By Gretchen Shirm
FICTION
Lioness
Emily Perkins
Bloomsbury, $32.99
New Zealand-based writer Emily Perkins returns to the territory of marriage in Lioness, which she expertly mined in her 2008 book Novel About My Wife. Whereas that novel was told from the perspective of a husband seeking to understand his enigmatic wife, Lioness is resolutely fixed on the female perspective.
Therese Thorne is married to Trevor Thorne, a wealthy developer who lives in Wellington and has four adult children. Therese rebranded from “Teresa Holder” to smooth her transition from a modest background into the role of homeware entrepreneur. While “Therese Thorne Homewares” is in the throes of expansion, Therese made compromises to achieve this success, including trading on her husband’s name, accepting a loan from him, and having her “wonky eye tooth straightened so that she could open her mouth when she smiled”.
Emily Perkins’ latest novel is all about female privilege.Credit: Ebony Lamb
As the novel opens, Trevor is caught up in a development scandal, and Therese starts to question the ethics of her life’s transactions. Having married into immense privilege, Therese has recently been plagued by “a cracking feeling”. Meanwhile, her downstairs neighbour Claire enters a phase of shedding: her possessions, her makeup, disavowing her beauty routine, and renegotiating her life with her husband to do less “emotional labour”. To Therese, Claire’s journey to a place beyond grooming and towards radical honesty becomes unexpectedly seductive.
Despite having actively embraced commercial bottom-lines in her business, which sells “the fantasy of time to read poetry and handwritten letters to women who scrambled to make it through the day without braining themselves on a desktop paper spike”, Therese is beginning to realise that there is something unseemly and intractable about her circumstances. The aesthetics of her brand, for example, which once oozed what she thought of as wellbeing, she now sees as “wealth”.
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Perkins has a lot of fun with Therese’s slow-motion implosion. She is particularly expert at skewering the absurdities of privilege. At one point, Therese laments the lack of a phone signal “as if not having signal was a lifestyle choice and in a crisis we should be able to switch it the f--- on”. The character Claire also comes out with some ripping one-liners, such as “the word woman is a category error”.
Part of Therese’s reckoning is to do with the self-effacement that seems to characterise the life of middle-class women. At one point Therese laments “who are you if you’re not looking after someone?” On a holiday with her extended family, she is responsible for organising presents, cooking, caring for Trevor’s grandchildren, and “the million invisible things that would make the day good”. Yet Therese assumes these responsibilities without having been asked.
Meanwhile, Trevor’s children, each beneficiaries of a substantial trust fund, are mostly concerned with how the fraud investigation into their father could impact their standing.
Therese’s ethical dilemma is not just about being blindly caught up in wealth and power, but also about the extent to which she is implicated in her own feelings of powerlessness. Therese is left questioning whether her desires are really her own, and finds that even wanting itself is a part of the problem. Perkins writes: “A sentence came to me: what you really want is Botox for the soul. I didn’t know whose voice that was.”
While Claire downstairs divests herself of the trappings of wealth, Therese develops a kind of infatuation with her that offers at least a degree of psychic escape. Perkins, though, makes clear that Claire’s own process of shedding comes from a place of immense privilege and wanting “to be seen as more than middle-class and white”.
If Novel About My Wife was a critique of the male ego, Lioness is about female privilege and the inequalities of wealth distribution. Perkins opens such a can of worms that Therese is unable to resolve her predicament neatly. She attempts to donate her way out of her feelings of guilt, and finds that even divesting herself of assets is not entirely satisfying.
Part of Perkins’ message is that wealth is a structural problem, and redistribution involves requiring privileged individuals to act against their own interests. It’s a courageous if unsettling message that Perkins delivers with vigour and mirth.
Gretchen Shirm’s most recent novel, The Crying Room, is published by Transit Lounge at $32.99.
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