Reviewed by D. W. White

Perhaps it is not surprising, given the hectic, myopic, and utterly absurd manner in which this rather new millennium has begun its life, that the most common refrain in the cursory consumption of art—be it film or television, music or literature—is that this piece or that show was, simply, tragically, sorry-to-say-but-just-a-bit, too long. The obsession with brevity pervades write-ups and reviews, dominates casual conversational recaps, permeates industries and dictates editorial decisions. And, to be sure, it is often sensible—as any writing workshop can demonstrate, much progress and refinement can come via the cut over the paste. A byproduct, however, in the literary world seems to be a proliferation of work that takes the maxim a bit too far, that forgets there is something lost in taking as one's lodestar economy while crafting a novel—after all why are we here, reading this book or living this life, if not for experience? A choice example of this phenomenon is Ella Baxter's engaging, lively, quite fun and ultimately a bit too brief of a debut, New Animal. 

New Animal follows Amelia, in her late twenties and maven of the dating app scene, rolling somewhat languidly through life. She flips through her phone and through her nights in the sticky summer of Australia's Northern Rivers region, stuck between Brisbane and Sydney, between youth and adulthood. She works, along with the rest of her charmingly dysfunctional family, in a mortuary, where Amelia serves as the serious and sullen cosmetic genius. Her brother Simon, whom she somewhat inexplicably resents, is in a triangulated relationship centered around reptiles and passive-aggressive conversation while her mother and stepfather manage and mismanage the family business, respectively. All of this is set up very quickly and very briefly in the book's opening pages, before bolting off on its narrative trajectory with the sudden death of Amelia's mother.

And that is where the challenge lies in New Animal: the weight. The storyline, compelling as it is, feels at times rushed and malnourished, as Baxter seems to take for granted much of the emotional depths through which her protagonist swims. Certainly, the untimely death of one's mother is a tragic event, and one always ripe for exploration in fiction. However, we see so little of Amelia's mother before she dies that her characterization—and thus the extent to which her absence can propel the narrative along—is limited. Simon, too, is more assemblage of details than flesh-and-blood fictive player, as neither his antagonism with Amelia nor his intriguing relationship status are given enough room to flourish. We as readers seem to be expected to understand these familial inter-dynamics, to be able to graft them onto the narrative based on our own experience and similar tales we've heard before. And while that is certainly possible on a cognitive level, such a thing is not really the point of fiction, or of art; each of us has in overabundance our own reserves of life stories on which to draw, but the essence of a creative work is to showcase something new or newly imagined. And while New Animal is an effective book full of many fine elements, it cannot be said to meet that particular challenge.

But, undoubtedly, those fine elements are present in spades, the most notable of which is Amelia's voice and narrative abilities. The present tense has become very common of late as a tool to assist in the capture of that slippery fictional creature, the driftless and disaffected late-twenties-first-person-narrator, and New Animal is a worthy addition. Baxter's heroine is amusing, perceptive, and refreshingly aware of her emotions—far too rare a thing in the first-person storyteller. A prime example comes soon after the accident that took Amelia's mother, high atop scraggly cliffs overlooking the sea:

If I had the ability, I would turn into a huge, malevolent demigod. A tall demonic goddess who would stand ten tree-lengths high, so tall that my head would reach the underside of the clouds. I would kneel in the sea as I clawed my fingers along the coastline, combing out all of the mothers from every family and sliding them in handfuls into the sea behind me, because if I can't have a mother, no one can. That's the law of my land.

After her mother's death, and unable to face the funeral with its attendant symbolism and irritations, Amelia flees to Hobart, where her semi-estranged father, Jack, lives in a Xanadu-esq house deep in Tasmanian suburbia. There she stays, watching Jack—the most fully-formed and compelling secondary character in the book—work through a late-mid-life crisis at the typewriter and display a remarkable level of tolerance towards his daughter's behavior. 

When Baxter slows down to take in a moment, she is perhaps at her best, and the novel's second half features a number of passages rich in descriptive and scenic detail. While Amelia's foray into the underground sex world will undoubtedly command the lion's share of attention, the physical world which Baxter coaxes into life is the more effective literary element:

I wake from a dream in which I'm trying to wrap an infant version of myself in banana leaves. I pull at the palm fronds, desperately trying to get the two ends to meet around the baby's tiny shoulders, but the baby feels cold—far too cold for something living . . . I raise the back of my hand to my own cheek, which is warm and dry. Without getting out of bed, I lean across and open the curtains to let the light seep in. It's a gray day and the nearby shed creaks with the effort of staying upright in the mild wind.

My mother will be buried today.

There is a tradition of physicality, of an emphasis on the tactile and the raw, which runs through Australian literature. From Patrick White's Voss through Murray Bail's Eucalyptus to Madeline Watts' The Inland Sea, the natural world has a prime place in the country's novelistic lineage. New Animal—an especially close cousin to Watts' 2020 debut—continues this legacy with skill and deft. Indeed, the book is a well-crafted one, relying on humor and authenticity, that narrative voice and those scenic skills, to render Amelia and her story in an engaging, authentic manner. One simply wishes, by the close of that one-hundred-eighty-fourth and final page, that there had been a bit more of it.