And How Are Things With You by Mia Farlane
Mia Farlane’s And How Are Things With You is a darkly comic and quietly searching novel about suicide, loneliness, return and the strange inadequacy of ordinary conversation. Its title has the rhythm of social politeness, the kind of question people ask when they do not expect, or perhaps cannot bear, a full answer. Farlane’s protagonist, Franny, is precisely the sort of person for whom such a question might become dangerous.
When the novel opens, Franny is stalled in London. She has abandoned her French translation work, is anxious about a cat-sitting job, and has become absorbed in a private research project on suicide. The project is intellectual, emotional and obsessive, a way of approaching something too large to face directly. Leaving the UK for Aotearoa seems, at first, like a retreat. Yet Wellington offers no clean escape. It is full of people Franny would rather not meet, memories she would rather not reopen, and new encounters that slowly disturb her isolation.
Farlane has a gift for making discomfort funny without making it harmless. Franny’s observations are dry, exact and often cruelly perceptive, but beneath the comedy is a serious inquiry into how people survive their own minds and one another’s evasions. The novel moves through awkward conversations, a nonagenarian aunt, climate protest and parliamentary debate around the End of Life Choice bill, finding in these varied scenes a larger question about who gets to speak honestly about death.
The book’s structure reflects Franny’s unsettled state. It drifts, circles and gathers, allowing research, memory and chance meetings to accumulate into meaning. This can make the novel feel deliberately off-kilter, and readers wanting a more conventional narrative drive may find its movement oblique. Yet that looseness suits a protagonist whose life has become a tangle of unfinished tasks, suspended grief and half-formed moral positions.
Farlane handles difficult material with intelligence and restraint. Suicide is not reduced to mystery, pathology or plot device. Instead, the novel considers the taboos around speaking of it, the strain placed on those who listen, and the strange mixture of intimacy and helplessness that accompanies another person’s despair. The humour matters because it refuses solemnity as the only ethical mode. It allows the book to remain alive, even when its subject is death.
Wellington, too, is used sharply. Farlane presents the city as a place of return rather than arrival, where nostalgia is repetitive, awkward and occasionally healing. Franny’s encounters do not transform her neatly, but they do loosen something. And How Are Things With You is frank, intelligent and often very funny, a novel that understands how hard it can be to answer the simplest questions truthfully.
Reviewer: Chris Reed
Mākaro Press
