Review: Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne

Worry Doll is a novel in two halves, both taking place over seven days, each closely following our two entwined protagonists.We start with Heloise, 36, in Melbourne. Partnered with Ernesto, she works as a support worker at a residence for formerly homeless women. Theirs is a seemingly pleasant Melbourne existence — dinners at Marion with other aspirational couples, pastries from the local bakery for breakfast, good sex, a small cat named Pearl who must be one of the better fed pets in fiction (salmon casserole, crab bites, “prawns and whitebait in cream sauce”).

But Heloise has a secret, the affair she is having with the younger Lacey, a 24-year-old engineering student from New Zealand. She texts and thinks about Lacey obsessively, at the expense of the things happening in her life; “a life lived only in the light couldn’t sustain her,” McPhee-Browne writes. When we at last meet Lacey in the second part, in Wellington, McPhee-Browne deliciously tangles the carefully woven threads of the first section to cast doubt on Heloise’s account of events. Worry Doll evokes Heloise’s and Lacey’s two worlds with brilliant specificity, bringing the halves of its story alongside each other and allowing their symmetries and asymmetries to reveal themselves. Despite some heavy moments, Worry Doll retains a playful, sly sense of humour and whimsy (“A brave person wouldn’t be having an affair. Her hair is pretty, [Heloise] admits it”).

Worry Doll turns a cool psychoanlaytic gaze to the destabilising effect of obsession and its warped mirror. Heloise misplaces everyday items, grows increasingly strung out. Making the most of this unstable ground, McPhee-Browne extends that gaze beyond the affair to work, the body and its nourishment, friendship and family, unsettling the middle class Australian condition. “There is only one reality, and it is hers,” McPhee-Browne writes, an affirmation, yes, but also somehow menacing. She makes the most of the derealising potential of her unreliable narrators, aided by her ongoing fascination with dreams, symbols and the titular dolls. On Lacey’s studies in machine learning, McPhee-Browne writes,”it can find patterns in things you would never see a pattern in … if you don’t tread carefully, you’ll go down a dark hole full of unpredictable, inconsistent, and chaotic results”, which could equally describe the tantalising patterns that appear to shape her novel.

Like the books of Ronnie Scott, Worry Doll is firmly a novel in the cat genre, attuned to the turbulent currents beneath austere surfaces. Pearl, McPhee-Browne writes forebodingly, “is more vicious than she lets on, and when they used to let her outside at night, she would hunt possums and mice and rats, bringing them home, half-dead and writhing, to play with in the laundry”. Worry Doll relishes in its fleshiness, not just in its excellent sex scenes, but particularly in the food and materiality of its characters. In the bathroom, Heloise’s body “is sallow against the backdrop of green shower curtain, pink wall”:

The bathroom is lined with pink tiles, which she and Ernie both rather like, and a few smaller tiles with swans painted on them scattered throughout. The swans are decorated and have sashes across them. Heloise gives them names when she is in here long enough: Philomena, Fetherpuss, Gwenny.

At an Italian lunch spot, “the pasta is silky”:

and Heloise can taste the rosemary and parmesan rind and pig. She laps it up, she has some on her chin, her wrist. Heloise’s favourite part of this meal is the mopping up of the last of the sauce with bread at the end, like she is cleaning up a crime scene.

Through such tactile prose, McPhee-Browne renders strange the superficially familiar lives of her characters.

Gay rating: 5/5 for queer characters, explicit sex, relationships and themes.