Christos Tsiolkas, 7 1/2

- Tsiolkas has written in 7 1/2 a confronting but ultimately unsatisfying mishmash of genres: memoir, realistic fiction, essayistic reflections, nature writing, childhood memories and movie critiques.

- I am writing a book about beauty. I want it to be simple, almost straightforward in its intent. If I were a poet it would be easier. Or if I were a musician. It’s harder to distill beauty into prose. The novel is treacherous.

- Fundamentally it's a celebration of the body in all its sensuality, pungent extrusions, youth and ageing. It’s also very gay. Tsiolkas is obsessed with the look and smell of sweaty armpits and beautiful male bodies. His uncle Nikos and his father’s friend Stavros inspired and attracted him while growing up. They were working class, with rough hands and sublime bodies. His wider focus is the beauty of nature in all its dazzling colours, and its birds, insects, animals, flowers, beaches, mountains and storms. 

- Though he briefly refers to the bushfires in early 2020 there is no reference to the harshness and loneliness of the interior; no reference to regional towns and their challenges and provincialism, and no reference to Indigenous lands. Disappointingly European visitors seem to want to see people, to drink coffee or wine or beer in a promenade cafe. They want motion and movement: they fear, and are made anxious by, this wondrous remoteness. It affirms that they are indeed outsiders, strangers. Whereas I return here again and again.

- This novel is far removed from the earthy, angry, realism we're come to love and expect from Tsiolkas. In fact he criticises that genre mercilessly here, effectively condemning his own oeuvre. 

 I am nauseated by their arrogance and their naivety...I have been agreeing to it for a generation now, and increment by increment and timid sentence by timid sentence I have been substituting moralism for imagination...How more tedious can the contemporary novel become?…I go into a bookshop these days and it is as if the shelves are filled with the agonised and narcissistic rantings of teenagers...I’m tired of being angry all the time...Our literature of the last half century has been the babblings from the university. There is so much I love in that chatter: incisiveness, interrogation, the engagement with reckoning. But not its arrogance, not its moral certitude, not its self-righteousness, not its smugness and not its masochism...I shed Justice, Society, Love, Equality, Liberty and Revolution...Shit on the censors of the Church and state, urinate on the puritans of the left and right. Pursue beauty.....I need to dive into the sensuous, bestial and amoral splendour of this world.

- Tsiolkas always incites a visceral reaction, and this book is no exception. He never shies away from celebrating bodily functions including sweating, reeking, pissing and shitting. And the Gothic character of much of his prose, honouring his Greek and Christian origins, elevates to mythic status the often quotidian realities he’s describing. I write in English, but I speak it with a Greek tongue.

- In fact the thickness of his prose often becomes tiresome. He himself calls it ‘baroque’. Everyday events and weather patterns are subjected to an arch, heavy handed style.

- His friend Andrea’s critique of him is spot on. You have a particular skill….that emotional and unrepentant honesty…..that rawness doesn’t feel diluted. As she implies, this book is a surrender, a capitulation to self-indulgence, a shameless retreat. 

- Ironically, given his rants noted above, there is a realist subplot in the novel - the story of the former gay porn star Paul. Apparently this has been long simmering in his creative brain. Whether it ended up a novel, a play or a film, it was going to be called Sweet Thing, named after Van Morrison's classic song. We're introduced to Paul, an American, and his wife Jenna (also a former porn star) via an extraordinary sex scene between them. It's lusciously described in erotic detail. Tsiolkas is so obsessed with sex in this novel that it strikes me as immature and it typifies his self-indulgence. 

- Paul also has a brother, Andy, who is still living in their old family house in LA. He's a thin, scrawny, dying junkie, married to another junkie. The stoned Paul is disgusted with himself after he touches and kisses the stoned wife. He has been sucked back into the 'netherworld' and is desperate to escape by returning to Australia and its physical beauty. This is melodrama writ large. It's cliched and overwrought nonsense. 

- I guess one could argue that Tsiolkas is in fact satirising the contemporary and fashionable critique of realism in fiction, but there's little evidence that this is the case. 

- This novel just doesn't gel. It won't be popular, it won't sell, and it will quickly be forgotten.

Damon Galgut, The Promise

 

- This magnificent novel won the 2021 Booker Prize, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's a fascinating read, set in South Africa in the three decades after the end of the Apartheid regime in the early 1990s to the present day.

- Although it's a seemingly simple story of a white family living on a farm near Pretoria, it develops into much more than that as conflict, struggle and tragedy define the individual lives of the two parents and their three children.  

- Galgut brings shifting perspectives and voices to his story. He darts from one consciousness to another, switching from the third person to the first person in the space of a sentence. And he’s not just a narrator but a commentator on what he's created too. It’s generous, sometimes folksy, prose, and is often delightful and funny. 

- Rather surprisingly, as if there wasn't enough intergenerational conflict in the family, there is also a Jewish versus Christian rift. Loyalty to these Western traditions, and reverence for their respective religious ministers, defines them. It takes a while to be introduced to all the extended family members and friends and clerics, but there is one thing in common - an ingrained racism. 

- The novel has a distinctly South African flavour. Differences dominate as the racist past still defines everything. The whites are masters, the blacks servants, the ugly arrogant overlords versus the lower classes. But the reckoning has begun, despite Nelson Mandela's breakthrough Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The fundamental social structure is in increasing decay. No lights, no water, lean times in the land of plenty. The whites' time is up. 

- Anton, Astrid and Amor are the offspring, the younger generation. Their perspectives on their privilege are more critical of it, but despite the promise they show only the youngest girl Amor comes close to fulfilling it. The oldest, the son Anton, Galgut's principal focus, is an aspiring novelist, aware of the social change underway and its attendant obligations, but in the end amounts to a dismal failure.

- As the years progress Ma, the Jewish mother, dies and ten years later, Pa the Christian. Both of these characters are cranky and unlikable. The extended family members all unite and reunite for the funerals. Galgut brings a charming comic tone to these rather ridiculous get-togethers. 

- There is a wonderful side story about the Rugby World Cup final between the Springboks (South Africa) and the All Blacks (NZ). It's on the same day as Ma's funeral. The whole country is watching, and amazingly South Africa wins. Mandela, released from jail a few weeks earlier, presents the cup. The nation is ‘beautiful’ and ‘amazing’ the media cries out. Everyone is gathering around their TVs. However the young daughter, Amor, who 'still holds herself aloof and apart' slips out. She knows. She just knows. There’s another side to South Africa - raw and vengeful violence.

- Troubles are always simmering. The clashes in the townships, the constant threats to Anton and the farm, it's all full of menace and there are always incidents. Astrid, the middle child is killed by a black thug in a carjacking.

- On a rare visit home for Pa's funeral, Amor wants to discuss with Anton the promise their parents made to Salome, their black maid for many years. They had promised to give her ownership of the small house on their farmlands that she and her son lived in. But they never delivered and now Anton also refuses to do it. The house has been neglected over the years: Amor looks around, at the cracking plaster. The broken cement floors. The missing planes of glass. Income from the farm is dwindling and land values falling. Anton's novel is not going anywhere. At 50 he realises he’s a failure. The decay of the old elite white structure in South Africa is self evident. 

- The novel ends in tragedy but also hope. A tribute to love, care, compassion and service. 

- All Booker prize winners are worth reading and this one is certainly no exception. And in the day of the long novel it's only 293 pages! 

Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads

 

- The world Franzen builds in this just released long novel (580 pages) is rich in detail and meaning. But typically, the reader must get beyond the estrangement and boredom of the first 100 or so pages, just like his previous novels, before the magic, like a drug, kicks in. The constant God bothering in this one will frustrate many readers too.

- He does tend to ramble on and on. The backstories are often tiresome in the extreme. He's introducing us to the Hildebrandt family - Russ, the pastor, Marion, his wife, and their four kids Clem, Becky, Perry and Judson. At first Marion comes over as batshit crazy. When Russ first met her...she was a pants-wearing, half-Jewish Catholic who lived with homosexuals. Later he resents her for having snared him into marriage. 

- The kids, at least before they leave school, are bright and full of promise. But it’s a dysfunctional family in the end. Perry, although intellectually brilliant, becomes a hopeless drug addict and a major financial burden on the family. Their relationships sour.

- Franzen drowns us in a religion versus secularism debate. The emerging new consciousness of the late 60's and early 70's, including drugs, sex, and the tensions over the Vietnam war and racism loom large, and traditional religious belief is challenged.

- But Franzen holds fast and gives us very fundamentalist Christian book, while also acknowledging native Indian beliefs and criticising white colonial arrogance. 'The world’s persistent talk of God' is everywhere. 

- Disappointingly the novel has serious weaknesses and they annoyed me intensely. The word 'hatred' is massively overused. Russ’s 'hatred' for his younger assistant pastor becomes absurd. It's way overdone and immature. His sexual attraction to a younger female parishioner becomes an obsession, but then he suddenly ‘hates’ her. Not long after, when he sees her again, he was flooded with voluptuous presentiment. After Becky and Clem fight...she struggled to regain her Christian bearings, but her hatred was too intense.

- Although lives are described in microscopic detail, minor incidents become highly dramatic. Commonplace emotions are over-intense - it's not just ‘hatred’ that's overused. So is the constant follow up 'sorry’. It's almost comic. The instant shifting in reactions is quite silly. Characters go from love to loathing and back again in seconds. It's over the top and overripe writing, which is very American. 

- You could conclude that all these characters are as mad as cut snakes. That would be rational.

- Of course Franzen's gift for prose that's bursting with electricity is always on show: their mouths like twins or proxies of other wet parts; lambert rationality; supremely unpleasant lavatorial digression. 

- I considered his 2010 novel Freedom a classic. It was a brilliant interrogation of contemporary America. (See my review here). Crossroads, unfortunately, is nowhere near as good.