Diana Reid, Seeing Other People

 - Diana Reid's debut novel Love and Virtue, released in 2021, was wildly acclaimed and won a number of literary awards. It thoroughly deserved them. Personally, I loved it. In her new novel her prose is far more poetic, intricate and convoluted, which unfortunately at times borders on pretentious. I was reminded of Emily Bitto's second novel Wild Abandon, which I just couldn't finish despite trying three times. (It has just been announced that it has won the 2022 Margaret and Colin Roderick Award for best literary book of the year, so what do I know?)

- Seeing Other People focuses on two sisters in their twenties, Eleanor and Charlie. Eleanor, a business consultant, is the oldest, and Charlie, a struggling actress, the more beautiful. 

- A key event takes place in the first few pages. Eleanor breaks up with her boyfriend Mark because he confesses that after a night out with his mates he went home with a stripper and ‘almost’ slept with her. A disgusted Eleanor ends the relationship.

- The second micro drama involves Charlie and her rather complicated relationship with her flat mate Helen, who is a theatre director and openly gay and my favourite character. They sleep together. 

- It becomes clear very early in the book that Reid is absolutely obsessed with her characters. She’s the equivalent of a school principal watching her pupils' every move. She creates a psychological drama out of rather ordinary, quotidian interactions. It's a densely painted portrait of young people with their usual emotional eruptions and anxieties. Nobody’s really at fault but everybody thinks they are, including themselves. As one character admits at one point, she is 'insufficiently self-loathing'. 

- Some reviewers have named Reid as Australia's Sally Rooney. That comparison is misplaced. Rooney’s characters have much larger minds and preoccupations. 

- As the novel proceeds the micro threads become quite entangled, and we're sucked into a more fascinating drama. Half-truths and lies complicate the relationships and at times come close to ending them. 

- The way the novel pans out is quite satisfying, if a little sentimental. I was hoping for a hard, wrenching finale, but of course didn't get it. 

(This brilliant review by Beejay Silcox is a must read)

Elizabeth Strout, Lucy By The Sea

 

- William and Lucy were married for 20 years and had two girls Chrissy and Becka. He is a parasitologist by profession, and she is an author. 

- Covid 19 is starting to hit New York. It’s a time of extreme stress. Here’s what I did not know that morning in March: I did not know that I would never see my apartment again. I did not know that one of my friends and a family member would die of this virus. Chrissy and Becka and their husbands all get Covid and recover. 

- This is a covid novel and a good one. There are many recent books and TV shows that reference the pandemic, but very few that feature it front and centre - the pressure on people's lives, the different way they react, the kindness on show, and also the ugly provincialism. Lucy and William decide to leave New York and go north to Maine to sit out the pandemic. They soon experience the animosity from many locals who don't like New Yorkers undoubtedly bringing covid to their community. 

- There’s much more to this novel than Oh William!, its lightweight predecessor, and thank god for that. In this follow up Strout's prime focus is marriage, children and the close relationships of family and friends. On show is the fragility of it all, including the wider social and political spheres. Covid is exposing it, but it was always there - the ordinary lives of older people infused with tragedy and sadness, and their wounds, memories and grief. 

- Her brother Pete dies of the virus. Her sister Vicky got it but recovered. They had come from a very sad family. It was a sadness that went so deep it was like it was a physical illness. Her daughter Chrissy loses her third pregnancy. Her sister Vicky joins a fundamentalist church and becomes an extreme right winger. ‘We don’t wear masks at church’. 

- Lucy is starting to get more aware of the social unravelling happening in her country - the George Floyd murder, the January sixth Capitol attack, the whisperings of a civil war...I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone. For some reason Strout never mentions Donald Trump. 

- Towards the end of the book Lucy feels she's starting to get old and meaningless. Her kids must be sensing that too as they contact her less and less. And William is now over seventy. The have started to share the same bed and sell their apartments in New York, deciding to buy a house in Maine. This is a huge decision as their longing and love for New York remains strong. 

- The last dozen or so pages of this novel are extremely powerful, and bring it to a very satisfying conclusion. 

- There is a lot more detail in the book than I have mentioned here, and it enriches the whole experience of reading it. I have read all of Elizabeth Strout's Lucy Barton novels and found them immensely enjoyable. This is by far the best.

Nina Kenwood, Unnecessary Drama

- I enjoyed Nina Kenwood's first YA novel very much indeed. 

- Her new novel is just as enjoyable. The narrator Brooke is similarly delightful and anxious, but a little more confident. She's highly organised and a real control freak. Kenwood's deliciously comic touch brings her intensely alive. As readers we can't help but love her. She's also highly intelligent and reflective.   

The thing is, I am a person who prepares. The very essence of who I am is my preparedness, my to-do lists, my thorough research, my above-and-beyond reading, my colour-coded spreadsheets, my first-hand-in-the-air-I-know-the-answer energy.

- She's just moved into a share house in Melbourne as an 18 year old first year university student. She's studying economics and also doing a creative writing class. Harper, whose family own the house, and a tall boy Jesse are her flat mates. She knew Jesse, however, in high school and they had a nice girlfriend/boyfriend relationship when they were 14 until 'disaster' struck. She overheard him saying to a teasing friend ‘Do I like Brooke? No. No. Fuck, no’. She was insulted and it ruptured their relationship. 

- Brooke and Jesse both come from broken homes. They have that in common and it's a bond they can't escape.  

- As they share a house together now their relationship starts to get more complicated. During a pub crawl one night with friends she and Jessie kiss with a passion that surprises them. They do it again a little later. Unfortunately intimate relationships are against the 'house rules' that Harper has set. So it's getting difficult. 

- Kenwood brings a very sure touch to this novel. The world her characters live in is not a complicated one. Apart from the family issues there are no political or social dimensions adding any spice or tension to their lives. But that YA simplicity allows her to focus on the very personal issues of these young people confronting their own emotional development. 

- A highly enjoyable read from a highly talented author. 

  

Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism

- This is an extraordinary book in so many ways. It's full of detail, and clearly makes every effort to be objective and accurate. It's also very clearly written, which helps enormously when it contains so much information that is sometimes overwhelming. 

- Although it's highly critical of the behaviour and commercial practices of today's Big Tech and Big Content corporations it also aims to be fair to all parties. Rebecca Giblin is a law professor at Melbourne University and highly regarded as one of our best and most active copyright reform advocates, and Canadian Cory Doctorow is a best-selling science fiction writer as well as an academic and a long term special adviser to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They really know what they are talking about. 

- The book has two parts: Part One, titled Culture Has Been Captured, ranges widely across the whole gamut of our digital lives. It's brilliant on how Amazon grew to dominate the books industry, including the war with Apple and ebooks and how that was fought and eventually resolved. It goes deep into how DRM (Digital Rights Management) became so insidious in cementing corporate control over creative businesses, and how the abysmal music industry rips off artists, including how sampling was killed by extravagant copyright payment demands.

- We're all familiar with music streaming services and the minuscule royalties paid to artists. This book delves into their commercial practices in depth and provides lots of data and statistics. Spotify’s Playlists are now a huge negative, as is their takeover of podcasts. Apple and YouTube are also critiqued in minute detail. 

- Unlike in Australia, the EU and most other countries, US radio stations don’t pay for the music they broadcast. And the live music industry has been concentrated by vertical and horizontal integration, and now under big corporate control. The result has been radically reduced payments to musicians and support staff.  

- Part Two of the book, Breaking Anticompetitive Flywheels focuses on solutions. We can't just rely on stronger anti-trust law enactment.

- Collective action is going to be key. Creators working as freelances need to be able to band together to advance their negotiating power. Now they can’t under law. Authors did recently protest Audible’s open returns policy which was successful in stopping this abusive ploy to reduce author royalties; and there needs to be a radical overhaul of authors' reversion rights under contract. After 25 years the full copyright ownership of their works should be returned to them. Other, more radical measures are suggested, for example paying minimum wages for creatives, or introducing a 'job guarantee' across the board.  

- The final chapter is an excellent summary of the problems and the recommendations covered in the book. However it reminds us that despite the fact that most of us like to deal with Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Spotify, YouTube and others in our daily commercial, communication and entertainment lives, the massive problems an unregulated internet infrastructure has brought to our creative and cultural industries and thus society as a whole are immense and incredibly damaging. 

- This powerful book is a must read. And because it's frequently dense with rich and detailed information its various chapters will require re-reading again and again. That will be a pleasure.  

  

Victoria Hannan, Marshmallow

 

- This new novel by Victoria Hannan is quite an extraordinary achievement. It's a sensitive and exquisite portrayal of grief, intimacy and love.

-  Ali, Claire, Ev, Nathan and Annie are the five young friends at the centre of the story. They are now in their late thirties and early forties and are old uni friends. Ali and Claire have been in a relationship for a number of years, and Nathan and Annie have been married for longer. Ev is still single. 

- Tragedy and its associated grief have deeply unsettled them all. Nathan and Annie's young toddler died suddenly one year ago. He was celebrating his second birthday. And Ali still feels deep guilt for the death of a young woman on New Year’s Eve 1999. She was only seventeen. She fell from a roof at a party, to which Ali had brought ecstasy. 

- As in her previous novel, Kokomo, Hannan explores family relationships and their tensions with particular skill. Mothers are a special target. Nathan's mother in this book is an unlikeable Toorak snob, married to Bob, a well connected and unfaithful member of the corporate/political elite. The contrast with their sensitive and caring son Nathan could not be sharper. The family gatherings are suffocating. 

- Ev is now a very popular high school teacher, having ditched law because of its meaningless boredom. She’s still single, but a lovely, highly likeable person. ‘She was a wonder, Ev. A strong, funny, beautiful wonder of a woman’. She feels immense guilt and grief because of what she deems to be her part in the toddler's death. What precisely happened at the party becomes clear later in the novel. 

- Claire, also a frustrated lawyer, has been offered a new and exciting opportunity with a law firm in Sydney. However it would mean leaving her Melbourne friends and possibly spitting with Ali. 

- One particular narrative device Hannan indulges in in this novel becomes quite frustrating at times. She refuses to disclose details when, as readers, we're crying out for them. It's a very slow pace of revelation despite being central to empathising with the profound grief the characters feel. While on page 33 we learn that Nathan and Annie had ‘a kid’ who died, we don’t know how, or even the kid's sex. We are forced to wait for those intimate details till page 202, and we finally learn the name on page 226. From then on all the characters refer to the kid by name. As is natural. 

- Hannan wraps up the story nicely however. It's deeply satisfying and will stay with you for a long time.