Good Things Come and Go
by Josie Shapiro

Two-thirds through Josie Shapiro’s second novel, Jamie and Riggs stand on the edge of a quarter-pipe at a skatepark in Whangamatā, boards under their arms. They haven’t seen each other for 23 years. They are physically worn, emotionally scarred, worried about their futures.

But there’s something about the skatepark, the young scooter boys, their shared history that sparks an old competitive spirit. A 180 nose-grind switch flip, challenges Riggs. A fool’s errand, thinks Jamie, ‘complete dumb-shit territory’. One falls, the other has a collision. ‘How do we handle it, bro?’ Riggs asks as they leave the park and Jamie doesn’t know what he is talking about.

‘All this,’ Riggs says, waving his hands around, as though to indicate this precise moment, or maybe the past or the future – perhaps all of it. Maybe he means all the hard parts.

Shapiro is a skilled storyteller, drawing her characters with a light but empathetic hand, carefully spooling out the details of the ‘hard parts’ – the barely spoken-about events that pulled Jamie, Riggs and Penny together then split them apart – that now, two decades later, will unravel in a stormy, tequila-fuelled, candlelit night in a rundown bach on the Coromandel.

The points of view of these three characters alternate chapters, with the Alley-Oop skateboarding competition, the event that will change the lives of all three protagonists, given a chapter to itself. When we first meet Penny, she is in her home studio in Los Angeles, dealing with Riggs’ absence, the intractable challenge of a blank canvas, and the paralysing grief of the loss of her young daughter. ‘How on earth had she ended up here? A childless mother, an artless painter.’

Riggs, now in his eighth day of a drug-fuelled bender, is at a nearby skatebowl, high on painkillers, grief and disappointment at losing his TV job. He slips, lands hard, blood in his mouth. He used to be a boy of steel, he recalls, a ‘little Superman, that’s what his mother liked to say’. Now he sees himself as a dead loss with no daughter, a wrecked back ‘and a fiancée who isn’t ready to say I do’.

On this side of the globe, Jamie is in Auckland, executing loose, graceful arcs at a skatepark in Grey Lynn, navigating a final trick for the day, a kickflip backside lipslide on an A-frame rail (Shapiro’s skateboard lingo is impressive). He hits the rail and falls. Skateboarding had forever been his escape, we’re told. ‘So what if he has a job he doesn’t find fulfilling? So what if he’s single and is starting to suspect he’s never going to find what he’s yearning for?’

Now, as Penny and Riggs board a plane back to New Zealand, the past, with all its secrets and seemingly lost opportunities, begin to crowd in. What if Jamie hadn’t fallen at the Alley-oop? What if it was he and Penny, not Riggs and Penny, who went to Los Angeles?

Two boys and a girl; two men and a woman. From romance to crime to literary drama, love triangles have been a reliable playing field for film and fiction: Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera; Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games; Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook; Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary; and, most pertinent to this book perhaps, Hari Kunzru’s 2024 novel Blue Ruin. As in Kunzru’s novel, Shapiro complicates the picture with the longstanding friendship of Jamie and Riggs, growing up together on knockabout Waiheke Island: ‘Unleashed, dirty, ferociously independent. Outside from sunrise to sunset… Seven years old, eight, ten, haunting storm pipes on cold winter afternoons or scouring beaches for unwanted treasures’.

When they swap the beach for the easy elegance and street cred of the skatepark, they meet Penny, the new girl on the island. She is a wannabe artist and daughter of the dictatorial Sir Damian Whittaker, ‘one of the greatest realist painters of the twentieth century’. Penny sees Jamie as handsome, graceful, talented, ‘On the board… a magician. A dancer, a rock star’. Riggs is dark, thickset, ‘each motion rough and square’. Three, as Riggs says later, ‘is a crowd’.

The landscape of Good Things Come and Go is evocative and instantly familiar. Waiheke Island, all sparkling waters, winding roads and lush bush. The Coromandel – tussock and oystercatchers, golden sand, the blue-grey chop of the ocean, ‘the lug of Slipper Island Whakahau loping heavy to the right and then nothing, nothing at all between him and Chile’. The novel’s description of growing up in small-town Aotearoa New Zealand is also pitch perfect: bonfires on the beach, cheap booze, empty streets, night swims in the ocean, dumb drinking games, spray paint on concrete, even the Crown Lynn swans at the local op shop.

But it is the three central characters that drive this book. While parents remain little more than vague worriers on the fringes, occasionally looming into menacing or ineffective proximity, the voices of Jamie, Riggs and Penny, with all their freewheeling dreams, impetuosity and self-doubt, hold the reader close to the plot as it gallops toward the final, frenzied showdown.

These are the same skills Shapiro brought to her portrait of young runner Mickey Bloom in her bestselling first novel, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, winner of the 2002 Allen & Unwin Commercial Fiction Prize (the word ‘commercial’ is no longer in the prize title but it is still there in the criteria). This book has similar qualities: a page-turning plot built on the compromised hopes and unspoken fears of characters on the edge of adulthood, the necessary re-reckoning of friendship and the negotiation of the physical (and in this latest book, artistic) demands of their chosen path.

When first Jamie, then Riggs and Penny, return to Waiheke Island, their early teenage experiences come barrelling back: that beach, that kiss, that painted phoenix on the side of the butcher’s shop, those misread signals, those impulsive decisions.

By the time they wash up at Jamie’s uncle’s bach on the Coromandel – fading red weatherboard; guttering jammed with pine needles – Jamie is facing a daunting health prognosis, Penny a questionable gallery offer and a fraying relationship, Riggs the loss of his career and, potentially, his fiancée.

His mate [Jamie] is harbouring a secret of some kind. You can’t be that close to someone all those years and not know when they’re keeping things from you. Riggs doesn’t hold that against him … He himself has plenty of things to hide. Penny, too – she is probably the person he knows best in the world and it’s plain she has things she’s never told him. Riggs looks around at the bookshelves, the windows, the kitchen bench. What a small house. Far too small for all the things they are keeping hidden from each other.

For her epigraph in this book, Shapiro chooses words graffiti-ed on a skatepark in Whangamatā (perhaps that skatepark in Whangamatā): ‘Hurting now does not mean your future holds pain’. On a hospital ward poster, the words would sound trite, but in this context, one anonymous youthful voice calling out to another, they are both empathetic and hopeful – a fitting subtitle for Good Things Come and Go.