Emily Perkins’ The Forrests (2012), a novel tracing one migrant family’s fortunes and alienations as they settle in New Zealand in the era between the end of the colonial period and into the moment, in official ideologies, at least, of the post-colonial one, begins with an image of dislocation that draws attention to the complexities of representation: “[their] father balanced behind the movie camera, shouting directions as he walked backwards and forwards in front of them. He handled the Kodak, their most valuable possession, as though it were an undulating live animal, a ferret or a snake, and it was leading him.”
The novel proceeds in this fashion. Perkins’ is an impressionistic art. Moments of intensity include a disastrous meeting at a Chinese restaurant with potential in-laws; half-drunken marital confessions; a very ordinary tragic death; the awkwardness of funerals. All are rendered through prose concerned with registering sensation, sense and unexpected detail.
The Forrests travel to New Zealand in the late 1960s. The novel traces the lives of the Forrest siblings. The perspective is focalised primarily, but not exclusively, through Dorothy, the second-youngest daughter, who over the course of the novel turns from a hopeful and rebellious teenager into an agoraphobic, lonely and alcoholic middle- aged mother, haunted by an elusive and unrequited love for Daniel, a close family friend. This is the story of a family, with the siblings’ emotional connections and estrangements providing an imaginative core around which themes social, political and historical are organised.
Is this, then, a mere New Zealand variation on the globalised middle-class novel of manners, those forgettable banalities of divorce and dinner parties that are sometimes dismissed in Britain as ‘Hampstead novels’?
Almost 30 years ago, Perkins was selected as Exhibit A of what literary historian Patrick Evans called the “spectacular babies” produced by the “globalisation of New Zealand fiction”. What Evans describes as the “rise of the young female writer” was “a commonplace of contemporary publishing wherever it occurs”. Perkins, in her early success, proved to be both a copy and easily copied, part of the “publishing industry’s contribution to the Baudrillardian hyperreal … [as] commodification fractalises authors, turning one into a simulacrum of another”. The spectacular baby – “preferably female and attractive” in Evans’s phrasing – joins the publishing production line in London, its literary efforts merely so many interchangeable stories of globalised middle-class life.
Evans reiterated this stance in The Long Forgetting (2007), presumably finding in Perkins’ two other novels from the 2000s nothing to alter his view. His argument is more complex than my précis here suggests. In addition to being uneasy with the commercialisation of fiction and its hom*ogenisation through writing school seminars, Evans is also critical of what he perceives as placelessness in contemporary fiction.
Ursula Le Guin, reviewing The Forrests for The Guardian, reads it in terms remarkably similar to Evans. The novel has, for Le Guin, a “generic suburban setting” in which “History is entirely outside the frame: only social fads and brand names locate the era.”
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Social fads proliferate through The Forrests’ narrative discourse, to be sure, with the question “why Marc Bolan had to die” and the arrival of the iPod acting as temporal markers for readers tracing the Forrests’ story from the late 1960s onwards. There is nothing generic in this setting, however, and the work of local reconstruction Perkins’ narrative style forces on the reader pushes history itself – and a particularly settler-colonial social formation’s confrontation with the representation of history – to the centre of the novel’s ambitions and aims.
This text is not a mere symptom of the “globalisation of New Zealand fiction”, and neither is it a record of middle-class anomie flitting across consumerism’s smooth spaces. The Forrests is instead a powerful registration, in the realm of fiction, of the pressures of globalised cultural and economic flows, and an opportunity to think with fiction about the decay of the social welfare state and the confiscated futures bequeathed to us by neoliberalism.
Perkins’ relative critical neglect and The Forrests’ absence from critical debates are a waste because the journey represented in the novel, “from oh my god the hub of the world, New York City, to Westmere, Auckland, New Zealand”, narrates and makes the process of globalisation itself graspable and available for representation. The Forrests is both ‘about’ globalisation and a product of it. It tracks the movement of peoples and commodity culture from the United States out into the world and the world’s consequent standardisation and hom*ogenisation in late capitalist consumer culture.
The Forrests move to New Zealand in 1967, with the eldest child, Michael, born in 1956, and Dorothy, through whom most of the novel is focalised, in 1960; Dorothy is pregnant with her daughter Grace in 1985. A gesture towards “the new Sky Tower” on the Auckland skyline during Evelyn’s time in hospital dates her accident to 1997. These carefully placed temporal markers matter for my argument here. The Forrests’ great emotional power comes from its careful representation of the quotidian, from ordinary people and ordinary lives, with the “kitchen table with the paint samples brushed on the walls, Donald in his bouncer on the table”.
In The Forrests, Auckland is blighted by untrammelled neoliberal deregulation, generalised poverty, restored contact with nuclear-powered vessels and uncertain social change. The novel’s dystopian future-Auckland comes into view in snatches and hints that the reader must reconstruct. The Auckland of this novel is not the Auckland of its moment of composition and publication. It is, however, an Auckland that could still come into being. Perkins’ fiction is both future history and potential warning.
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“Another nuke ship out there” in the harbour, a detail we catch only as an aside late in the novel, joins Perkins’ science fictional aesthetic to her novel’s political power. Reading The Forrests as science fiction offers generic tools for decoding local and post-colonial politics. In New Zealand, the three words “another nuke ship” carry considerable dystopian political weight and demand what narratologists call ‘over-reading’, that is, the investment of a text by a reader with meaning and significance beyond what can confidently be deduced from the words on the page alone. The nuclear-free legislation of 1987, after all, is currently supported by all the major political parties in the country, and it was a National Party MP who, on its 20th anniversary, acclaimed it as “iconic” in the House. More than any other piece of legislation or social marker, the nuclear-free moment in New Zealand is a sign of settled and shared social values that, 40 years on, are part of the political consensus.
Harbour views, political quarrels, family life, domestic details: The Forrests’ details are from our present, with the science fictional twist that this is the present treated as a historical problem. Whereas Le Guin sees nothing but a “generic suburban setting’” a New Zealand reader will find in “the burned knife by the stove top” an obvious reference to spotting, a sign of the serious cannabis smoker. By this stage in the novel, Michael Forrest, Dorothy’s older brother, is alone, unemployed and despairing. The simple detail of a burned knife evokes not just location but class location as well, Michael’s place at the edge of Auckland’s social world.
Dorothy’s father moves from the United States as a trust fund child, for “reasons to do, she later figured, with lack of success back home, a paucity of funds, an excess of entitlement”. The problems of money, work and employment” dominate the text, transforming material that seems on one interpretive level to be about erotic and personal relationships into investigations of societal relationships and class struggle: “something had happened to money; not just theirs, other people’s too, even those like them without investments. There was less of it. Andrew was made redundant and the teacher’s union lost a pay dispute. The kids needed help with student loans. Petrol. Food. The cost of moving house.”
The global financial crisis beginning in 2008, the waves of recession in the Covid era and our reinvigorated awareness of capitalism’s instability are present in these sentences. The Forrests is best read in relation to contemporary debates about the nature of the capitalism post- Brexit, post-Trump and post-Covid, an era marked by new nationalisms and a new awareness of the fractures of this once allegedly smooth global space. (Perkins develops these themes in her 2023 novel Lioness, which tracks the world of wealth and its instability.)
An early scene in The Forrests set in a 1970s commune run by “wimmin” is represented with a temporal uncertainty: “days passed free of lessons and duties. Time belonged to the sunlight, and the Forrests’ stay might have been a week of several months”. Perkins’ prose shifts from a careful timelessness and imprecision. The labour of motherhood is represented as “here in the constant turn of the washing-machine drum, the bottles forever sterilising on the stovetop” or in Dorothy’s absorption “in the dense volume of things to do in her day”. Nuggets of temporal detail emerge in the release of a pop song, the death of a pop star or mention of “the new anti-nuclear policy”. What to do with these shifts between the time stamps and timelessness?
The shock and most distinctive aesthetic innovation of The Forrests arrives in the novel’s final third. It transforms into a narrative of the future in which New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy has been overturned (“‘So I hear there’s another nuke ship out there,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the invisible harbour”), and Dorothy and Andrew grow old in an Auckland transformed by some sort of economic crisis or collapse during the 2010s. It becomes clear that these are future times, the representation of a world yet to come. Dorothy’s life – and thus the novel’s focus for its first two-thirds – follows the “accelerated culture” of Generation X.
Time is scrambled throughout the novel. The hippy commune of the first section is a familiar enough cultural signpost. Harder to know, then, what to do with its reappearance at the novel’s end: “The commune had expanded from the few prefabs and A-frames it consisted of over fifty years ago. Dorothy didn’t remember the way it looked; nothing would be exactly the same except the stern rocks, covered in lichen.” Over fifty years ago. This detail, along with the first visit by the Forrest children to the commune in 1970 and Dorothy’s move to New Zealand occurring when she was seven, could place the novel in the 2010s. A few pages before this scene in the expanded commune, however, Dorothy’s age has been revealed as 64 (“we should do something for your sixty-fifth”), making this part of the novel set in 2024–25.
Present, past and future detach themselves in a complicated way for readers encountering The Forrests a decade after its publication.
Perkins gives us a future that has not been, but may yet be. In the future Auckland of The Forrests, politics is different, with nuclear ships in the harbour, people are poorer and the social order itself is destabilised. The Forrests’ future hints at migration patterns and metropolitan redesign following full globalisation in this dystopian Auckland of debt cancellation, world-wide recession and, through the figure of the teachers’ union that “lost a pay dispute”, an atomised and defeated working class.
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There is a case for reading The Forrests as science fiction. Its raw material is the future. But against the standard view of Perkins as a writer of globalised literary fictions, this case for her as a science fiction writer may seem eccentric. What are Perkins’ referents? Globalisation, for one thing, and the changes involved in the transfer of American domestic life to New Zealand. “Nothing, not even vinegar, not even turpentine, would shift the chewing gum from where it stuck all through [Dorothy’s] long blonde new-girl American hair” after her first day at school. By novel’s end, Auckland might as well be Los Angeles. The struggles of the individual to process this social transformation and the difficulties of making sense of this past and to locate themselves in the “deserted streets” of late welfare state New Zealand through to the recession of the 1990s and into the dystopian era of the 2020s is rendered in the language of science fiction. Ruth, who left for the United States with her parents returns to New Zealand culturally estranged: “I love Ruth, but she’s from outer space.”
Her novel’s representation of the future rearranges the significance of historical events from our own past and gives them, in the alternate reality of The Forrests, a different significance. The absence of any sense of the colonial heritage, post-colonial future or of Māori as a people in particular becomes a sign of the dystopian future: that past, the past that post-colonial scholarship struggles to preserve has, in this universe, been erased. Perkins’ science fiction historicises the present by way of the future: no Māori dimension exists in the Auckland of the debt crisis. Māori absence from the present-become-past (our world rendered as science fiction) acts as a warning. Representations of racial difference appear hardly at all in the novel’s future sections. It is an Auckland that passed from Empire to neo-colony without pause.
This is a sad novel, one sensitive to the future world’s sufferings – debt, climate change, loneliness, racial injustice. Perkins’ early short fiction in Not Her Real Name (1996) represented casual labour and fragmented neo-liberal lives that participated in what literary critic Mark McGurl calls “lower-middle class modernism”. Her short stories were “preoccupied more than anything else with economic and other forms of insecurity and cultural anomie”. They registered an aimlessness, a “barely disguised symbolic class warfare”. Characters were “bulgy in the wrong places” and caught in cycles of appetite and consumption and meaningless work.
The Forrests takes this sadness, this ressentiment from the era of neoliberalism, and, in the form of science fiction, offers it ambitious historical and representational possibilities. Perkins gives us the globalised era stripped of its past, a future stripped of its futurity. New Zealand, in one possible future, is the endless globalised present, while human communication is an alien impossibility: “She patted his arm and he turned to face her, and she asked him again, and he leaned in, but she may as well have been speaking Martian.”
The Forrests’ science fictional achievements and their generic discontinuities act as a comfort and a warning. “The sheer f*cking hopelessness of it all” lies before us.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken from the ambitious, entertaining, and hard-thought new book of literary criticism, Forms of Freedom: Marxist essays in New Zealand and Australian literature by Dougal McNeill (Otago University Press, $45), available in selected bookstores nationwide. Its study of 13 authors includes Hone Tuwhare, Patricia Grace, Pip Adam, Alice Tawhai and Albert Wendt.
