VIVIENNE PLUMB The Glove Box and Other Stories. Reviewed by Nicole Hayes
This unsettling collection explores transience and the longing for something or somewhere lost.
The Glove Box and Other Stories is a short story collection by New Zealand playwright, poet and novelist, Vivienne Plumb. This collection, Plumb explains in the Acknowledgements, formed part of her doctorate thesis on women and hitchhiking and the relationship between the female body and the road. This theme is a thread throughout the entire collection, which is both its strength and weakness. The stories also explore questions of family, grief, mental health and its impact on others, and the navigation of communal and shared living, while challenging the idea of proprietary space.
The first two stories are preoccupied with family, the mother in particular, and the impact of her frail mental health – a ‘little nervous breakdown’ – on the people left behind. While the voice is similar in both stories, and a little disorienting for it, they are presumably different families – or at least different mothers. In the eponymous ‘The Glove Box’, the mother’s breakdown involves unexplained absences during which, the family later discovers, she would hitch rides with strangers, disappearing for days at a time. While in ‘Why My Mother Never Hitchhiked’, as the title suggests and the story reiterates several times somewhat unnecessarily, we are told that the protagonist’s mother, also of frail mental health, never hitchhiked. Although she travelled widely as a young woman, and befriended many strangers on the way, ‘she never accepted lifts with them’. The family dynamics in these stories are altered somewhat, but remain similar – the mothers seem remote and difficult, the fathers are barely present and their relationships with their wives fraught, and the narrative of each is told from the daughter’s perspective, in first person.
Most of the collection is told in first person, and echoes similar themes and concerns: names and characters, obscure fixations and traits, regularly bleed across stories, unusual enough to stand out in memory. Characters Jassi, Caro/Caroline and Valma appear in different stories. A Piano Commune, the family trope of the Axe Murderer of Mummulgum, and a proclivity to live exclusively on fruit feature repeatedly. A fascination with food and fasting that hints at eating disorder peppers many of the stories. And of course, the common thread of hitchhiking.
In two of the stand-out stories, ‘Floorplan’ and ‘Dangerous and Deep Undertow’, hitchhiking, we are told, is a ‘transaction’, a lifestyle choice more than merely a means of transport:
They pick you up and give you a free lift and you keep them entertained for x-plus miles. You talk and keep them awake. Or you listen to them ranting and pretend to take them seriously.
We also hear about the other side of this transaction – the potential harm and fear that these women seem determined to ignore or overcome. In ‘A High White Ceiling’, Wendyl reveals to Dougal, her former hitchhiking partner, that after they’d been dropped off on one trip, the driver had found Wendyl’s address and broken into her home to violently assault her. In ‘The Blouse’, the commune leader, Joseph, touches the protagonist’s sheer blouse and, after explaining that the commune women are not allowed to orgasm, tells her that he will ‘look after [her] personally and teach [her] everything’. Similarly, in ‘Mortdale’, when the young runaway protagonist hitches a ride in a truck, the driver establishes trust first, buying her a meal and asking about her home life, then, on learning that she is disenfranchised and largely alone, rapes her by the side of the road.
Despite the traumatic outcomes for these characters, the over-arching tenet seems to be that the choice to hitchhike is somehow representative of something bigger, something noble. In these stories, people hitchhike, or they don’t – a point made in reference to many of the characters, even when it seems irrelevant to the story. The implication is that the choice to hitchhike is always relevant. That it says something profound about who we are and what we care about.
As a consequence, there is a general feeling of transience, of travel and movement, and a longing for something else, or something lost, or even just something different, which has a vaguely unsettling effect – one that isn’t entirely unpleasant but is, at times, unsatisfying. In ‘Sixty Photos’, Valma, the main character, presumably the Aunt Valma referred to in ‘The Glove Box’ (rumoured in the earlier story to have entertained a ‘young hitchhiker’ in her kitchen), encounters a transient girl who breaks into her home in the middle of the night, and helps herself to the contents of Valma’s fridge. When Valma discovers the intruder, rather than call the police or ask her to leave, they sit down to a meal together, sharing each other’s history and, eventually, Valma’s album of photographs of herself and her deceased husband; an album that catalogues their life together, year by year. It is a surprisingly romanticised and sentimental ending considering that Valma’s husband is described as ‘A generous conversationalist, popular with people from all walks of life and consequently annoying to live with’.
There are some powerful moments too. In ‘Efharisto’, a mother takes her terminally ill son on a holiday to Greece: ‘We had needed something. Greece had been the thing that we had done to break the dreadful silence of my son’s illness.’ When they hitch a ride with a stranger to the hospital, their driver initially helps them, but then, over coffee, moments after learning that the woman’s son is very ill, he makes a pass at her:
I hated the way one thing could appear to be one way and then suddenly morph into something else, something other. I could taste the bitter coffee in my mouth.
And on Plumb’s preferred topic, hitchhiking, we are told that ‘… when you hitchhike, it’s like opening yourself out, opening the pages of your own book’. It is this level of complexity – the nuance and shades – in relationships and how we relate to the world around us, that this collection articulates best. The power of these relationships – these moments – to shape who we are.
There is much to enjoy in this book, particularly the unpacking of conformity and notions of the female body and space. However, when read as a collection, the emphasis placed on hitchhiking as a measure between those who choose to hitchhike, and those who choose not to, rankled. That this is somehow representative of some greater, more poignant question of character, a question Plumb applies most directly to the women in her stories, seems overly simplistic. As a result, it was difficult to avoid the feeling that the individual pieces seemed to cover the same philosophical and emotional territory, without much variation or extrapolation in the position taken. I wonder, too, if this sense of repetition was not aided by the structure of the book. Perhaps if the pieces had been ordered differently, breaking up those first contributions so that it didn’t feel as if they were all different sketches of roughly the same woman, this might have resulted in a broader, more satisfying consideration of the themes.
Vivienne Plumb The Glove Box and Other Stories Spineless Wonders 2014 158pp $24.99
Nicole Hayes is the author of The Whole of My World, a YA novel set in 1980s Melbourne about a teenage girl obsessed with footy, shortlisted for the Young Australian Best Book Awards (YABBA) 2014 and longlisted for the 2014 Gold Inky Awards. She teaches Creative Writing at Australian Writers Centre, the University of Melbourne and Phoenix Park Neighbourhood House. She tweets at @nichmelbourne. To find out more, visit her website: www.nicolehayesauthor.com.
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