After the death or loss of someone we love, grief suspends us in the non-real, the in-between. The poet Emily Dickinson describes a “formal feeling” in the aftermath of great pain; a numbed anguish where “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs” and “The Feet, mechanical, go round”. We become “Freezing persons”.
In Soft Serve, playwright George Kemp’s coming-of-age debut novel, people in a small regional Australian town are trying to thaw. It’s been two years since the accidental death of Taz, an ambitious teen who’d just begun to seek a life beyond the town’s “gravitational force”. His mourning mother, Pat, has left her job as a school career counsellor to flip burgers at the local McDonald’s, finding an anchor in the repetition. It’s here that Taz’s friends, Ethan, Fern and her brother Jacob, have gathered for their annual tradition: toasting three soft serves to his memory.
Meanwhile, nearby bushfires chart a path of destruction, and when the winds suddenly change, the group find themselves trapped under the golden arches. As they shelter inside, other tinderboxes threaten to ignite. Fern is eager for the next chapter of her life to start with Ethan, her boyfriend, but Ethan privately pines for Jacob, with whom he shared an unexpected kiss a few years earlier. Jacob, who has “something bright and sad clanging about” in him, is chaotic and adrift. Pat, their stalwart maternal guide, watches over them. Each is burnt by loss, each has private fears and desires, each is snared between where they’ve come from and where they want to be.
As in Kemp’s award-winning play Shack, climate carnage serves as backdrop, plot driver and metaphor in Soft Serve. As the fires rage, we witness different kinds of courage: volunteer firefighters persevering to keep the town safe; people fighting their own private anguish. Kemp handles this well, as he does the bushfire’s symbolism. There’s a bit of schmaltz – resilience being “the tiny green shoots you see on a tree trunk after a fire’s ripped through”, for example – but also evocative ideas: grief as an engulfing blaze, the unexpected winds of change, the path ahead veiled in an impenetrable haze. These tenderly articulate Kemp’s affecting interplay of destruction and rebirth.
There is a somewhat made-for-stage quality to Kemp’s novel, however, that keeps us at arm’s length. Its spatially confined, pressure-cooker setting and dialogue-driven plot offer a vivid tableau, but we rarely delve far into the psyche of the characters, leaving some of the novel’s poignant moments a bit stilted. It is a short book, too, and the competing perspectives of Pat, Fern, Ethan and Jacob – and more sporadically a Māori firefighter called Lotte, and Taz via flashbacks – struggle for enough space to breathe. There is a whole world to explore in Pat, Kemp’s most immersive, intriguing character, but our access is limited.
There is still a lot to like in Soft Serve, though, particularly Kemp’s wry depiction of regional Australia. The novel’s fictional town is a place where you feel “the excitement of a new set of traffic lights going up … as well as the sadness about the excitement of a new set of traffic lights”. It’s a place where Taz’s funeral might be cut short because “the priest’s lawn bowls final was later that afternoon”, and where “anyone could walk from the pub to the kebab shop six beers deep and guess their way perfectly”. Kemp is affectionately sardonic, relatable and droll, a foil to the novel’s tender undercurrent.
In the last line of that poem by Emily Dickinson, she writes that the frozen stasis of great pain may be “outlived”; that even memories of the pain give way – “First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go”. What comes after this gradual relinquish is not necessarily death but the “recovery of life”. Soft Serve isn’t the “drive-thru Chekhov” that it’s blurbed as, but it speaks movingly of grief and of life at its many thresholds, moments when we must choose between remaining suspended in what is no longer or never was, or renewed in what could be.
Soft Serve by George Kemp is out through UQP ($29.99)
