There’s a powerful lot of bonking in Miranda Nation’s debut novel, NEW SKIN. I couldn’t have liked it more.
Leah and Alex meet in med school in Melbourne. In May of their second year of study, 1997, Alex attends Leah’s nineteenth birthday party in Geelong. Leah has recently broken up with Amir.
Later that night, Alex fulfils his fantasy of fucking Leah “…But the person he thought he was fantasising about turned out to be a different person altogether. It was like opening a book you’d read as a child to find there was a whole level of erotic subtext that had gone completely over your head.”
What follows is a story full of erotic behaviour, overt but layered with subtext, complex, tumultuous, obsessional, a driving desire that spans decades.
NEW SKIN reminded me of Chekov’s maxim – make all the haste you can to live, my friends… God forbid you should sacrifice the present for the future. There is youth, health and fire in the present, the future is smoke and deception.
No amount of coitus can quench the fire of connection these two ignite even as Leah quits medicine to become an actor while Alex continues to become a distinguished physician. The tyranny of distance and time, their coupling with others over this distance and time, cannot negate the powerful attraction, the apparent soul mate template that age cannot wither or stale.
A dab hand at both description and dialogue, Nation has created two fascinating characters and an intellectually provocative, sexy, saucy story. Intensely and insistently sensual and ferociously honest, NEW SKIN is formidably literate and erotic.
I admired Miranda Nation’s feature film debut, UNDERTOW, from a few years ago – https://sydneyartsguide.com.au/undertow-take-the-plunge/ – and similarly applaud her debut novel, NEW SKIN. I hope it too sees its way to the big screen.
NEW SKIN by Miranda Nation is published by Allen & Unwin
