Photograph of a grey day in Pātea, view of an old building with FREEZING WORKS painted on the side

The Pātea Freezing Works Museum (Photo: John Summers)

BooksJuly 20, 2021

John Summers: ink stained from the beginning

Guest writer

The Pātea Freezing Works Museum (Photo: John Summers)

Tom Doig talks with John Summers about Summers’ new book The Commercial Hotel, a collection of essays released last week to uproarious acclaim.

As an origin story, it would have been perfect, and perfectly literary: the young John grows up in the shadows of a labyrinthine second-hand bookshop. He loses himself in shelved cul-de-sacs, surrounded by teetering piles of leather-bound lore, long-forgotten postcards tucked in yellowing dust jackets. The building has cult status in certain circles, “an oasis in conservative Christchurch, a salon of sorts where artists, writers and academics might congregate”. Even better, this beacon of bohemian progressivism is called The John Summers Bookshop (after John’s grandfather). Except that John Summers Jr was born in 1983 – the year that John Summers Bookshop (est. 1958) finally closed.

Even so, the ink stains were on him from the beginning.

In 2015 Summers published Mermaid Boy, his first collection of non-fiction, with Hue & Cry Press; this second book is via Victoria University Press.

Meticulously researched, gorgeously written and endlessly surprising, The Commercial Hotel is a compendium of sparkling oddities. The 21 essays and sketches are the sum-total of five years rummaging in rural New Zealand, with a focus on the neglected towns of the lower North Island (Summers and his partner Alisa Yong lived in Greytown, Wairarapa from 2015 to 2019). Summers searches through archives, through collections of old letters, people’s patchy memories and his old childhood for those moments that ring out, the details that haunt. He captures poignant glimpses of a world before the climate crisis, an Aotearoa before social media flame wars; a world that is sometimes actually still here, if only we could tear ourselves away from our screens long enough to recognise it.

Cover of a book showing illustration of an old building topped with a sign reading The Commercial Hotel; author portrait of a man in khaki shirt leaning against a wall — John Summers and his essay collection (Photo: Ebony Lamb)

The content of The Commercial Hotel is as Kiwi – as Kiwiana, even – as it gets: Arcoroc mugs, freezing works, state housing, men shivering in the bush and, occasionally, killing each other. But Summers’ writing style is not at all macho or Crumpy. “There are new stories to tell,” he notes. Instead, these shape-shifting essays evoke the gnomic cosmopolitanism of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia or Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing. Where Weinberger honed in on Naked Mole Rats, Summers chooses eels. “I actually wrote a draft of the eels piece before I read his moles essay,” he says. “But after I read it, I couldn’t look at my piece the same way.” And while Chatwin obsessed over his grandmother’s scrap of “brontosaurus fur”, Summers elegises his friend’s Commodore 64 game The Pharaoh’s Curse – and his grandmother, Constance Summers. The longest essay in the collection, ‘Temperament’, is a tender and proud portrait of Connie, a renowned Christian pacifist and the only woman in New Zealand arrested for protesting against World War Two. Summers salvaged this note from Connie’s prison diary: “The other girl I understood removed her unborn child by means of a crochet hook.” A euphemism that remains brutal in its specificity, and a window onto a New Zealand with radically different social mores.

We talked about a bunch of things, but mainly we nerded out over books and writerly craft.

Photo of an older woman, beaming, in her garden; photo of a bright orange hut against deep green bush and ferns — Constance Summers, and Mid Waiohine Hut in the Tararua Range (Photos: Supplied; John Summers)

The Spinoff: What is your earliest memory?

John Summers: My earliest memories are of before I started school, living with my mum and my brother in a place called Hei Hei. I remember the landlord’s name was Mr Cooney. And that’s pretty much it … I have memories of that time that are quite false, like, the person next door had a playhouse that was as big as a house – and that’s probably not true.

Do you feel like books were really important to you, early on?

I was a big reader as a kid. My father never owned a TV, so when I spent time at his house, I just read books the whole time. And he owned a lot of books. For that side of the family, books were the only gift [at Christmas and birthdays]. I was a massive Tintin fan. I loved Tintin in Tibet – all the snow is great, and there’s a yeti in it.

I also read a lot of books about ghosts and the supernatural. You know, UFO abductions, the Bermuda Triangle, that kind of stuff.

Uri Geller, bending the spoon!

Exactly. I thought this was particular to me, but these things were weirdly common in the late 80s and early 90s.

As I said, I used to get given a lot of books – and stuff that was quite difficult for a kid to read. My dad was very keen on giving me things like Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad when I was about 13.

What about non-fiction?

My interest in non-fiction really started at university, reading George Orwell and his essays. And they remain a touchstone for me … it was a real revelation that people could write non-fiction in this way. [Orwell’s essays are] lasting, and highly interesting and enjoyable as well, as rich as fiction.

The other thing I’ve been a big reader of for ages is those Best American Essays collections. I started reading those when I was living in Japan [in 2007], after university, and have read them ever since.

I was also very interested in travel writing. Not so much now, but I think it’s a really useful model for writing non-fiction: people like Paul Theroux, their attention and eye for particular types of detail, that kind of sponge-like ability to soak up their surroundings. I’m not saying that I can do that, but that’s always the aim.

We interject to bring you three examples of “particular types of detail” in The Commercial Hotel:

1 A note pinned to the FreshChoice Greytown community noticeboard: “How to grow a great beard and trim it to please the ladys”

2 An evening spent in the bush, sans tent: “Most of the night was spent wide awake, shivering and listening to the trees drip and creak, a wild pig’s far-off yodel at one point, and, the more constant soundtrack, the lyrics of ‘Psycho Killer’, which had stuck on repeat in my head”

3 On Summers’ grandmother, Connie: “Dad remembered her telling him that she found herself agonising decades later that she hadn’t bought a spade at an auction. She said, ‘I don’t know why I worry about it. It’s not important and it doesn’t matter.’”

Photograph of a grey day in Featherston, and the frontage of the Royal Oak Hotel — Carterton (Photo: John Summers)

There’s a John McPhee book I’m a big fan of, called A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles. The piece about Bernard Shapiro – I would say the first sentence of that is me trying to write like John McPhee. “When the Christchurch Press came across him in 2005, on a roadside in Culverden, Bernard Shapiro was wearing canvas trousers, an oilskin jacket, puttees and a pith helmet.” From then on I drop the conceit, but it’s there.

Also, Helen Garner is a big influence, and closer to home, Ashleigh Young and Steve Braunias.

I was very interested in writing a book that is essays, and they have the memoir thing too, but they’re about … other stuff. And I don’t know if that’s that common here – I’d love to be wrong. I didn’t see a lot of examples of that. I like memoir, but I was quite keen to go beyond that, and bring in other topics.

What would you say that your chapters, taken as a whole, reveal to us about New Zealand?

I guess I’d admit to a certain nostalgia, but I’d be very careful about that too. One reason I’m drawn to the “old New Zealand” stuff is I like the idea of an egalitarian country – which is a myth, I don’t think it was ever the case, but it still seems like something to aspire to, even if you never quite reach it.

New Zealand wasn’t a better place [in the past], in particular for women and people of colour. But I think this past New Zealand still kind of lingers in the present, still has this haunting presence, and I’m interested in speaking to that, revealing it where I see it. The example I’d go to is the freezing works [The chapter is called ‘The Dehydrated Giant’]. The works aren’t a particularly nice place, I wouldn’t advocate for us needing more of them, but the fact remains that they were a part of New Zealand life for a long time. They were really important for the people that worked at them, and the communities that lived around them – whether they chose it or not. And that essay – a few of the essays – are saying, “Let’s not forget this, let’s acknowledge that part of life.”

Photo of a line-up of Elvis impersonators on stage, huge neon ELVIS behind them — Please see chapter four: Grassroots Elvis (Photo: Sarah Smythe)

Are there any lines that you’re particularly pleased with, that other people might not notice?

Hmm. The one that comes to mind isn’t even that good, but –

But exactly!

It’s in reference to the Elvis impersonators [The chapter called Grassroots Elvis, an early version of which was published on The Spinoff]. I refer to them all being the 70s Elvis, so I say it was the days of the jumpsuit “and that famous sandwich”. And [Summer’s editor] Ashleigh Young suggested that just “the sandwich” is funnier, but I was like, “No, there’s something about the impreciseness I really like.” Like, not describing the sandwich or anything. Because we know Elvis so well, that you can be vague and everyone knows what you’re talking about – and that’s how Elvis impersonation works too.

The Commercial Hotel by John Summers (Victoria University Press, $30) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

Keep going!

Flaming comets falling to Earth, except the comets are all Sally Rooney novels

(Image: johan63 via iStock; design: Tina Tiller)

BooksJuly 17, 2021

Rooney incoming

Catherine Woulfe

Contributing writer

(Image: johan63 via iStock; design: Tina Tiller)

All we can do is brace for impact, writes books editor Catherine Woulfe.

Some people consider Sally Rooney to be a genius, a god, a gift to the novel as art form, and are still astonished that she didn’t win the Booker in 2019 with Normal People. Fine. Others think her books read like overly long stock image captions, or like Dawson’s Creek except an extra overwrought version where every character is Dawson. Also fine.

What you need to understand is that it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Because in 51 days thousands and thousands of copies of her new novel are going to be laid out in bookstores and they are going to sell out in a snap and so another tranche will shuffle off the ships to take their place. And then another. And another. All the way until Christmas at least, through into January definitely, likely on through Easter and autumn and into the depths of winter. What you need to know is that today we teeter on the cusp of another Age of Rooney.

Covers of three novels by Sally Rooney, all featuring bright yellows, blues and greens, and illustrations of young people — Rooneys one, two and three (Images: Supplied)

A quick recap. Rooney’s debut novel was Conversations With Friends. It came out in 2017 and has been in the Unity Top 10 charts 37 times. It was Unity Auckland’s second-biggest seller of the year in 2019. In what you’ll see is typical Rooney fashion it then clung on like grim death, retaining sixth place in 2020. Which is amazing.

But the smackdown came with Rooney’s 2018 book, Normal People, which became a Netflix hit circa lockdown 2020. People who did not usually read novels did read this novel, then stumbled back out into the world chorusing “Have you read Sally Rooney?” Normal People made Unity’s annual bestseller chart three years running. It also made the Booker longlist and there was much wailing when it didn’t advance any further. The Spinoff named Normal People our very best book of 2018, via a review in which Kim Hill wrote:

Only a young person could have written this, with its vivid descriptions of what it’s like trying to figure out who you are, the struggle to make the inner and outer parts of yourself cohesive and consistent, the way you can be a different person, depending. We might remember the agony of it, in an inchoate way, but to describe it as Rooney does is an extraordinary feat.

It was also quite a feat for booksellers to keep up. This from an Auckland bookseller: “Some novels become a monumental, unstoppable fad – suddenly everyone’s heard about them, everyone’s reading them, and amazingly, everyone seems to love them. Normal People was that novel. For months, it was impossible to order too many copies. We were always running out and having to pre-order piles more for customers – and piles of Conversations with Friends, too, as the second dose for Rooney converts.”

And here’s Kiran Dass, also a bookseller at the time, and more recently convening judge of the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction: “So much fire and buzz. Never in my 15 years as a bookseller have I seen a novel make such waves across such a diverse readership of all ages and genders. I talked to tweens to 94-year-olds who were hooked, it seemed to have such a wide and genuine gravitational pull. Adorable elderly couples were coming into the bookshop and asking for the books by name. They’d read a great review somewhere … and then they’d pop back in later to buy copies for their children and grandchildren.”

Dass herself was an early convert – twice she was given, and ignored, review copies of Conversations with Friends, dismissing it as “lightweight millenial crap”. Then she interviewed Olivia Laing, who sold her on Normal People. And Dass was a goner.

“I reviewed it everywhere and hand-sold hundreds of copies of it over 2018 and beyond. I went back and got a copy of Conversations with Friends … I felt like my inner world was being reflected back at me in a strange but familiar memento mori. I loved that hypersensitive line ‘the inside of my body was like hot oil’ … She so successfully captures that clammy claustrophobic feeling when you are inexplicably trapped in something that isn’t quite working but you can’t quite shake it off. The romantic gravitational pull, I mean. She studies the murky intricacies of emotional and sexual relationships, miscommunications, and how these are affected by class and power dynamics, in a way that is sharp and refined.”

But what about actual numbers? Allen & Unwin uses my most-hated phrase of all time to convey the bigness of Normal People. “We have now sold a whopping [shudder] 21,000 copies in NZ, and it’s still selling strongly. Almost half of these have been since the TV series hit our screens.”

And wait for it…

“We have much bigger expectations for Sally’s third book, as her popularity is still growing. We will have over 12,000 copies in-stores on publication (as compared to 1,000 copies on publication of Normal People) and we will be restocking stores in the months leading up to Christmas.”

Another number: as of Wednesday, Auckland City Libraries had bought 85 copies and if you want to read one you’ll have to wait behind the 178 people who’ve already called dibs.

“Oh my god,” said Jo McColl of Unity Auckland. “That’s just astounding.” That 12,000 initial release into bookstores was also “a huge number”, she said.

But she thought two other books might just pip Rooney as Unity’s book of the season: Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr (of Pulitzer-winner All the Light We Cannot See) and The Women of Troy, by Pat Barker (of The Silence of the Girls). Those two won’t get as much attention, McColl reckons, but they could quietly outsell her.

The extraordinary thing about this round of Rooney hype, though, is that all of the momentum is self-generated. The merry-go-round of reviews and interviews and think pieces is only just grinding into action – the only publicity I’ve seen so far is an excerpt in The New Yorker. This time, with this book, the hype is a freewheeling beast, a pure and easy thing: people simply want to read it.

The new novel is called Beautiful World, Where Are You. As per, it’s about pale and interesting young people being awkward and intelligent and falling in love, except this time the climate crisis looms explicit and large. I liked it much more than her other two. It’s out on September 7. Start the countdown.

Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney (Faber, $32.99) can be pre-ordered from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.