Late

I'm not always Zelda, and Zelda is not always me.

The voice is not Zelda's and yet it is, and this is a very strange book—not at all what the blurb inside the dust jacket suggests it is. Instead it is something of a mystery, until the owner of the voice that is "not always" Zelda has dropped enough hints to make her identity clear. As the film critic C. J. Johnson says on the back cover, this woman is someone "we all know and don't know at all, and she is passionate, smart, self-aware and very, very funny."

Zelda Zonk, whose body she inhabits, lives with her two cats, Carson and Isak, in an architect-designed, cliff-top apartment in the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse. Carson and Isak, so the voice tells us...

...are named after two writers I had lunch with in the (late?) 1950s. Not that their taste runs to oysters, white grapes and champagne, as those two lady writers did, nor are they female... Carson and Isak are undoubtedly boys. I've always preferred the company of males.

The cats disrupt this person's typing on her ancient American Royal machine as she remembers "important and personal" fragments of her "way of being": her films, her three husbands, and her thoughts and opinions about photographers, producers, films, books, art, and about Zelda. "It must be two decades since you last saw (heard?) the twists of this tongue," she tells us. "But why now you ask—what has changed?" Two things, apparently. "One was a typewriter and the other a book, and they were addressed to Zelda Zonk."

Zelda, appears to be Jewish (as was this other person, who converted to Judaism after she married her third husband), and she observes many Orthodox Jewish customs.

You might not notice her, only your reflection in her sunglasses. With the slight synthetic sheen of her wig as it catches the sun, the Jewish ladies think of her as their own, as do the Irish widows up at the cemetery on the hill, though she's not a member of any group.

Zelda's taste in clothing is "quite dark" we are told, but expensive. She wears furs and black Ferragamo heels, her camera is a Leica, she likes to visit the cemetery, and she has stuck photographs of three missing young men to her apartment wall. They "are both missing and lost" and were last seen on the cliff-top headland, from which Zelda and "not Zelda" have been hearing terrible things happening late at night.

One night a scream so pitiable it sent the cats scampering into the bathroom. Then the other night a kind of yodelling, a drowned baritone that brought my palms flush with the salt-streaked window glass.

So begins another mystery. And when a young man called Danny locks himself out of the apartment next-door to Zelda's a series of events begin which involve them both and which reflect some of the terrible things which did happened on the Sydney headlands not so very long ago.

There are other things mentioned in Late which Sydney-siders will recognize but others will pass over as just being part of Zelda's world. She takes ferry rides on Sydney harbor and notices recognizable places; she refers to iconic buildings which have long been both loved and reviled; she walks on easily known pavements and paths; and her descriptions of the wildlife, plants, and of the colors of the sea and sky are beautiful and exactly right.

Alongside Zelda's peregrinations, there are constant references to acting, filming, to "not Zelda's" early life, and the many things which she did or was said to have done. Frequent footnotes, too, offer details and comments on events, books, and films. There are many digressions, but often they are linked to the skills required in acting a part—as if Zelda, too, is just another part.

So now do you see my problem? How I keep getting distracted and then life intervenes. Working out how to play it doesn't get any easier, doing it justice (life, that is) being true to it but keeping it loose. (Nothing must come between me and my part—my feeling—concentration).

She tells of how she first met Zelda in the Jewish quarter of Los Angeles, how she "put on the black wig and sunglasses" as a form of disguise: then "I took Zelda home in my big black Cadillac and we've been together ever since." And she describes her own death in detail, and the details of the Jewish rites Zelda performed over her body, taking "the role of shomer, the guardian or watcher over my body, and also its agent of purification." At the same time she, as Zelda, is trying to answer a philosophical question Daniel has posed about a falling girl in a book he and Zelda and she have all read. Their conjoined lives interweave like this throughout the book and the imaginative flair of "not Zelda" allows her to join herself to both Zelda and Daniel and feel everything they experience. This is especially gripping in the final dramatic pages of the book.

It becomes clear this woman who builds so much of her life into this story-telling was not the dumb blonde she became in her films but clever, funny, determined, and talented. And once her identity is known, there are online accounts of her life to confirm all this.

Altogether, Michael Fitzgerald's Late is a most unusual book, with a daring and sometimes confusing structure. Some readers may find it too puzzling, others may know straight away the identity of the speaker and enjoy the conceit, but even for those who, like me, suspect the identity but wait for confirmation, Late is an imaginative and enjoyable read. Significantly, Fitzgerald notes in his "Acknowledgements," "its many literary sources are integral to it," and part of the experience of reading it is recognizing at least some of these, but this is never essential to the story.