Glass Houses and Other Stories

GLASS HOUSES AND OTHER STORIES
Karen Phillips
Cuba Press

REVIEWED BY JESSIE NEILSON

Karen Phillips' short stories concern New Zealanders going about their everyday lives, struggling to pay the bills, navigate relationships, or otherwise survive crises. They may be at the end of their lives, raising young families, or somewhere in the ambiguous years of middle age. Most hint at sombreness, some stuck in agonising crossroads. In all, we are reminded of how much of life is made up of small struggles, decision-making, and uncomfortable interactions, and that sometimes we have no control.

The first story, Extractions, features a woman newly single and thus newly poor, locked out of the shared apartment and bank accounts. Rendered barely functional by shock, she finds herself at the supermarket buying the essentials. In a lower socio-economic area, this supermarket has a different, neighbourly, clientele. At first she merely eavesdrops politely on the conversation of the supermarket queue led by the over-familiar checkout operator, Tania. Yet in its humdrum relevance, comparing dental work is too intriguing to ignore.

Others, too, are concerned with physical or mental health. In A Silver Thread of Time, a woman is emotionally yo-yoing as she waits at the doctor for an unwelcome diagnosis, but one which would at least give her direction. Another demonstrates the effect of illness on a couple, where dementia coupled with general old age lead to feelings of helplessness, shredding patience until it snaps.

In Digital Silence a mother is waiting, agitated, for news of her son in what has become a digital void. There has been an earthquake in Turkey and with no communication he may as well be on another planet. This is when the mother observes others who are managing to communicate, just, who pause for moments in their busy lives, to send peremptory texts, ‘‘moments of contact so fleeting that they are nothing more than standing on the doormats of other lives with no time to come in, sit down and talk’’.

Glass Houses inspires the striking cover, which features ocean-smoothed pieces of glass, laid out with driftwood so as to replicate the image of a home. Yet the pieces are tentative, fragile and easily broken apart from each other, just like the extended family relations hinging on goodwill.

Much here covers loss: of a person, a feeling, a time of life. Some show a passing of naivete into a more hardened truth: that life will not get better, that a partner has become a shell, their essence somewhere else. Northland-based writer Phillips does not aim for gloss, the perfect or the superficial; she looks at the intimate, and the failing.

Yet in these stories too we see perseverance, that the pieces of a glasshouse may hold together, or that a person may cobble together life after disappointment, and in quiet moments, reveal something that, after all, is worth sustaining.

Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant