2000ft Above Worry Level

Published by Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2020, 192 pages.

Everything is sad and funny and nothing is anything else

2000ft Above Worry Level begins on the sad part of the internet and ends at the top of a cliff face. This episodic novel is piloted by a young, anhedonic, gentle, slightly disassociated man. He has no money. He has a supportive but disintegrating family. He is trying hard to be better. He is painting a never-ending fence.

Eamonn Marra's debut novel occupies the precarious spaces in which many twenty-somethings find themselves, forced as they are to live in the present moment as late capitalism presses in from all sides. Mortifying subjects - loserdom, depression, unemployment, cam sex - are surveyed with dignity and stoicism. Beneath Marra's precise, unemotive language and his character's steadfast grip on the surface of things, something is stirring.