The New Animals
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2018 Acorn Prize, New Zealand’s highest fiction award, Pip Adam’s The New Animals is a work of artistic ambition and political urgency.
Set in the Auckland fashion scene in 2016, The New Animals moves over the course of one night through the hopes, misapprehensions, resentments, and regrets of a small group of fashion-industry workers, divided by generation and class. The young and rich act like nothing can touch them; the tired Gen-Xers feel forever adrift. On this particularly stressful night, hairdressers, patternmakers, stylists, and a makeup artist are tasked with preparing for a last-minute photoshoot without clothes or clear directions. Caught up in the small dramas of their lives, while around them the world is fast becoming uninhabitable, the group toils against the impossible pressure until one of them decides to break away.
Like a twisted contemporary heir to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, The New Animals is a brilliant and unforgettable dive beneath the surface of life, uncovering the common ground of humanity, as well as the common plight.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The sardonic U.S. debut from New Zealander Adam takes a scathing look at Auckland's fashion scene. It's 2016 and 40-something stylist Carla has seen it all. She regards her younger coworkers with bemusement, acting, one of them notes, as if they were "somehow going to destroy a world that was already fucking ruined." Her only confidante is fellow stylist Duey, with whom she's been friends since childhood. Tommy, the clothing label's millennial owner, fancies himself a born leader and lives in an apartment above the label's offices, which Carla suspects was purchased by his parents. Despite his ambition, Tommy struggles to keep up with skilled designer Sharona, who resents his privilege and befriends Carla and Duey. Free-spirited model Elodie, who sleeps with Tommy and one of his other business partners, is much cannier than anyone suspects, and after the various characters fall in and out of bed with one another, a feverish final act turns everything upside down. Adam projects a wearied and sneering perspective onto each of the players, which can feel a little one-note until she works up to the grand finale (Sharona's outlook could apply to the novel: "Everything becomes bearable. Eventually"). Though a bit of a slog, it's worth seeing through to the end.
