SUMMER LOVING:
The invisible companion on a summer holiday is always an author.
The invisible holiday companion is always an author.
HAT, TOGS, sunscreen, gin. Insect repellent and Panadol. A few clothes and copious tucker. Yes, my annual holiday has arrived, at last. Around this time every year, my employers at the Sunday StarTimes unshackle me from my desk for a week and I go bush, heading into a rented bach at Torrent Bay in the Abel Tasman National Park with an agreeably motley collection of family and friends.
We haul in so much crap that the people running the water taxi service gape in amazement. You know that bit in Jaws where they suddenly realise the size of their toothy opponent and someone says, ‘‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat!’’? Well, this is precisely what our skipper says when a convoy of vans, cars and station wagons pull up at his jetty, discharging 20 people and almost as many chilly bins, rucksacks, child flotation devices and groceries.
But why go hungry, or thirsty, either, for that matter? We may be heading into a distant bay with no road access, limited fresh water, puny solar lights and no electricity, but there’s no point roughing it. There are gas fridges desperate to be filled with cheap plonk, and barbecues that won’t feel complete unless they’ve seared off a mountain of sausages.
Food, drink, sun and, of course, books. My invisible companion on these trips is always an author. Not just any old author, either, because the summer holiday provides a unique opportunity for author-reader bonding. During times of negligible showering, excessive drinking, intermittent nudity and relentless sloth, this author will be permanently by your side. As you slide all your excess kilos of Christmas blubber into a warm lagoon, they wait patiently for you on the beach. You will be sharing sandy bedlinen together, and quite possibly the stinky confines of a long drop.
It’s a deeply personal connection, so I always choose an author I’m keen to get to know better. Last year I brought Richard Ford. Not the Richard Ford who writes those slow, overworked novels, you understand. I’m talking about the younger, punchier Richard Ford, who revelled in the discipline of the short story. In his novels, passages of glorious spare prose are diluted by page upon page of enervating waffle; these books contain more padding than an Arctic ski jacket, and leave the user similarly hot and bothered. But when Ford brings his formidable skill to bear within the tight confines of a short story, magic happens.
Last year, sitting beside the beach in damp togs, my back wedged against a manuka tree, I lost myself in his magnificent 1987 short story collection, Rock Springs, and when the holiday was over Ford and I parted firm friends.
This year, my silent partner at the bay is Boston-based Dominican writer Junot Diaz. Admittedly, it was a risky choice. A few years ago, I stumbled across his 1996 short story collection, Drown, which blew my mind and broke my heart. Set among the tough new immigrant ghettoes of New Jersey, some stories blithely recounted staggering brutality, and I worried that going bush with Diaz could be like heading into the forest with a sociopath.
But his new short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her, proves the perfect holiday read. A book of quite devastating honesty, it’s about how young men secretly think about women, and the way today’s impulsive choices shut down tomorrow’s possibilities, and the nature of regret.
The central character in nearly every story is a pathologically unfaithful Dominican immigrant called Yunior, loosely based on Diaz himself. As I get sucked deeper and deeper into his world, I imagine how Yunior might operate in a remote setting like Torrent Bay. I picture him swaggering through the scrubby ngaios near the beach, on the lookout for hot Scandinavian tourists arriving by kayak, and sucking in his stomach whenever he passes young female trampers sunning themselves near the jetty.
I recognise elements of my younger, dumber self in Yunior’s behaviour, and shake my head. Going on holiday with Diaz and Yunior make me keenly aware of how much I’ve grown up. If I raise my head a few inches above the page, I can see my wife lying in the sun, talking to a couple of our closest friends. I can see my daughter, careering along the track with a sandy herd of semiferal children. While Yunior ponders the many and varied consequences of betrayal, checking in and out of hell, I’m on holiday in paradise, surrounded by love.