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May 07, 2008 04:30 AM
New Zealand novelist Emily Perkins arrives for a reading at Harbourfront Centre tonight with no real reputation to speak of on these shores. Not that she's necessarily complaining. Back home in Auckland, Perkins first came to the public's attention as a 16-year-old actor in a soap opera that ran for a season in the mid-'80s. "There wasn't much New Zealand TV at that time," she recalled yesterday, during an interview at the Toronto offices of Random House. "I would get recognized at McDonald's. That was the level of my fame." When the series was cancelled, Perkins enrolled in drama school but ditched acting when it became apparent that she was destined to spend more time waiting on tables than appearing onstage or screen. A creative writing course yielded more encouraging dividends. Perkins' first published story was spotted by a visiting U.K. publisher who encouraged her. She moved to London, where her highly lauded debut collection, not her real name, was published in 1996 by Picador, followed by two novels, Leave Before You Go (1998) and The New Girl (2001). It wasn't long before Perkins was being hailed as one of the fresh young voices of her generation, which can be a mixed blessing when it comes with being labelled by one pundit as "the Natalie Imbruglia of Britlit." "Oh my God," says Perkins, bursting into laughter, "what does that even mean? What could it possibly mean?" Perkins' previous titles have been distributed here to minimal or non-existent attention. That is expected to change with Novel About My Wife, the author's first title to have the backing of a Canadian publisher. After seven years without a book, the novel will also serve to reintroduce the author in places where she is already known. "I'd made a few false starts on a few novels prior to starting on this one," says Perkins, who moved back to New Zealand earlier this decade with her husband and three children. "I just thought, `I'm not going to pursue something that isn't working. I'm going to take my time and not worry about whether it should be two or three years between books.'" Set in London, the book gradually unfurls a taut, unsettling, psychological narrative about the mysterious death of a young Australian woman, told from the perspective of her English husband. "It just made so much sense that the husband should be the one to tell the story about the wife, because he's almost in the same position as the reader where there's a lot that he doesn't know about her. He's making sense of it and piecing it together as he goes along." Perkins, who made an aborted effort at writing a historical novel, happily concedes that she is much more comfortable inhabiting the fictional present. Novel About My Wife, among its several attributes, offers a sharply observed critique of the efforts to which middle-class Londoners will go to ensure that their shelves are stocked with the right kind of olive oil. "How we live now is endlessly fascinating to me," she says. "Middle-class people are expected to maintain a level of materialism and consumption, and yet not seem to be aspirational about those things because that would be crass." Not intending to wait another seven years between books, Perkins is already plotting a new novel with a similar societal backdrop. "One of the things I want to explore is the way that the middle class is farming out jobs to other people in the way that the Victorians might have done. Nobody says now that they have servants, but they have a cleaner, a nanny, a gardener, somebody who paints their house and maybe they'll get the caterers in for a party. There can be a great deal of tension in that." Emily Perkins appears tonight at Harbourfront Centre's International Readings with fellow authors Susan Choi and Adriaan Van Dis at 7:30 p.m. in the Brigantine Room. Flight delays were widespread in March, the U.S. Transportation Department reported today, signaling trouble ahead as the summer travel season approaches. Nearly 30 percent of domestic flights arrived late in March, compared to about 27 percent in March, 2007, the agency said. It was the worst March on record since the department started collecting comparable data in 1995. Bad weather and heavy traffic volume slowed flights, the report said. Another reason, the Associated Press reported, is that airlines are replacing big planes with smaller ones to fly with fewer empty seats. That crowds the skies and gates. Hawaiian Airlines had the best on-time record among 19 airlines surveyed, with almost 95 percent of its flights arriving on schedule. American Airlines' record was the worst. Just 62 percent of its flights arrived on time. Seattle-based Alaska Airlines ranked third best, with 78 percent of its flights arriving on schedule. The airline canceled just under 1 percent of its flights, compared to an average 2.6 percent for the 19 airlines surveyed. American Eagle had the highest percentage of cancellations, 5.9 percent, followed by American Airlines at 5.6 percent. Of the total flights departing out of Seattle-Tacoma Airport in March, 78 percent left on time, and 72 percent arrived on time. Chances of flights leaving on time were best in the early morning. Nearly 90 percent of flights leaving Sea-Tac between 6 a.m.-9 a.m. departed on schedule. The worst period for on-time departures was 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. when just 61 percent of flights left on time. Complaints about missing or mishandled bags dropped slightly compared to March a year ago. The airlines averaged 6.7 complaints per 1,000 passengers, down from 7.7 in March, 2007. Alaska ranked sixth-best, reporting 5 baggage complaints per 1,000. Hawaiian had the fewest complaints, just 2.5 per 1,000. Atlantic Southeast Airlines had the most, nearly 16 per 1,000 passengers. Carol Pucci: 206-464-3701 or cpucci@seattletimes.com Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
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