In the beginning paragraph of Emma Neale’s startling new novel Maybe Baby, Nate wakes lazily to the sound of the neighbours’ kids playing a creaky ukelele and recorder duet behind the hedge. “The lengths people will go to for their kids,” he murmurs. His wife Kelly, a curator at a public art gallery, snuggles in. “How hard can it be?” she asks. For 10 years Nate has waited for Kelly to agree to begin a family. Now, “This wild thing in his chest leaps a ravine with the whoop, She’s ready! Ironic therefore, how soon he finds himself thinking, Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! The speed of it.”
Neale is just gearing up. Now she puts her foot down. This is page 6 (the story begins on page 5). On page 8, the pregnancy test comes up negative. By page 9 the plump specialist diagnoses stage four ovarian cancer: “Mestasised. Devastatingly young.” Nate is “reeling, falling inside his own skin”. It seems just moments ago when he first saw Kelly across the art gallery foyer. Now she is asking about cryopreservation. What? Frozen embryos, explains the oncologist. Do-able. By page 23 she is in a hospice room, its smell “a strange, sad cocktail, the sweetish sting of acetone, hand sanitiser, and a blue-lotus room spray” (Maybe Baby is rich in scents). By page 25 she is dead.
Love, pain, hope, loss. The story could have ended there but this is just the trailer for the deeply humane, strangely plausible story of Nate, a freelance photographer “crook with grief” over the death of his wife and haunted by the embryos suspended in life-on-hold inanimation in a medical storage facility.
When he is not working, Nate barricades himself in his obsessively tidy flat, avoiding friends and family, watching Netflix, drinking too much coffee, hating his I Hate Mondays mug. “His heart is still a Kelly-shaped bucket with a split down one side.” His longing for Kelly prickles. He catches a whiff of her favourite scent, La Nuit Trésor – “Rose, vanilla, lychee praline”. He hears her laughter. He sees her at the grocery store. Objects in his house seem to have moved; his phone acts strangely. Even when there is no scent, no glimpse, “Is nothing a message?” he wonders.
This yearning, for one more day, one more hour, one last exchange with a loved one, a yearning so deep it tears at the weave of reality, is familiar ground. It fuels Heathcliff’s mad obsession for Catherine in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It is explored with charming oddity in the 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply; it drives the plot of Anna Smaill’s novel Bird Life (2023). From here, Neale slows down the pace as Nate negotiates not just his own anguish but also the genuine concern of friends and family. There’s his mate Max, a fellow surfer and outdoor ed teacher going through his own chaotic love life; Amy, his cheerfully wilful drama teacher sister; his mother Linda, oscillating between maternal worry and impatience; and his wise and ironic stepfather Ted.
His support crew, it seems, has a timeline for his grief. After a year, they want Nate to pull himself together. But if the pain left, Nate reasons, “wouldn’t his memories of her have faded?” He does try. He helps his mother in the garden, he goes to a birthday bash where a buzzy nine-year-old introduces him to sandbox game Were-Wars. He hosts a family dinner – do you believe in ghosts? he asks them. And, when does a soul begin? The silence is awkward; the responses stilted.
Neale’s portrayal of Nate’s overwhelming grief, far beyond the reach of family and friends, is utterly convincing, remindful of Max Porter’s exquisite Grief is the Thing with Feathers where the widowed father sits alone in the living room, floored by a grief that is “fourth-dimensional, abstract, faintly familiar”. But where Porter’s widower has two young sons, Nate has a tiny team of stalled embryos, the ‘maybe babies’ of the title: “I have this sense of someone waiting,” he tells his family.
He talks to Amy about surrogacy – but her petrolhead husband, a member of the Church of the Bright Cloud, is “worried about the planet”. In a disastrous lack of judgment, he broaches the subject during pillow talk with Robin aka Fleetfoot, a player on Were-Wars who happens to live in the same city. Fleetfoot is true to her avatar.
He posts a listing in the Wanted section of a fertility support group – “it’s a jungle out there,” he tells his mate. “Yeah. Well. At least it’s a fun jungle. With hook ups, I mean,” replies Max (Max is “on the swipe”).
That night, Nate enters his profile on three dating sites. Is he looking for companionship or surrogacy? Even he doesn’t know. There are misunderstandings, hurt feelings, short meet-ups, awkward mornings-after. “I’m just saying,” says date number 10, after spouting anti-immigrant sentiments. Nate learns to raise the question of surrogacy over dessert “so he, and his date, can both leave as soon as possible if things immediately deteriorate from there.”
A year after Kelly’s death, things are still deteriorating. As Max would say, it’s a bit of a “mare”. When his birth father dies – Nate and Amy call him “the farther” after he “buggered off as far away as possible” – there is little grief. Feckless, scarpering bastard, mutters Amy. But Nate now has money, time and the opportunity to honour his commitment to Kelly while avoiding the hook-up jungle altogether.
If there is a before and after in this book it is on the plane to the UK. Behind him, the wrenching loss of Kelly, his family’s anxiety, his I Hate Mondays mug. Ahead of him, the “tenuous high-wire act” of London with its brick courtyards and papery hydrangeas, its homelessness, its theatrical street protests, and a wildly radical medical proposition.
On the final leg of the flight he meets Sadie, a counsellor in student health, heading to London on a professional scholarship but also to look for her birth mother. Nate is blindsided, by her looks, her humour, her scent: “Soaked in Cointreau and sunshine. Yes, he’s fallen hard, and he knows whatever comes next will hurt like the bollocks.”
Describing what comes next would be a massive spoiler but top marks for Neale for having the courage, the gall and the skill to stay true to Nate’s plan.
Science fiction, dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic fiction, even Emily Bronte’s gothic novel, succeed or fall on their ability to hold readers to the post; never allowing doubt to send the whole fantastical edifice crumbling to the ground. Neale succeeds here, building credibility on a strong platform of sound characters, unflagging pace and excellent dialogue, helped by a plot that teeters on the edge of conceivability.
Only once does the authorial voice lean in too close: a new section beginning, “Was he [Nate] wrong to consider that conversation as an item in his mental to-do-list?” It sounds a minor detail and it is never repeated but, like an unplanned glimpse into the wings of a live performance, it barely perceptibly and momentarily drops the story.
The rest of the book charges ahead with page-turning momentum and finely crafted depictions of people and place. Dunedin, with its old stone buildings, its sleety spring wind, the goldfinches lined up on telephone wires, the café chairs “fat with temporarily discarded coats, scarves, sweaters and hats”. Nate, his friends and his family, in all their distracted love and wrongfootedness; their dialogue as recognisable as the overhead conversations on a bus, family tiffs, even the mask of professionalism, like the woman in the London reception room, her voice a “velvety sort of bell with a hint of cognac and wasp.”
The storyline is outrageous, it is provocative (book groups will be all over Nate’s story), but in its humanity, its humour and sheer verve, Maybe Baby is clever, courageous and surprisingly persuasive.
Maybe Baby by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, $38.99) is available in bookstores natiownide.
