Pastoral Care
by John Prins

Pastoral Care by Auckland writer John Prins, is the second in a new story-collection series from Landfall Tauraka and the University of Otago Press, alternating well-known names with debut writers. The inaugural title was Kirsty Gunn’s Pretty Ugly, a fiction finalist at this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Pastoral Care is no less impressive – it is a highly accomplished debut. Prins offers fully formed characters in lively and often tragi-comic stories that explore, among other things, contemporary Pākehā dislocation. In the COVID-era opening story, ‘Lake Pukaki’, Ross is travelling around the South Island, leaving Ross’s family unsure whether he is coming back home or staying with Flo, his new – and much younger – employee/lover. Together they are off on ‘a kind of extended sexy staff party’. Ross tells some other travellers they encounter that he is ‘drawn to rivers, burns, glens, brooks. It must be his Scottish heritage. All that babbling. The water spoke to him’.

The windscreen was an oil painting. A Turner sky. Aoraki’s eastern wedge brooded in shadow. The mountain’s lower slopes dipped into the lake. Straw grasses swayed like an Andrew Wyeth, or Rita Angus.

He imagines ‘true love this time, with Flo. Beautiful Flo’. Meanwhile for Flo, the ‘transition from lust to disgust happened like a lifted blindfold’ and she thinks Ross looks ‘elderly in his white undies’. Away from Auckland and work, he is ‘so unbelievably boring’. Flora is equally unromantic about the South Island, where she ‘could not feel any further from Auckland and still be in New Zealand. Her lips had never been so dry and look, another silly lake’.

Paul, the main character of the title story – a twelve-part novella that explores one day in Paul’s life – is also adrift. A young father struggling with his lack of purpose in life, Paul fears his identity is ‘not fixed to the land in a way he could be proud of. It was not fixed to any land really, or ocean, star, river, lake, nothing. He was his job’. His job is teaching – a ‘relentless act of communication’ – he worries that his students hate him and his only friends in Auckland are colleagues. Paul’s favourite time of day ‘before the kids’ used to be his commute.

It was where he could be alone. There were no questions, no demands for his attention, no one looked to him for answers, He was ashamed to admit he yearned for those predictable hours alone, that sacrosanct distance between home and work, work and home, insulated from the noise of life, cocooned in his car, slowed by heavy traffic.

Paul is considering (not for the first time) a career change. To teach and to be a father and husband was ‘so much to be, and still it wasn’t enough. He needed to be more ambitious, more productive, more attractive, more social, and more than all of those things, he needed to earn more money’.

Prins’ take on Pākehā New Zealand identity – especially masculinity – is sharp and insightful. In ‘A Good Man’, the narrator and his friend Adam go to a gym that ‘carries the smell of disinfected sweat and sweet peat. Large men live inside the walls, concerned only with the image of themselves’. Brothers Liam and Brett in The Falls’ have inherited a Piha bach built by their inept ancestor Aidan Dillon, a man ‘on the front lines of the New Zealand colonial project’ who was ‘too proud to return home with less than he arrived with’. The house has become a totem for one brother, his version of an origin story.

Brett treated the bach as though it was a historical document, the official record of how their family came to be in Aotearoa … What Brett couldn’t see, or the bach account for, was that not all of history was for being proud of. History was filled with people too afraid, or too ashamed, to admit they’d been wrong.

The other brother, Liam, ‘no longer felt at home here’. The bach only has monetary value: he leaves a message for his wife ‘to say he loved her, and that he was going to find a way to earn more money, buy her a house, and a holiday’. Male ambition, hubris, self-delusion and deep insecurity run throughout many of the stories in Pastoral Care.

The protagonist of ‘But Baby, I Love You’ is Bernard Jane, 80s author and big literary deal whose collection of poems about his newborn son are published and marketed as romantic love poems, because domesticity, childcare, and the awe inspired by fatherhood were not profitable in 1983’. In fact, while his wife spent the first weeks of their baby son’s life caring for the child, ‘Bernard had sat in the lounge drinking beer, reading, writing his poems, putting the kettle on’.

In one crossover between stories, Paul is watching a video of Bernard Jane with the students in his English class: Bernard contends that fathers in general ‘haven’t been malicious, but they’re far from perfect. Let’s be honest. When they weren’t absent, they were silent. At worst they were violent, but I see that changing, I feel it. Maybe it’s why our wives have been so tough, so progressive, the aunties too. Women have had to be mother and father…’

Certainly, many of the women in this collection are steady, competent, wise presences – as wives, principals, bosses – although Prins never leans so far into this dynamic that it becomes preachy or sexist. Some are more flawed. Mara, the main character in ‘Rapture’, is having a relationship with an AI chat bot and dreams of ‘ascending to heaven to live with Jesus’ which would be ‘less lame than living with her parents’. Young mother Nicole in ‘A Safe Passage’ worries about her son, bitten at school. ‘Nicole knew all about getting up to shit at school … [Her husband] knew nothing about what she’d been capable of when she was a kid’. Even worse, the other mums have never rung to confide in her ‘about a feud, an affair, or even to comment on a teacher’.

Details in these stories are fresh and particular. The furniture in the Piha bach ‘was draped with old sheets so that entering was like interrupting a family of ghosts. They stood staring out the windows, reclined on couches, gathered around the fireplace’. In Hawkes’ Bay, the harbour is a ‘round salty belly’, the sky is ‘a vast dome of swimming pool blue’ and the rivers Tutaekuri and Ngaruroro are ‘twin umbilical cords’. The bedroom in ‘But Baby, I Love You’ smells ‘of ocean salt, seaweed, and gamey meat’.

In that story, Bernard is interviewed on Radio New Zealand and criticises the local literary scene as:

too small, too naïve, too earnest, too unsophisticated, too obsessed with identity, national or otherwise, and too immature to be anything more than a, a, what? A bunch of hobbyists who turn to secret sharing and self-promotion the minute we lose faith in our work … He hadn’t said what he’d meant to say, which was that local writers had been trying valiantly to articulate the question of this nation for some years now, offering up their experiences, and all readers ever looked for was themselves. People were not being taught how to read. They were being handed portraits and trying to use them as mirrors.

Prins is self-aware enough to include himself in Bernard’s vitriol – ‘all those writers whose every story ends at the beach, or in the water … whose self-deprecation is nothing more than thinly veiled self-loathing’. In Pastoral Care, he offers us nuanced takes on identity that are both individual and national, span history and allow space for a range of flaws and insecurities without ever feeling earnest or over-reaching – or prescribing one specific version of man, husband, father, teacher, writer, Aucklander.