A Review of The New Animals

Pip Adam’s The New Animals is a claustrophobic satire that dissects modern life with an unflinching eye. Set in 2016, the novel takes place over the course of a single day in Auckland, New Zealand, following a group of fashion-industry workers—designers, pattern-makers, stylists, hairdressers—as they prepare for a last-minute photo shoot.

At the center of the novel is Carla, a forty-three-year-old hairdresser who has spent too much of her life in fashion and is indignant that she has ended up working for a bunch of wealthy, entitled millennial designers. However, Carla’s acerbic interior monologues bely a deeper sense of existential disconnection. Tommy, the visionary that heads the clothing label and employs Carla, constantly seeks Carla’s approval while also feeling responsible for fixing the mess left by Carla’s generation: “The planet was dying, there was poverty. This was what they’d left them.”

The thread of fashion is woven throughout The New Animals, with Adam noting the perversity of how we decide what is fashionable and gently skewering the millennial designers’ almost painful sincerity about their work. Yet she also maintains a reverence and respect for the art of fashion, inviting us at one point to appreciate the beauty in a simple white T-shirt: “The cotton had a nylon mix in it and the fabric fell long and still. It was so white as well. Like Jesus-in-heaven white… She loved the sleeves on it. The sleeves were a fucking revelation.” Ultimately, however, we are left unsettled by the consumerist, disposable nature of fashion and its devastating ecological impact, a fact that becomes increasingly impossible to ignore.

Divided by generation and class, Adam’s characters are quietly at war not only with one another—their conversations are rife with hidden meanings and misinterpretations—but also with themselves, often taking stabs at their own disappointing traits: “She was lazy. Really. That’s what it always came down to. Too lazy to succeed, really. In any real way.” The one exception is Elodie, the young “dumb nice” makeup artist, whom everyone appears to be sleeping with but no one seems to actually understand.

As Carla walks around Auckland, having meetings, cutting hair, and brimming with Gen X cynicism, she reflects on a city in constant flux: “She’d lived in Auckland for forty-three years and it still wasn’t finished. Nothing stayed in place.” Adam also floods the text with hyper-specific geographical details, describing Auckland with the same offhanded...