The Ice Shelf

by Anne Kennedy

On the eve of flying to Antarctica to take up an arts fellowship, thirty-something Janice, recently separated, has a long night of remembrance, regret and realisation as she goes about the city looking for a friend to take care of her fridge while she's away. En route she discards section after section of her manuscript in the spirit of editing The Ice Shelf into a stronger, sleeker work of literature. The Ice Shelf is an electrifying allegory for the dangers of wasting love and other non-renewable resources.

Genres: Fiction

297 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Anne Kennedy is the author of three novels, a novella, three books of poetry, and many anthologized short stories. Her most recent book is the novel, The Last Days of the National Costume (Allen and Unwin). The Darling North (Auckland University Press) won the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. Sing-song (AUP) won the 2004 Montana Award for Poetry and The Time of the Giants was shortlisted for the same award in 2006. Anne has also won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and has held fellowships at the University of Auckland and at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa, where she taught Creative Writing for a number of years. She now teaches Creative Writing at Manukau Institute of Technology.

After leaving high school, Anne studied for a Bachelor of Music in Composition at Victoria University of Wellington. She later completed at MA in English at the same institution.

For many years Anne worked in the film industry as a screenwriter and script consultant. Her screen credits include Crush, with director Alison Maclean, which was shortlisted for an Australian Film Critics Award and an Australian Film Institute Award, and The Monkey’s Mask (directed by Samantha Lang), an adaptation of the verse novel by Dorothy Porter.

Anne is the 2014 Michael King Writer’s Fellows at the University of Auckland.

Reviews

[Trudie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

I really hope I have just read the book that will win the 2019 Ockham prize for fiction as it is far and away the best work of NZ fiction I have read for quite some time. I make this bold statement with the caveat that I don't actually read a lot of NZ fiction ( so thus my opinion matters not a jot).

However, if more NZ fiction was this much fun (as Janice herself would say this book is no Cinema of Unease ) then I would probably be reading more of it. An eco-comedy is an accurate description of The Ice Shelf , it is outrageously funny, I literally read and guffawed my way through an entire afternoon. The last time this happened was reading the scenes with Dr Tuttle in Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year and Rest and Relaxation. Kennedy can be just as dark as Moshfegh but with less obvious intent to shock. Her protagonist, Janice, while not exactly likeable is sympathetic, and I think she actually broke my stony heart a tiny bit.

The story is faintly absurdist in a " I am going to cart my fridge around Wellington" kind of way. In some respects it's a brand of quirky humour familiar to fans of Taika Waititi films like Eagle vs Shark or What we do in the Shadows, it is difficult to know how well this translates outside of NZ.

I just adored everything about this book, as my quoting large chunks of it probably attests. I know it is not perfect, it takes some risks in form ( no chapters ), I am not sure the extended acknowledgements conceit entirely works. There are dubious amounts of hill walking during a night that appears to last forever and one scene at Hoki Aroha in which I remain unsure if tonally it reached the right note.
Nevertheless, I want to reread this and I want Kennedy to write more novels but more importantly I can't wait to see what other readers make of it.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many Kiwi novels inhabit the world of the Literature of Unease: they're gloomy, depressing and downbeat, with hardly a drop of humour in sight. They share that with the Cinema of Unease, a reference that Janice, the narrator of this biographical twelve hours or so, frequently throws into the mix, especially when confronted by gloomy, depressing and downbeat people on an inclement Wellington evening.

Janice is a writer with one 49-page novel behind her (the number of pages is significant), and is about to go to Antarctica on an arts fellowship with three other artists. She has written a second novel, The Ice Shelf, the manuscript of which she carries with her everywhere (along with the laptop containing the digital version). During the course of the night, she 'edits' her manuscript down to nothing - something she later regrets - while carting her fridge along with her. Yes, her fridge, a green object that almost has a life of its own. Once again, she and her fridge have been kicked out of a friend's flat. The fridge is a cause of considerable difficulty in terms of where Janice is going to put it not just during her brief stay in the Antarctic, but while she's visiting various friends, cafes, pubs and the Arts Fellowship on the evening in question.

The book opens with a page entitled Acknowledgements. It takes only a couple of pages for the reader to realise that the entire book is one long chapter of 'acknowledgements'. Janice thanks all the people who've made her the person she is today: a loopy, alcoholic but optimistic person who has friendships that she unwittingly manages to undermine, a family history that's much darker than she admits, and relationships that crumble at the drop of a hat - or never form at all.

Janice's first book is called Utter and Terrible Destruction. We're reminded frequently that it doesn't even have a spine, and that for a particular reason its publisher has vowed to hide every copy on every bookshelf in the city. Utter and terrible destruction might be the theme of the book we're reading, but only in the sense that the Marx Brothers' movies are equally full of utter and terrible destruction.

All this Literature of Unease world should be a miserable as hell, but Janice's apparent willingness to see the positive side of all things dark, and to be grateful for everything, makes for a novel that's funnier than anything I've read since one of Kevin Ireland's Kiwi novels showed me that New Zealand writers could actually be funny.

The words in paragraph after paragraph of Kennedy's novel are daft and laugh-out-loud, chock full of Kiwi references (I'm not sure how many of them will make sense to non-New Zealanders), in love with Wellington and its weather and the constantly-needing-to-be-negotiated hills, and dazzling in their succinct and spot on language.

I doubt that we'd enjoy Janice's real life company, but within the confines of this book, she's a delight.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the ten novels that have been longlisted for the 2019 Ockham Book Awards, this novel bills itself as ‘An Eco-Comedy’.
I have to admit this was a long way from being one of my favourite entries for New Zealand’s national book award. I enjoyed the humour of what is essentially a comic novel, but the repetition of what became the same joke all the way through the book did eventually put me off. The format of the novel is one long stream of consciousness which begins with Acknowledgements and then never ends. The book is one long acknowledgement, to everyone and everything that has ever played a part in our heroine’s life. Janice thanks everyone one for all the terrible things they have done to her, and looks on these set-backs merely as various ways of helping her to develop as a writer. Even being abused as a child is turned into a positive, ‘he gave me the means to draw upon personal experience when writing rape scenes…’. Every emotion experienced, from abuse to love and then rejection, is treated in the same way. A useful learning experienced, and given an acknowledgement.
Janice is writing the book we are holding and she is also the recipient of a grant to travel to Antarctica with a small group of artists, to accomplish their artistic projects in the cold, frozen wastes of the deep Southern Ocean. Apart from reviewing most aspects of her life to this point, the acknowledgements also show us her journey around the city of Wellington on the night she receives her travel award and before she departs the following morning. On this journey she is accompanied by a green fridge, which she liberated from her ex’s flat and has been looking to find a home for. As Janice prepares to depart for Antarctica, none of her friends seem willing to take her fridge. During the course of this unlikely evening, as she wheels the fridge up and down the steep streets (and steps) of Wellington, she also performs edits to her manuscript of ‘The Ice Shelf’, thus reducing the size of the manuscript time and again once she has told us each section of the story.

There are plenty of great moments, travelling with the fridge on the Wellington cable car was one I enjoyed, and the description of the Book Club and its uptight members which quickly morphed into being known as the Cook Blub, for their love of talking food and their blubbing about personal experiences. As a set of character assassinations, it was perfectly written. ‘…Liz: forty, Pakeha, married with two kids…. talks about baby Chloe ad infinitum, Chloe this, Chloe that, texts home ad infinitum, reads novels to relax, knows absolutely nothing about fiction, brings homemade quiche to Book Club, pet word: Chloe.’

Having reached the end, I am still wondering about ‘An Eco-Comedy’. I know Janice has won a place to travel to Antarctica, but was that the only eco-moment in the book, apart from the huge amount of power the old green fridge took to run? Memorable mainly for being different.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh I did so love this funny, uncomfortable book. Being in the company of Janice is like hurtling along in a car destined to crash. Janice's life is a total wreck. On the eve of her departure for her recently awarded Antarctica Residency, she and her much loved green fridge are homeless and desperate to get to the awards, do some final editing and find a place to stay - the fridge for a bit longer than a night. The opening acknowledgments feel familiar and genuine as Janice thanks the people who helped her to write The Ice Shelf, but four pages in you know that things are not quite as they seem and the sting of her asides reveal a complicated narrator with an axe to grind. With each 'thanks' she reveals the people and events that helped form her creative journey. It's not pretty. She's self obsessed, thoughtless, selfish and flawed in so many ways that you know she'll crash and burn. However, she is also funny and sweetly desperate and always hopeful, so you don't really want her to, even though the thought of being stuck with Janice in real life for any amount of time would make you flee in horror.

I really liked the structure of the book. You start out waiting for the story to begin, and then you realize you're in. It has great pace which stops any irritation of the repetition of thank yous, acknowledgments and positive mantras that Janice uses to remind us she is truly grateful. If it wasn't for the series of terrible people and events she "would certainly not be the writer I am today". It's a tough story, a sad story, and a totally convincing one. I just wanted to hug her sometimes and tell her I'd look after the fridge for her.

By the time I got to the end I really wasn't quite sure how it would go, would she make the flight? would she write the greatest novel ever? ...would someone take the fridge?...
Fabulous book, totally recommend.

[Rosetta Allan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have come to understand Anne's writing as unusual, even quirky, so I felt I was prepared for a reading that would tip me out of my comfortable chair, and I wasn't disappointed. This book is brilliantly bold and lyrical. The main character is totally unreliable, but then, so is the Wellington weather. No room of one's own, she says somewhere in the book, things change, and it's in this place of unease that I find the bold and resilient character of Janice. I laughed, I cringed, I sighed, and in the end, I salute her. Keep going I want to tell her. Overcoming is never a pretty place in life. Enjoyed this review as well: https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/pr...
Bravo Anne Kennedy.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the February book for my book club and I for the most part loved it. The things I didn't love so much are more to do with the technicalities and also some of the elements which seem to epitomise New Zealand literature. Rather than get bogged down, or as it may be, buried under an avalanche of my own personal qualms...I did love the way this book unfolded as a series of literary acknowledgements. It morphed and spiralled into a novel which was really a recollection of the fictitious author's life and its essence. It was witty and clever. I laughed out loud at certain passages, most notably, the cook blub aka 'book club' extracts.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's some wickedly trenchant [and funny] stuff in here about the NZ book and author world - including belonging, not belonging - writers' courses, established authors vs newbies, and some just strange stuff and general humour. Not a quick or compulsive read but worth persevering.

[Sarah Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suspect as this one settles it may float up more naturally to a 4. Smart and quirky, this is definitely a niche novel - set so firmly in NZ that you can smell the pohutukawa off the page. Although Janice is a very tongue in cheek non writer as she ditches huge swathes of her novel, leaving only the 300 pages or so of acknowledgements, the misery of her life and the lack of empathy she shows to those who attempt to help her became a bit laboured at times.

[Adam Dudding · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bloody brilliant. Very funny.

[Felicity Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who would have thought that a young woman’s self-deprecating litany of destructive experiences could be so consumingly funny? Or that a large, green fridge would be her chosen ally as she criss-crosses hilly Wellington, dragging it up and down hundreds of steps, battered by wind and rain, with the goal of finding a suitable resting place for it during her impending absence. It is the eve of thirty-something Janice’s “Arts New Zealand Antarctica Residency”, an award based on the success of her slim volume of poetry that was, unfortunately, too slim at 49 pages to be counted as a book that would earn her the annual library compensation every author craves - Public Lending Right funding.
A propensity for such close shaves with success – she also missed out on a half-share in a nice, cosy apartment by being just one day short of the three-year matrimonial property requirement – and far too many brushes with disaster are recently-separated Janice’s lifelong hallmarks. But she takes them all on the chin, as the socially isolating experiences that make a good writer. And Janice has those character-forming unhappy experiences in abundance, some brought on herself, some inflicted by others. Like her alcoholic mother, who sent her off at the age of 12 to live with her stoner father at a filthy, vermin-infested commune. At the commune school she learns “Show Me How” is infinitely preferable to “a school dedicated to the principles of dialectical materialism”. Show Me How to plant, tend and harvest hectares of weed, for example, or the kiddy-fiddling teacher Valour’s instruction on Show Me How to “become a woman”. The strength of Anne Kennedy’s writing is nowhere more evident in the telling of this horrific event. But, like all the other ghastly events in poor Janice’s past, it has a bright side: “And here I want to thank Valour most profoundly, from the bottom of my heart. Because where would a woman writer be without having been at the very least sexually abused as a child?”
It is this wry wit and ironic style that are characteristic of so much of this superbly written satirical novel. How else would we empathise with the essentially unlikeable Janice so deeply, if it weren’t for her fully engaging, first-person tone of voice and total transparency, to the point of owning up to a series of most unfortunate incidents she’s inflicted on those who have financially supported her and shown her kindness. She’s a consummate bludger, has hardly done an honest day’s work in her life, and has nothing to contribute to society other than her slim volume of poetry. Yet we are right beside her as, having consumed far too many vodka and oranges, she drags her fridge up the National Library steps to the Antarctic Residency Awards function, then bravely troops round central Wellington trying to find her fellow awards winners who seem to have fled her presence.
Ann Kennedy wrote The Ice Shelf – about the fridge more than about going to the Ice – when the 2016 Writer in Residence at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

[Ciaran · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be disingenuous to not say this first; this book sat half finished along with about 6 others next to my bed for around 2 (two!!!!!!) years. I finished it in a rush the other week because I finally could. If I'd read the whole thing in one go, this would have been a 5. No fault of the author, no fault of the story, all fault of mine.

I love the weird, postmodernism of this. The first half of this, you know, the half I read two years ago, I spent trying to convince my partner that there wasn't any unreliable narration to it at all; we the audience KNOW when Janice is leaving shit out, when the relationships are more strained in reality than they are presented on the page. How could that be unreliable narration if there was not even a chance of trickery?

When I picked it back up, I changed my mind. The structure of the book is built on flattery, on thanks, obviously. The gimmick is that The Ice Shelf is a 300 page acknowledgements section for a book that is still being edited. As the Acknowledgements progress, Janice, our protagonist takes us through those that she acknowledges for the impact they had on her life, while she takes apart her manuscript of The Ice Shelf (the novel) bit by bit across Wellington central and beyond. As she edits the manuscript, suspiciously in line with the stories she tells us of her history in order to contextualise the thanks she has to offer to various people, there is always a sense that we can't be truly sure what is true, and what is false.

Janice is not kind with her editing of The Ice Shelf (the novel). Large swathes of it, past she'd much rather forget, sections she believes could be cut to better fit her dwindling novel, end up abandoned across the city, unable to ever be returned. It is baked directly into the page that Janice is keeping things from us, things that would make the story worse off. Sometimes we discover this anyway, sometimes we are told what happened with Mark and the baby, all the terrible, fucked up shit that happened at the cult. Sometimes we don't. The narrator is unreliable, because she has to be. It's the acknowledgements. She has to be kind. One wonders what The Ice Shelf (the novel) is like. Whether it's kinder to it's own narrator. Whether it's more honest about the realities of all of those parallel events.

New Zealand fiction has, in my experience, always touched on this other-wordly, unreal sense of plot. The entire last act, where Janice searches Wellington for the pages of her lost manuscript after losing her laptop, her lifes work, her only remaining sense of purpose, and comes absolutely no where near finding a single page of it, I felt that there was someone following the narrator, picking up after her, forcing the story in the direction it was going. There is a character who saves her life at one point who I'd recreated as some figure who was accompanying Janice on her hero's journey the entire night. I wanted him to show up right at the end with the solution gripped in his hands, with enough time for her to get to the plane. At another point, I thought Janice was a ghost, haunting the past of that same night, a poltergeist of her own making.

It's only when she's sitting on the rocks of the harbour that I knew it was never going to happen, not only because there were only around 5 pages left, but also because that wasn't the point, and it was never the point. Janice was alive, lighter, even with 320 pages of acknowledgment's behind her, without that manuscript, without the burden of it all. The acknowledgements of The Ice Shelf were more confession than thanks. Her burden has been lifted; all of it. Even the bad parts, the awful childhood, her history with her family, her friendships and acquaintances, her careers, all of it off her back gives Janice, this character, a blank space. Nothing left. The Janice of The Ice Shelf would call it a mercy, and we'd be loathe to disagree. Give her her grace.

I completely forgot about the fucking fridge, but I'm not writing anymore about it.

[JeanG · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder if I am part of a social experiment to see how people cope with a chapter-less book. Clearly I have failed miserably. It has been eye-opening to me to discover my need for real structure in a book. A chapter makes for a lovely natural break in a story: a good goal to aim for: a reason to read just five more pages before turning off the light. I have found the story somewhat funny (and I am a Kiwi), but for me the irritation of the lack of chapters overrode any sense of hilarity and I just couldn’t keep going. Sad because I absolutely loved “the Last Days of the National Costume” and approached this book with anticipation.
Two other points: 1. Anne’s biograpy in Good Reads needs seriously updating as it states her “last” book was the one just mentioned (written in 2013, when the Ice Shelf was written in 2018) and 2. Despite the lack of chapters, a better cover may make more people likely to pick it up. Over and out.

[Barnaby Haszard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brutal -- in what happens to the narrator, especially in deeply uncomfortable scenes from her childhood, and in the deluded house of cards that is her reality slowly crumbling until she's left with nothing but her true self. A comedy? Well, this is clearly the work of a person with a sound wit, deployed in service of escalating tension rather than laughs. I've certainly not been taken inside an unsound mind so effectively for a while. But that's undercut by the inherent absurdity of dragging a massive old fridge around the bars and hills of Wellington on a wet and windy night, so the most trigger-warning-worthy moments are more shocking for being dropped suddenly into the narrative, wry asides like all the other wry asides, except they describe sickening abuse. I don't know how to feel about that, but this one will stay with me -- that's for sure.

[McKenzie Millican]

What a weird, funny little book. The book wanders through a chaotic, meandering acknowledgement section of a novel we never quite catch a glimpse of, written by an author on the cusp of flying out of Wellington for an arts fellowship in Antarctica. I am currently flying out of New Zealand for a trip to Antarctica so I figured this would be appropriate. The premise was clever, the story was deeply grim in the vein of Halle Butler’s the New Me or Ottessa Moshfegh (albeit funnier and a bit less serious, though equally uncomfortable at times), and the schtick carried on a bit too long at times. The book lost me around 60% of the way through but got me back in it at the end.

[Vyvien · Rating 5 out of 5]

I initially picked up this novel because I love Wellington, but I got more than I bargained for! This work is bitingly satirically funny, (think Dame Edna Everage meets Mary Bennett) and profoundly upsetting at the same time. I love works of art that tread that in-between area, that defy genre mandates. Highly recommended, but you are going to need some comfort food to get through certain sections (well, most of it).

[Catriona Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, dark, tender and poignant.

[Becca Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant novel. It’s hilarious and painful and utterly compelling. Watching the insanity of the situation unfold was simply hypnotic.

[Anne Herbison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sort of sad, but also funny with its anti-hero protagonist in picaresque style. Sends up all manner of aspects about books from publishing - who's in and who's out - to book discussion groups.

[Rod MacLeod · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just a lovely book, funny, engaging and hugely entertaining. It helps if you know Wellington but not entirely necessary. It would make for a very good TV series in my view

[Claudia Small · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed the writing and came to enjoy Janice much more as the book went on. 3.5