fiction
Jan McKemmish
Catherine Ford
NYC
Text Publishing $24.95pb, 205pp
1 876485 40 X
This documentary was remarkable for its candid ear, its heartbreaking revelations and its honourable but nonetheless tough view of a mother from a son's point of view. Sewell is currently working on a novel based on this material.
Georgia Blain's Candelo also features a feminist mother, one who, like NYC's feminist 'mother', spends a lot of time sitting at a table smoking.
Another ABC radio program last year: about women who gave up their children for adoption in the 60s and 70s. They were young mostly Catholic girls pregnant outside marriage, from the middle and working classes; story after story about being sent away to a home for the duration and returning to the town, the family home, unburdened, without public shame.
White Australia is a place of disparate maternities and paternities: the youngest son who finds out after her death that his eldest sister was really his mother; curiously short family trees, no family stories of home villages or greatgandparents, of family traditions; for many of us the story starts with an appearance on a record for the first time and goes on from there.
Adoption is a hard story. John Howard's meticulous and mathematical denial of the Stolen Generations being the latest move in what is both a deeply personal and psychological story and one that is deeply historical and ideological.
In Australia a literature of search -- for parents, culture and story -- flourishes. I think of Lily Brett, Arnold Zable, Robert Dessaix, of Gabby Naher's beautifully written first novel The Underwharf which tells of a young woman's search for the father. Catherine Ford's NYC is part of this literary moment.
NYC begins as many novels do these days, on the plane. Astrid is flying from Melbourne to New York to meet her American birth mother Carole for the first time. Astrid is twenty, her focus is fixed on her journey, what she has left behind, her adopted parents, loving and kind. The plane lands and it all becomes real. Astrid avoids the waiting Carol and books into the Hilton, giving herself the alone-in-New-York-story and a comfortable place to start her quest.
It is not an easy quest for Astrid or for Carole and her two friends Gary and Fay who were there when Carol had the baby and gave it up and have been there ever since. NYC starts slowly, seems a little predictable and uncertain, meandering. It reads like a short story extended to novel length. Like many first novels the writing takes a while to hit its stride and NYC is not helped by its four-four time sentence rhythm which may be an attempt to enact the youthful sensibility of Astrid and the sad passivity of the other characters. Fifty pages in the pace settles and the work moves irrevocably forward through the gestures of anger, need, confrontation, resentment, rejection, disturbance. I am using these generalities to avoid giving away the plot which is light, clever at times and measured. The blurb says terror and panic but for me the novel is an exposition of what it is like to be in shock. There are secrets and revelations and a romantic ending.
The writing and the story are perfect fits, they are spare, almost sub-realist; Astrid walks every day, pounding the pavement in New York, seeing, being, feeling, keeping the feelings down. The mother Carole is disappointing, a passive waiting woman unable to behave in any way appropriate as a mother; her response to meeting her daughter is to take her out to dinner every night, show her photographs from the seventies and talk selfishly about how awful the whole adoption thing was for her.
Astrid connects with Gary, part of the Fay and Gary couple; he is an architect and was at Woodstock and can't remember much of it so you know he was there. Fay and Carole are loud together, familiar, there is an old and embedded friendship here, coded and dominating; they were second wave feminists, tough and cool and ruthless, libertarian, although this was the first time I had heard that seventies feminists advocated adoption of children as an aid to liberation but perhaps this was an American thing or perhaps it is a necessary extremism, to make the scenario crystal clear.
There is a lovely interaction with a woman in the street. Astrid becomes lost and is taken up by one of those open talking New Yorkers. In a couple of blocks they exchange the very essence of their lives and as they are about to part Astrid thinks, I love you and the woman says, 'Let's not exchange names.'
There are quiet descriptions of the New York characters we all know, the garrulous strangers, the uncomprehending waiters, the selfish Woody Allen style middle class. And there's an upstate New York car trip that carries us into America complete with diner, and into the past, to the father.