Ronnie Scott, The Adversary.

  

- The unnamed narrator of this novel set in inner-city Melbourne is a self-conscious young man who is completely unsure of himself, is as boring as batshit, and a frivolous jerk. He never engages with other people, including friends, on any meaningful level. Never talks about books, movies, TV shows, politics, sport, food or anything but his own tedious insecurities. That's when he does talk at all. He admits at one point: ‘...I’d thought I could out-nobody the best of them’. 

- His friend Dan is the only remotely interesting character in the story. He is confident and has opinions - about marriage, the evil supermarket duo, cooking and other things. 

- Yet, and this takes time to creep up on you because the author, Ronnie Scott, unravels this little tapestry of a story slowly, our narrator is also fairly and slyly wise and insightful: ‘Life was in the business of closing doors..’; ‘I’d behaved inconsistently in the stony name of justice, and behaved ineffectively in the human name of love...’

- And he loves strange words, because he ‘...liked the way different language sounded...I definitely liked sounding smart’.  Words like janky, liddedly, mooching, chittering, grade-grubbing, sheeny, gamely, skullduggerous, bronzer, blipped, twink, skeeze/skeezily, scooched, mentossy, gruts, capacious, glommed, a smear of influence, munted, ouroborosing. God knows what most of these mean. And faux-poetic expressions: I thought wonderingly; Lachlan kept his bike, and all things, serviced to a noiseless state of unsqueaking zoom. 

- We spend twelve weeks with this narrator and his four friends, three of them new, wandering around Brunswick, Fitzroy, and Richmond. The inconsequentialness, the existential meaninglessness, the smallness, the emptiness of it all, whether they be at a party, at a pool, in the kitchen, in a bedroom, in a street. '‘Am I meant to go up there?’ I asked. But I was asking nobody; Vivian was gone.’ 

- Halfway through though, I began to find these friends very likeable - their fragility, their obsessions, their sensitivity and their supportive and loving surface interactions. A heightened intensity starts to imbue the quotidian smallness of it all, and inconsequential details become significant.

- And the novel ends very satisfyingly.