Teenage pregnancy informs Antonia Hayes’s debut novel Relativity

Antonia Hayes has drawn on her own experience of teenage pregnancy in her impressive debut novel.

The world of books is a familiar place for first-time author Antonia Hayes.

Antonia Hayes, a former book publicist and director of the National Young Writers Festival, has mined personal experience for her impressive debut novel, Relativity.

While still a teenager in Sydney, Hayes, now in her 30s and living in San Francisco, fell pregnant to her high-school boyfriend and went through with the birth. One night when her son, Julian, was six months old, she took a nap while her partner gave him a bath.

Her panicked partner woke her soon after. Their son was in a bad way as a result of being shaken. Julian nearly died, but recovered from this early injury and is now a flourishing adolescent.

In Relativity, the shaken baby is Ethan, son of Sydney couple Claire and Mark. Hayes has made them somewhat older than her own experience. Claire is a ballet dancer on the cusp of becoming a principal, Mark a postgraduate physics student.

They are locked into their highly specialised tunnels of excellence and the news of Claire’s pregnancy and the subsequent birth of Ethan causes friction between the demands of family and the pursuit of professional dreams. Claire leaves an unhappy Mark to look after Ethan while she flies to Melbourne for an audition, which is when the little boy receives his injury.

Most of the novel’s action takes place when Ethan is on the cusp of adolescence. He is an intelligent, eccentric boy, obsessed with physics. Hayes introduces the idea that Ethan has unique powers of perception in that he can see physical processes such as the emanation of waves of energy, a kind of geeky version of the notion of auras, maybe.

Perhaps this is a side effect of neuroplasticity, the rewiring of Ethan’s brain’s circuitry to compensate for the damage. Or is it something more banal, such as epilepsy?

Hayes has boned up on her physics and neuroscience and makes the science convincing, but her poise is such that it never impedes the unfolding of the story.

The relationship between Claire and Ethan is beautifully written — the fierce love, the companionship, but also the threat of change as adolescence begins to alter Ethan’s world view:

Ethan was twelve years old and Claire still watched him sleep, still sending herself into a panic if she couldn’t see his ribs move. She’d survey the landscape of his face — the smiles and frowns of his dreams, the shadow his long eyelashes cast on his cheeks, the crease that ran through the middle of his nose. His long limbs were always a shock, caught in his rumpled bedding. Her son was always taller and older than she thought he was in her head. Claire could never see him properly.

But Ethan gave the vagueness of her life definition. And although Claire complained about his clothes and Lego scattered about the house, she needed them to punctuate her existence. He made their house a home. They were similar in so many ways, softly spoken and prone to dreaming, half-listening to conversations and lost inside their own heads. Echoes of her bone structure bloomed in the lines and angles of her son’s face. But something about Ethan was from another planet.

Their relationship is all the more keenly felt because of the precarious situation from which it has blossomed. However, the golden days of boyhood are thrown further into confusion by the return of Mark from Western Australia. Mark’s father, on his deathbed, is keen to see his grandson.

Hayes uses relativity as an organisational motif in the physics sense, but also in the novelistic sense, through its capacity to inhabit and explore the ambivalences of multiple points of view.

Does a shameful moment of violently frustrated egocentricity a decade ago, for which a man has been punished by society, mean he is no longer able to be a father? Is it fair to Ethan to deny him access to Mark, with whom he shares obvious affinities such as physics? But what about Claire, who has done the hard yards, yet whose urge to protect Ethan is nonetheless imbricated with her own loneliness? The emotional relativities of these dilemmas are negotiated deftly for a first-time novelist.

There are times when Hayes overreaches, particularly during moments of lyrical epiphany. The writing loses some of its sharpness when it plays with cosmic significance. It’s a trap for first-time novelists enthralled with the transfer of their passion on to the page. Yet it’s a forgivable flaw, the mark of an ambition that is vindicated by the book as a whole.

With its excellent characters, sharp writing and intricate exploration of difficult ethical issues, Relativity is a strong debut that should endear itself to many readers.

Ed Wright is a writer and critic.

Relativity

By Antonia Hayes

Viking, 356pp, $32.99