Review: Good Things Come and Go, by Josie Shapiro

Good Things Come and Go is the follow up to Josie Shapiro’s award-winning, best-selling Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, and is an impressive, accomplished novel that arguably outshines even her debut. While Everything is Beautiful explored long-distance running, winning over runners and non-runners alike, Good Things Come and Go delves into the world of skateboarding.

Riggs and Penny are living in LA, where Riggs has a glossy skateboarding and television career, unbearable chronic back pain, and a painkiller addiction. When the couple lost their young daughter, Rose, to leukemia, the little that was holding their frayed lives together fell away completely. Now, having been dropped from his TV show, Riggs has disappeared, sleeping ‘no more than three hours each night he’s been away from home, curled up beneath a motorway underpass or, if he’s lucky, on a lumpy mattress in his dealer’s apartment.’ Sometimes all he needs, all he has, is skateboarding. ‘Faster and faster he skates, and then he drops into the bowl, falling into the hollow like he has nothing in the world worth living for.’

Penny is the daughter of ‘one of the greatest living realist painters of the twentieth century’. She has spent her life chasing success as an artist, but her progress dwindled into paralysis after Rose’s death. The loss is palpable throughout the novel, the strains of grief subtle but ever-present: Rose’s lilac tutu and soft-top skateboard frozen in time behind her closed bedroom door; the unspoken blame and resentment. Penny measures even her own age against the loss: ‘Another chunk of time without Rose: gone. Soon all the parts of her that held Rose will have gone.’ Penny is bound to Riggs by his threats, her guilt, and financial dependence. But when she secures an alluring solo exhibition back in Auckland, she decides it is time to go home. Riggs reappears, messy and apologetic, and with him, a sliver of hope: ‘Riggs is back, and when Riggs is back, it feels less like Rose is gone, and maybe, just maybe, she might be able to paint.’ Together, they return to Aotearoa.

Back in Auckland, their childhood friend Jamie’s career has also stalled. Deteriorating eyesight threatens both his job as a builder and his beloved skateboarding. Lonely and broke, Jamie finds himself on the Coromandel fixing up his uncle’s old bach in a quiet, unpopulated bay, where ‘Tufts of tussock grass combed over the top of the dunes bristle in the breeze. Ribbons of cloud thin as gossamer trill across the sky.’ The vivid details contrast with Jamie’s shadowy vision, where faces are becoming ‘cloudy and indistinct’, daylight ‘burrowing away in a narrow tunnel.’ For him, the view is all the more intense with the thought of losing it. He ‘[w]ants to look forever on the perfection of the dirty turquoise water and the sky melting into a pale wisteria-purple where it kisses the ocean.’ 

The story moves between the three characters’ perspectives, each of them weighed down by their own regrets and shattered hopes. Both Shapiro’s main characters and secondary characters are rich with complexity, broken but sympathetic. She takes us beyond their mistakes to the pain and heart underneath. The novel weaves in and out of the past, zooming in on the moments where life let the characters down, where they let themselves and each other down. The fateful day of the Alley-Oop skateboarding competition, when they all felt invincible, both Riggs and Jamie intent on winning. Jamie’s kiss with Penny. A finger, broken. The phoenix painted on the side of the butcher’s shop. It has been twenty years since the three connected. Each of them has changed irrevocably, and the reunion will spin them all into chaos.

Shapiro’s writing is artful and assured, and Good Things Come and Go is a heartfelt exploration. It weighs up what could have been, and what really matters. When life doesn’t work out the way we hope, it asks, where to from here? How do you carry on? Good Things Come and Go doesn’t promise a tidy or happy ending; it is full of heartache and loss. But it reminds us that our decisions shape our fate, and that while some of the best things in life are only temporary, other good things are just ahead.