Leave Before You Go

Leave Before You Go

Ecco Press, 292 pp., $23

First off: Ignore the jacket blurb that refers inexplicably to the "major zest and humor" of Leave Before You Go. With zero zest and damn little humor, Emily Perkins' first novel is an unrelievedly glum tale of what the same blurb calls "generational malaise," which presumably means it's about people younger than the blurb-writer. Your own age and malaisiness will vary, of course, and may determine whether the young folk wandering vaguely through urban New Zealand look like angst-ridden heroes or shallow, morose gits.

Daniel, for example, arrives in Auckland with a colon full of condom-wrapped Thailand smack, a little job he took in London for a whim and the promise of $10K (that's $10K New Zealand, so don't get too excited). But the deal goes wrong. Then, after he gets drunk, flashes his cash, and leaves the door to his youth hostel unlocked, all his money -- surprise! -- is stolen.

Adrift and broke in Auckland, Daniel meets aimless Josh, his ambivalent girlfriend Lucy, and their slacker friend Kate. All three have love and work and family troubles, though not big ones; Daniel adds to these troubles, though not by much. And so much for the plot. The theme of the futzed drug deal -- while occasionally sounded as an ominous organ chord when nothing else is happening -- eventually leads exactly nowhere. Is it meant to be, um, postmodern? Or did the writer just lose interest?

But plot isn't everything, and the book actually picks up in interest as the thriller motif fades. Perkins draws skillful miniature portraits of flat affect, depression, and despair: Kate's "sleep is heavy, constant, almost drugged. She sleeps the sleep of the grieving, of the jilted, the deep denying sleep of someone who needs sensory deprivation, of someone who doesn't want to be themselves." If that's your cup of Zoloft, then this may be the book for you.

All the major characters have interior monologues, all-too-reliable narratives in which each one obligingly tells us the kind of person he or she is. But it is when Perkins takes a little distance from her creations and their bleak lives that this book finds some true and touching moments. Here is Lucy, in the wake of an emotional betrayal: "Lucy runs a bath but when it's full she lets it out again. She doesn't want to take her clothes off. ... When she wakes up it is only just light outside. She thinks, 'There's something I should have dreamed about, but I didn't.' Then she remembers what has happened, and for the first time she starts to cry." In passages like these, Perkins earns her malaise.