That Was Not My Intention
by Frances Pavletich

Frances Pavletich’s debut novel is a tessellation of lives. While it examines the frictions caused by inner worlds colliding, it also shows these inner worlds reacting to changing life periods in an adapt-or-die-alone narrative evolution. The validity of either choice differs, depending on who you ask.

The novel is divided into two parts. In the first, Lola meanders through her early twenties alongside her best friend Elija, and her boyfriend (though not for long) Ben. Ben’s twin sister Polly and best friend Jay also feature, along with a few others in and connected to their circle. The characters tend to take shape through free indirect speech which makes for suggestive gaps between external and self-perception.

The half-way point brings a ten-year time skip which drops us neatly into the characters’ thirties. The disparities between those who have grown and those who have not become increasingly obvious. Lola is now unhappily married and engaged in a ‘friendship’ (emotional affair) with a younger man. The parallels between her life and Ben’s at this point are clear – both are panicking and reacting destructively to circumstances they find stifling (Ben’s impending fatherhood and Lola’s marriage); both are baffled as their best friends adjust willingly to the responsibilities of adulthood and parenthood.

Ben wanted to know how settling down turned men into such pushovers. No, genuinely: he was curious. People liked to believe that the boomer-humour of I hate my wife, haha was an old story, but was it? As far as Ben could see, men still handed over the bulk of their personalities to the women they loved, often with a steady dose of resentment to lubricate the transformation.

 

Meanwhile, Jay often thought about how grateful he was. The first time he met Mila, there was no question that this was the woman he was going to marry. It was both an inevitability and a gift.

The blurb states that Lola and Ben ‘circle around one another, trying hard to grow up’. Neither of these things seem particularly true. Their brief contact, a decade or so after their separation, seems less the result of an irresistible draw and more of a bleak and disaffected impulse which, once followed, does not re-establish any sense of emotional intimacy. And if ‘trying hard to grow up’ means morbid contemplation of how little they actually want to do so, followed by swift abandonment of the effort in favour of gratification at any opportunity, then we’re all in trouble. Nonetheless, as the blurb also suggests, the novel is certainly ‘spicy’. Sex – and the way gender interacts with it – is often portrayed with painful honesty.

That Was Not My Intention contains few references to its specific setting, besides an urban tinge associated with party drugs and art exhibitions and the fear of provincialism. A mention of peanut slabs suggests Aotearoa, yet in the same line, chips are called crisps. This furnishes the whole narrative with an untethered quality, as if the characters transcend nationality and regionality, or exist on an allegorical plane. But it makes certain scenes hard to envisage, and, further, it is sometimes difficult to parse who is speaking in conversation:

‘Remember when she kept bringing that old dude around? How he used to say awky mo instead of awkward moment?’

 

‘Yeah,’ Lola replied. ‘Except, to be fair, I think he may have had a genuine learning disability. I did like him more than the other one, though. What was his name?’

 

‘The guy with feathers in his car?’

 

‘Yeah.’

 

‘Stuart.’

 

‘Oooh, yeah. Hippies are entertaining, though. Pretending to be all conscious and shit when all they really want to do is have sex without a condom on.’

 

She picked up the gnome and tucked it under her arm. ‘Is that Jonathon?’ she asked, pointing to the rail-thin man across the street.

 

Lola pivoted to get a better look and confirmed that yes, it was him.

The novel is loaded with social commentary. Characters spend a lot of time thinking and pontificating about their moral and philosophical concerns, despite their day-to-day choices remaining largely reactionary. As things progress, one begins to wonder whether such people actually exist: people who talk almost exclusively of art, film and social phenomena, and never about the latest episode of Love Island or the price of milk. The writing maintains a solid embargo against the vapid and mundane, and specific observations are often rebutted or recruited by sharp generalisations. Had this embargo been broken at some point during the ten-year time jump, it might have been more believable – a means of revealing the pretension of youth to be just that.

Robert talked about the American soldiers that defected to China post WWII and how this defection helped researchers understand the eight pillars of coercive control: isolate, monopolise perception, induce exhaustion, cultivate anxiety, indulge, suggest omnipotence, degrade, enforce trivial demands. The goal: dependence, debility, dread. Lola discussed the Hays Code and how Hitchcock’s film Strangers on a Train altered Patricia Highsmith’s original ending because bad deeds were not allowed to go unpunished; how Wong Liu Tsong was denied the leading role in the film version of The Good Earth because of anti-miscegenation, the role going to the German-born Luise Rainer in yellowface instead; how the Hays Code was created to keep the industry ‘moral’ and prohibited depictions that could be regarded in any way as homosexual, blasphemous, or criminal; how Hollywood queer-coded its villains with negative stereotypes and exaggerated mannerisms to suggest their immorality was because of sexual perversion.

Conversations are often relayed as an exchange of knowledge or opinions rather than a genuine meeting of minds. When we first meet Lola and Elija, they are in the bathtub trading edgy witticisms and anecdotes about thefts they’ve committed. The desire to impress seems inherent in most interactions. It emerges, then, that the novel’s relationships are actualised the most by the things not said. The things held back for the care of not hurting one another tend to be the marks of love in a community where words are often designed either to injure others or to elevate oneself.

She recalled the week before her wedding, how stressed and nervous she had been. How she would text Elija in the middle of the night and say you up? like a mediocre, but confident, man champing at the bit for a lick of the action. But Elija would reply, say no more, and pick her up so they could get on the lash together and talk about how it was sweet, really, just the two of them, a couple of drunks on a binge.

It is, at times, affecting to witness the inevitable degradation of these relationships. But for this reader, at least, it is difficult to feel a great deal of empathy towards these people, not because they make bad choices, but because they seem at most times to be coated in a sticky sense of disdain towards others. Less idealistic readers may well find greater resonance.