The New Animals

by Pip Adam

Overview

Winner of the 2018 Acorn Prize, New Zealand’s highest fiction award, Pip Adam’s The New Animals is a work of artistic ambition and political urgency.

Set in the Auckland fashion scene in 2016, The New Animals moves over the course of one night through the hopes, misapprehensions, resentments, and regrets of a small group of fashion-industry workers, divided by generation and class. The young and rich act like nothing can touch them; the tired Gen-Xers feel forever adrift. On this particularly stressful night, hairdressers, patternmakers, stylists, and a makeup artist are tasked with preparing for a last-minute photoshoot without clothes or clear directions. Caught up in the small dramas of their lives, while around them the world is fast becoming uninhabitable, the group toils against the impossible pressure until one of them decides to break away.

Like a twisted contemporary heir to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, The New Animals is a brilliant and unforgettable dive beneath the surface of life, uncovering the common ground of humanity, as well as the common plight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948980180
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Pip Adam is the author of three novels: Nothing to See (2020), The New Animals (2017), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and I'm Working on a Building (2013); and the short story collection Everything We Hoped For (2010), which won the NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction in 2011. Adam makes the Better Off Read podcast and lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

Editorial Reviews

The New Animals is a strange, remorseless, powerful book, leaving the reader drained, angry, and frightened. . . . Pip Adam is an intriguing writer. Dangerous. You’ll want to read everything she’s done.” —Joy Williams 

“The New Animals is a prescient novel centering on the beauty and fashion industries and the people who run (or are run by) them. It is a genre-jumping and layered novel, by turns hilarious and humane, then spiky with frustration and heartache.” —The Rumpus

“The New Animals by Pip Adam is a secretly speculative novel that follows a multi-generational group of people through one manic night in Auckland. . . . The novel’s central concern is how much a body can change. Can we change fast enough to keep up with our rapidly disintegrating world?” —Necessary Fiction

“The New Animals was first published in 2017. The following year, it won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, New Zealand’s biggest book prize, its answer to the National Book Award. Prior to winning, reviews were scarce, and when the book was reviewed, the coverage was fairly negative. It got to the point where novelist Carl Shuker wrote an essay telling the country’s reviewers to open their eyes and realize that a master was at work. He asked, ‘What the fuck are we doing in this country when we are not reviewing and talking about this book?’ New Zealand’s literary community is a fairly small pond, and it’s not often that shots are fired so eagerly, so readily, into the crowd. But Shuker was right: Adam is undoubtedly one of the country’s best writers. . . . The New Animals might not be an easy read, but it is an important one.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“A less ambitious, less confident writer might not want to disorient their readers with such experimentation. But Pip Adam would rather have us experience these ideas and be inundated by them." —Clara Sankey, The Believer

“Thorny, funny, shocking, brilliant. Trust me when I tell you you have no idea where this novel is going.” —Dan Kois, author of Vintage Contemporaries

“The New Animals is fiction that doesn’t sit still, that shifts and shimmers as you read. It is in equal measure steely and self-delighting; it has little mercy. . . . It is willing to leap into the surreal in order to capture the weird violence and strangeness of being alive in this post-colonial island nation in the 21st century.” —Anna Smaill, NZ Listener

“I held my breath while reading Pip Adam’s The New Animals. As a writer, it was the type of book that makes you marvel at Adam’s fearlessness. I wanted to tell everybody about it. . . . The New Animals is a dark book. But far from being unlikeable, its characters are thrillingly and heartbreakingly alive. The book is a cry for human emotion where human emotions are constantly being wiped clean. . . . It left me stunned and heartbroken.” —Brannavan Gnanalingam, The Spinoff

From the Publisher

2023-07-26
New Zealander Adam centers her novel around a doomed fashion photo shoot for which the clothes will not arrive in time.

It is not a merry band: hairstylist Carla, who is obsessed with aging out of the business, lives with a murderous pit bull, originally bought as a prop for a shoot; Tommy, the head of the brand (along with nonentities Cal and Kurt) is insulated from all sense of responsibility by his wealth; Elodie, the makeup artist, is described as sweet, fat, and in bed with everyone. There are generational divides and monologues about being directionless and low-paid. Suddenly, the plot unexpectedly swerves, and one of the characters—up to that point a minor one—goes on a cataclysmic, folkloric odyssey that reminds readers that fashion is, in the end, just waste. Adam’s writing style can be plain, and the characters feel flat. The book seems to be aiming for a Bret Easton Ellis–style affectlessness, but you can’t be sure the lifelessness is intentional in lines like, “His father just kept making more and more money and he believed in Tommy in a way that infected Tommy with hope and love.” The twist at the end, in which the book’s messaging becomes political-cartoon-clear, will surprise readers, possibly because there is no setup for it. It includes apparently earnest attempts to equate scenes of environmental desolation with the horror of being fat while working in fashion. If that sounds unconvincing, it is. Adam writes, “Kurt loves unicorns, he feels like they really say something about the pre-apocalyptic mess they were all drowning in. Sing, they said. Dance.” In this book, there are no unicorns—only a devious pit bull waiting to attack and some fashionistas with a hard bite.

An unpredictable end punctuates an otherwise prosaic read—for a book about style, there isn’t much of it.

Kirkus Reviews