slot in around school runs, sales calls and hospital visits. “It sounds terrible, doesn’t it,” groans Perkins down the line from New Zealand, “but I wanted to celebrate the ordinary – to bring an ordinary life to the forefront and give it that attention because I feel there’s a lot of value in that. Dorothy’s not a heroic person. She doesn’t do anything extraordinary but she has this enormous joy in physical existence, in that reality of being in the world. She has this quality that she describes as ‘hot noticing’.”
Related mostly from Dorothy’s point of view, The Forrests stays true to the way families drift and shift over decades. Characters you last remember as chubby-legged children are suddenly uncorking wine bottles, swearing and offering acute insights into their parents. Peripheral figures slip between the pages. “I was interested in the way our roles within a family change as we grow,” says Perkins. “How we’re not just children and siblings, but become parents ourselves. And yet how our roles are fixed too – how we can never quite escape. I was hoping to capture those two sides.”
Perkins – whose novels and short stories have already garnered an impressive array of literary awards – made the unusual decision to go back to school before writing The Forrests. “I’d been a supervisor on the creative writing course [at the University of Auckland] and I thought, ‘well, if I want to go on teaching I should find out what it’s like on the other side. I had also begun to feel a bit sick of the short stories I was writing. I wanted to write something that had some kind of emotional cost. I didn’t start out thinking this was my next book for publication. Although pretty soon I decided I wanted it to have a life outside in the world – the writing felt very true to the experience of life.”
To give “real life” to the kind of narrative tension that kept me up reading late into the night, The Forrests features an enigmatic family friend called Daniel, who seduces them all in different ways then packs his bags. They’re always waiting for a phone call, a postcard, an overheard snatch of gossip about him. They’ll slip their hands into other people’s pockets for clues. “His role in the book is our longing for all of those unlived lives,” says Perkins.
Emily Perkins spoke at the Hay Festival on June 8, and again on June 10.
