'Infidelities' by Kirsty Gunn

Gunn’s last book, The Big Music, which won the 2013 New Zealand Book of the Year, was a novel of vast scope and innovation, an exploration of the forces of pattern and place on emotion and (in)action. The stories in Infidelities (divided into three sections: ‘Going Out’, ‘Staying Out’ and ‘Never Coming Home’) narrow the scope to examine various kinds of infidelity and betrayals of trust, sometimes devastating, sometimes so subtle that a mere ripple of barely recognised possibility is enough to change a life’s direction, or to retain an undischargeable potency in a life whose direction is not changed. Gunn is good picking out the tiny flaws and irregularities in the knit of relationships at which unravelling will seemingly inevitably begin, and at presenting small details upon which the characters’ lives and the reader’s understanding of them turn (Gunn’s time attuning herself to Katherine Mansfield (read Thorndon) is very much in evidence). The title story, about a writer trying and failing to realise in fiction the potential for infidelity not realised in an actual brief incident much earlier in her life, epitomises Gunn’s interest in emotional ambivalence and the possibilities and impossibilities of the eddies and countercurrents beneath the surface of ordinary lives.

(Oct 2014)