He would never. Or would he?

Holly Wainwright’s explosive new novel is about adults out camping with their maturing teenage kids.

Holly Wainwright’s fifth novel He Would Never opens with the immediately-hateable Lachy Short sprawled on the ground, “somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness”, lamenting his own fate.

It’s an arresting beginning that immediately casts doubt on the type of man Lachy is. What unfolds is an emotionally layered novel about female friendship, maternal responsibility, and the often invisible work of holding a group together while ignoring the cracks beneath the surface.

 

The novel’s emotional anchor is Lachy’s partner Alyssa (Liss) Short. She is one of a group of women who first meet at an explosively dramatic mother’s group in Sydney. Each year, Liss hosts her friends and their families at Green River campsite, a secluded bush plot to which Liss’s family holds exclusive camping rights. Over time, they support, exasperate, rescue, and rely on one another as their lives and relationships drift into new configurations.

The women are flawed — sometimes unkind, sometimes careless, often overwhelmed — but also resilient, funny, and tender. They are “existing in a women’s world,” as the author puts it: navigating the blurred lines between selfhood and sacrifice that motherhood so often demands. But as their children grow, so too do the complexities of their relationships and the dynamics that unfold at the yearly camping trip.

Wainwright is at her best when evoking the textures of this world: barefoot summers, oyster cuts and campfires, the illusion of childhood freedom enabled by watchful parents. She writes well of what it means to raise children in a community, and the ways in which love, frustration, respect and obligation can twist together until it’s hard to tell them apart. It’s a vision rendered with tenderness and nostalgia, grounding the story in a deeply recognisable cultural setting.

Friends who go camping every year find themselves in a moral quandry in Holly Wainwright’s new novel

But while the campsite is idyllic, the yearly camping trip is clearly far from perfect. Liss is difficult — she makes excuses and avoids conflict in ways that feel believable but also, at times, unresolved. She struggles with boundaries — her relationship with her best friend Dani is, from the beginning, inappropriately intense. “I’m in love … we’re bonded now,” she says earnestly after knowing Dani for all of a month —the kind of talk that, from a lover, would raise a loud alarm. But for Dani and Liss, this attachment becomes the beginning of a friendship that will see them become each other’s “family”.

Liss is both central to the story and frustratingly uncritical; a woman desperate to hold her world together, yet unwilling to examine the foundations on which it rests.

Liss’s husband Lachy, meanwhile, is an almost cartoonish figure of entitlement. He is smug, sly, and morally vacuous. His inherited wealth comes from “gambling money made from poor men’s misery”. As Lachy’s behaviour grows more disturbing, Liss continues to make “endless small, uncomfortable excuses for him”, avoiding confrontation and prioritising the illusion of harmony over the safety and comfort of those around her.

Holly Wainwright is a wildly successful podcaster, and now author of He Would Never.

Male characters are at once peripheral and immensely impactful in He Would Never, and that, perhaps, is part of the point. Most of the men — wealthy, emotionally avoidant, or performatively rugged — serve as catalysts rather than companions.

The lone exception is Aidan, a gentle schoolteacher and one of the few men who doesn’t feel like a walking red flag. It’s hard not to wish the novel had more to say about this performative masculinity, or the ways in which male entitlement is maintained not only by men like Lachy, but also by the women who shield them.

The issue of class lurks beneath the surface, too. Liss’s group of friends spans a broad socio-economic range. Liss, apparently, doesn’t care about money “at all”. In fact, she abhors it, as well as men — like her father — who make chasing it part of their identity. For Liss, “after the time she’d spent in India, everything back home seemed wasteful, frivolous, gross”. But at the same time, she seems blind to the extent of her many privileges — the six-bed mansion in Sydney’s east, the barely used beach house, the night nurses and designer baby clothes, the inheritance that means she would never have to work again if she didn’t want to.

Liss’s supposed disdain for money is never held against the opulence and privilege of her life, and her barefoot, bohemian ideals sit uneasily alongside the trappings of wealth. While Green River holds immense personal meaning for Liss, it’s clear that most of her friends would prefer a stay in one of her luxurious beachside mansions instead.

Liss is often likeable, but she is also under-explored. The big questions — why Liss married a man so much like the father she disdains, why she refuses to see the danger in Lachy, why she continually prioritises harmony over safety — are never fully unpacked.

Liss is out of touch, not just with the world, but with herself. She is described by her husband as “a woman who likes to pretend she’s wild,” while zipping between her campsite and luxury beach house in a Land Rover. That contradiction might be compelling if it were more critically explored.

While some readers may wish the novel confronted its darker themes more directly, others will find its strength in Wainwright’s accessible writing and emotional realism.

“I wish for a year here where things don’t get messy,” says one of Liss’s friends. But of course, things do get messy.

Seren Heyman-Griffiths is a writer and researcher currently based at the University of Sydney.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Holly Wainwright is a writer, editor and podcaster who lives on the south coast of NSW with her family. She is co-host of the nation’s No.1 podcast, Mamamia Out Loud, and she is one of the stars of the live shows around the nation. Her previous novel, The Couple Upstairs, made Better Reading’s list of the Top 100 Books of 2023.