Without a shell

The Good Parents, Joan London’s second novel, begins with the seduction and disappearance of Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old who has recently moved to Melbourne from a small Western Australian town. Maya’s worried parents, Jacob and Toni, travel to Melbourne, set themselves up in her Richmond share house, and begin to search for clues to explain her absence. We know that Maya’s affair with her middle-aged boss, Maynard Flynn, began when his wife was dying of cancer; what is less evident is Maya’s true motivation. She is detached: her observations and insights into the relationship are delivered from a million miles away. She accepts his petulance, his condescension and his lechery, comforting herself with well-worn adolescent sentiments. She wonders if she will ‘ever be able to have a “normal” relationship’ and if ‘secrets and rules were part of its kick’; she wishes they could ‘spend a whole night together’; but she also cringes with self-consciousness and vulnerability at the thought of herself, ‘on that mattress, like a creature without a shell’. Her fluctuating emotions and misguided romanticism allow Maynard to whisk her away to a dingy hotel in another city, where she languishes without telling anyone where she is.