Grief has a way of freezing us in time, trapping us between what was and what could have been. Emily Dickinson once penned that after great pain, a 'formal feeling' sets in—a numb, ceremonial ache where even our nerves feel like tombs. But what happens when a community tries to thaw? George Kemp’s debut novel, Soft Serve, dives into this question with a raw, heartfelt exploration of loss, love, and the unexpected ways we find our way back to life.
Set in a small Australian town still reeling from the accidental death of Taz, an ambitious teen who dreamed beyond its borders, the story unfolds two years later. Taz’s mother, Pat, once a school career counsellor, now flips burgers at the local McDonald’s, finding solace in the repetitive rhythm of the job. Here, under the golden arches, Taz’s friends—Ethan, Fern, and her brother Jacob—gather for their annual ritual: toasting three soft serves to his memory. But here’s where it gets complicated: as nearby bushfires rage and winds shift, trapping them inside, the group’s own emotional tinderboxes threaten to ignite. Fern longs for a future with her boyfriend Ethan, who secretly pines for Jacob after a shared kiss years earlier. Jacob, chaotic and adrift, carries a brightness tinged with sadness. And Pat, their steadfast maternal figure, watches over them all. Each character is burned by loss, tangled between their past and their uncertain future.
Kemp, whose award-winning play Shack also explored climate carnage, uses the bushfires as both backdrop and metaphor. The fires become a mirror for the characters’ inner turmoil—grief as an engulfing blaze, change as unpredictable winds, and the future as a haze-shrouded path. And this is the part most people miss: amidst the destruction, Kemp finds moments of rebirth, like the resilience symbolized by green shoots sprouting from a fire-ravaged tree. Yet, there’s a touch of schmaltz here, a sentimentality that occasionally feels too polished. Still, his tender articulation of destruction and renewal is undeniably affecting.
The novel’s confined, pressure-cooker setting—a McDonald’s during a bushfire—creates a vivid tableau, but it also keeps us at arm’s length. The dialogue-driven plot and competing perspectives (Pat, Fern, Ethan, Jacob, a Māori firefighter named Lotte, and Taz via flashbacks) leave little room for deep dives into the characters’ psyches. Some of the novel’s most poignant moments feel stilted, and its brevity doesn’t allow enough space for these voices to fully breathe. Pat, in particular, feels like a character with a whole world to explore, yet our access to her remains limited.
Despite this, there’s much to love in Soft Serve, especially Kemp’s wry, affectionate portrayal of regional Australia. This is a place where the excitement of new traffic lights is tinged with sadness, where a funeral might be cut short for a lawn bowls final, and where six beers deep, anyone can stumble home from the pub to the kebab shop without a hitch. Kemp’s sardonic humor and relatability serve as a foil to the novel’s tender undercurrent, grounding its emotional weight in everyday absurdity.
But here’s the controversial part: Is Soft Serve the ‘drive-thru Chekhov’ it’s been labeled? Not quite. While it doesn’t reach the depths of Chekhovian complexity, it does speak movingly of grief and life’s thresholds—those moments when we must choose between staying suspended in what’s lost or embracing what could be. Dickinson’s poem ends with the idea that even the deepest pain can be ‘outlived,’ giving way to the ‘recovery of life.’ Kemp’s novel echoes this sentiment, offering a hopeful, if imperfect, vision of renewal.
So, what do you think? Does Soft Serve capture the complexities of grief and recovery, or does it fall short in its attempt to balance destruction and rebirth? Let’s discuss in the comments—I’d love to hear your take.
Soft Serve by George Kemp is available through UQP ($29.99).
