Charlotte Grimshaw on Greta & Valdin, named best novel of 2021 by ReadingRoom
Early on in Rebecca K Reilly's Greta & Valdin, a scene opens with a sage observation: "There comes a time of night when it becomes okay to sit on the ground, even away from parks and boulders and other natural sitting spots. Slava and I are sitting on the kerb outside St Kevin’s Arcade. We are men without a plan. We have a third friend, Chris, but he texted fuck no! when Slava asked if he wanted to go to Family tonight."
It’s a scene that induced a brief reverie in this Auckland reader of a certain age. Long ago, when the reader was a fresh 14-year-old, there would come that time of night on K Road when fellow revellers, if they were able to talk at all, might have shouted, "For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings." Some would skip the sitting on the ground and fall flat on their faces, or fight terrible battles and be carried off in paddy wagons or ambulances. There was always a lot of brawling and shouting to be done, when came that time of night.
Eventually the reader stopped lounging around on K Road because she’d had some children and needed to behave, and soon it was the reader’s twenty-something children crashing good-humouredly home from Family Bar at dawn, while the reader, upstairs in bed wearing ear plugs, would reflect, Do I go want to back there, to youth, and those dingy bars on K Road? Would I want to go to Family tonight? Fuck no!
This is the cycle of Auckland life – from Family to family to Family – and Rebecca K Reilly, who has a long way to go before the fuck no! stage, has cast her fresh young eye over it, and given it an exuberantly comic treatment.
It’s highly familiar Auckland territory: the central city where Greta and her brother Valdin live together in a flat, the university where Greta and her friends and her father work, and the affluent suburbs just beyond: Epsom, Ponsonby, Remuera. Greta and Valdin’s Māori-Russian-Catalonian extended family is a middle-class, educated group, and the brother and sister are described as nerds.
Valdin has been studying physics but has left this for a job in television. He is pining for his ex, Xabi, who has left the country. Greta is in love with Holly, a fellow English tutor who may or may not share Greta’s passion. Valdin is sensitive, nervous, afflicted with OCD, a sweet, tormented soul who has always been unfailingly kind to his sister, until he disappears to South America and stops communicating. Greta is the comic centre of the action, a woman quick with witticisms and sharp observations, never short of off-kilter interpretations, the first to come up with a joke, described a number of times as ‘funny’, she’s the life and soul, a good sister, a fun friend.
Via her wry asides we’re given to understand that although she’s the highly educated 26-year-old daughter of an academic who lives in central Auckland, she’s all naivety, freshness and simplicity: "‘Yes,’ I say, quietly relived that we aren’t going wherever fancy businesspeople go for lunch. I’m not sure where that would be in town. All my ideas about what it’s like to be a high-flying operator in the world of business come from the film American Psycho.'"
The naïve tone is a trademark of Greta and Valdin, and of the novel they inhabit. It’s interesting to try to figure out what it’s signaling. At its best it’s sharp and quick, a kind of off-hand, jesting commentary on the ridiculous world. It brings to mind words that are hilariously dated and potentially sarcastic: zany, quirky, whacky, madcap. At its worst it’s witless chatter, as if Greta and Valdin are thinking like children (or like children portrayed in certain kinds of jovial kids’ fiction.)
Here’s Valdin, when Greta’s friend Ell is missing: "It makes me think of Hine Hukatere who cried at Fox Glacier because her boyfriend was shit at mountaineering and died in an avalanche. I don’t think Ell has died in an avalanche; it doesn’t really go below 14 degrees in Auckland in September. I think a more logical way to die in Auckland is getting hit by a bus because the driver was yelling at a cyclist."
Perhaps it signals a certain uneasiness at the prospect of being taken seriously: cuteness as a defence against criticism. The funniest moments come in the second half of the book. These include Ell’s surreal monologue about a marrow, and her attack on a woman using an aerosol can.
So there’s a pervasive cuteness or playful charm, depending on your take, but there’s also variety, richness, a gratifyingly complicated set of relationships, a large and interesting cast of characters. The connections are tangled and numerous enough that we need the helpful cast list at the beginning.
When Valdin goes to Buenos Aires and meets Xabi, the novel steadies and becomes much more interesting. The story unfolds with admirable energy and originality, gathering momentum and never flagging.
The only objection, perhaps, is that the arc of each crisis is uniform. It goes roughly like this: someone has a mental health problem or an issue with their sexuality or their love life, and it turns out that everyone is okay about it. The kids are gay, and the parents are okay about it. There’s a controversy, and people are okay about it. There is much setting out of issues, and not so much about behaviour. There is no exploration of the complications that lie beneath issues and labels – those inherent in individual personalities.
Greta & Valdin has the flavour of dramatic comedy, and there’s appeal in its lightness of touch. But it is quite long, and the novel as a form is enriched by subtleties, ironies and conflict. At a minimum you’d think there could be some minor intolerance. Or scenes in which, to think of random examples, people who are gay or straight or of a certain ethnicity engage in behaviour that’s arcane, opaque, puzzling, dangerous, tricky – and no one is okay about it. Or everyone is blandly okay about it, and that’s deeply disturbing. I’m thinking of action based not on issues but on close observation of human conduct and conflict, in all its mysteriousness.
I happened to read Vanity Fair recently, a long novel about society. It’s famously a novel without a hero. For some reason I’d had the idea that compared to Dickens say, Thackeray’s novel is light entertainment. It’s really not. What’s extraordinary about the book is the level of perversity, cynicism and sheer wickedness depicted, along with the rollicking laughs and the odd spark of virtue and goodness. It’s a bracing lesson in the portrayal of human complexity.
But all that is to race forward in the cycle of Auckland life. In Greta & Valdin there are cruxes and crises and climaxes, there is comedy and laughter and tears and it all culminates, in the great, joyous tradition of dramatic comedies, with a coming together of friends and lovers, a family celebration and maybe, possibly, even a wedding.
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly (Victoria University Press, $30) is available in bookstores nationwide.
