Claire Mabey reviews Josie Shapiro’s second novel.

How would Josie Shapiro follow up her 2023 debut novel, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts? A bestselling novel with a magnetic lead character in Mickey Bloom – a woman that thousands of readers around the country fell in love with and rooted for and related to. 

I was nervous for Shapiro when I picked up Good Things Come and Go. A second novel is as difficult as the second album, perhaps especially when the first is an out-the-gate banger. But I’m happy to report that Shapiro has done it again: Good Things Come and Go is as intimate and explorative as her first book, and has cemented Shapiro as a writer who is deftly chronicling 90s-soaked elder millennials in their midlife crisis era.

When I was a kid in Tauranga everyone knew who Tony Hawk was. Even if we were too scared (and uncoordinated) to try and emulate any of his moves at the skate park, we were still decked out in Dickies shorts, Vans shoes and knew our way around the skateboarding lingo. Hawk was the kind of iconic sportsman who cultivated an entire vibe: the pied piper of skateboarding, leading children to ramps and rails all around the world. Shapiro builds two of her characters from this phenomenon: Riggs and Jamie. In his youth, Jamie was the effortlessly talented one, Riggs the wannabe but in the end the one who made a successful career out of the sport – until injury and adult life got the better of him.

It is now apparent that a theme across Shapiro’s work is closely examining fragile masculinity. Adam Riggs is fascinating. His adult persona is inextricable from the youth skateboarding culture that he rode high on until injury, pain and addiction saw him tossed out of sporting fame and the adrenaline he lived for. Riggs’ dialogue is punctuated with “bros” and a general air of the has-been skater star desperately trying to hold back the torrent of grief and pain that Shapiro’s close third person narration permits us to see. 

The tension in the novel comes from Riggs’ on-edge energy and from a love triangle framework: Penny, Riggs and Jamie met as teenagers and while it’s Penny and Riggs who end up together, there’s a lingering chemistry between Jamie and Penny that will flare up down the line when trouble and age and pain have worn Riggs and Penny’s partnership right down. It’s a classic trope – the teenage love tryst bubbling back up in adulthood when old friends are reunited and secrets unearthed. But Shapiro turns the cliché on its head by infusing the story with art and with loss.  

Like Damien Wilkins’ award-winning novel Delirious, Shapiro’s novel is haunted by the death of a child. Penny and Riggs’ daughter Rose has died of leukaemia but the glow of her is present throughout the book, lingering just out of sight: the sodden pain of loss is on every page. I find it extraordinary when writers who are parents play out the loss of a child through fiction. What drives an artist to confront the worst? Shapiro writes into danger, failure, loss and regret without losing sight of the flipside of those states. In both Everything is Beautiful and Good Things, the female characters in particular find ways to evolve beyond trauma. They leave men behind.

Penny Whittaker is a likeable if not at times frustrating character. She is an artist suffering under the weight of her father’s mighty legacy as one of the great realist artists of the 21st century. Fathers are brutes in Shapiro’s worlds: overbearing, toxic, violent with ideas as well as with bodies. As in Everything is Beautiful, it’s the influence of an older, wiser woman that pulls the younger woman up and away from the spheres of the patriarchy and into a freer, more self-focussed way of being. For Mickey Bloom it was a female running coach who understood her body and the pressures that nearly destroyed it; for Penny it’s the example of an artist who did not need public acclaim to make good work and enjoy doing it. There is, now, a thematic continuity across Shapiro’s novels: middle-aged women emerging out from the shadow of misogyny and acute trauma and into a more confident iteration of themselves. 

Alongside the thematic strengths of Shapiro’s work is the craft itself. Good Things Come and Go is set to be as much of a commercial success as Everything is Beautiful. The writing is fast-paced, told in short, clear sentences in the present tense (“The oven buzzes while it gets up to heat and the dog saunters from the bedroom to the couch”) – and the terrain is intimately connected to the emotional turmoil of the characters. The undulating ground of Penny, Riggs and Jamie’s internal worlds are the lifeblood of the book: the unpredictability of Riggs, Penny’s evolution and the revelations at the heart of Jamie’s own painful story keep the reader glued.

It is incredibly difficult to create a layered, intricate novel that is also a dream to read. Shapiro has proved herself a masterful storyteller, able to create lived-in characters specific enough they are universal, relatable, pitiable and even galling: all three characters are flawed and test the reader’s patience until you’re reminded of the pain that has shaped their sometimes devastating behaviour.

Good Things Come and Go is a novel about life not going as hoped or planned. It’s a novel about failure and danger and not knowing what you have control over and when your life may be derailed by unforeseen catastrophe, common as they can be when you invite parenthood, high-risk sport and art into your life. Despite its agonies, Good Things Come and Go is ultimately a book that reminds us that experience has value and reinvention is always an option. It’s a novel to gift to your millennial friend who might need to be reminded that middle age doesn’t have to mean it’s too late to start again. 

Good Things Come and Go by Josie Shapiro ($38, Allen & Unwin) is available to purchase at Unity Books.