The Basketball Diaries features excerpts from musician, poet, and author Jim Carroll’s adolescent journals, kept from age thirteen to sixteen; a time where he acquired a nasty junk habit between committing petty crime, attending classes and playing basketball. Written in New York in the mid-1960s, there is the distinct intonation of baby Beat in Carroll’s rhythms and hip slang, but none of the energy or enlightenment. Rather, Carroll’s constant nodding out on heroin becomes repetitious to the point of boredom. The Basketball Diaries lacks the narcotic cadence of other drug-fuelled memoirs or prose, most likely due to the age of the author at the time of writing them.

You just got to see that junk is just another nine to five gig in the end, only the hours are a bit more inclined toward shadows.

Carroll’s descent into heroin begins when he starts shooting up under the mistaken belief that marijuana, not heroin, is the habit forming drug. Young Jim guides us through his journey toward and through (but not out of) his addiction and the risks he takes in order to get his fix. The beginning of the diaries start off innocently enough, his peers are his school and neighbourhood friends, they commit crime and take lighter drugs, engage in sometimes funny pranks, and the usual boyish behaviour you’d expect. It is only through comparison that we can see any evidence of the loss of innocence/childhood/faith (delete as appropriate), because Carroll himself doesn’t seem to want to expand upon this. It seems, through his bleary eyes, that the drug addiction is to be seen as something of a gain, an extension of himself, something that offers a better version of himself through the purer state of existence that he aims for.

Now there’s one set of gimmicks hid up there and it’s the filthiest spike you ever could see, been used by guys I prefer not to think of out of the fact my stomach is a bit upset. But you bet your ass there is not one bit of hesitation in drawing your shot into that harpoon and shoving it into your mainline. If you got dope you will get it inside you no matter how and I will too I can’t deny that. But here’s what I can’t get. Willie asks me for a slug of soda so I pass him the bottle and what the hell does he do but pull that old second grade bullshit of wiping off the top of the bottle before he takes some. Shit, I men anything I can give him from that bottle he’s gonna get a lot easier from using the same spike. None of these lames think twice, or once, in fact.

It’s difficult to feel any sympathy for Carroll, and he wouldn’t want it if we did. Though there are very few moments of inspired prose, Carroll jerking off on the roof under the stars and moon stands out as one instance of vivid imagery, the majority of The Basketball Diaries is tediously boring.

Whenever I read a classic novel, or something by a renowned author, I stare blankly at the document in which I intend to write my review, deeply anxious and uncertain. “But, Cannery Row’s been read by a million people before me, studied by thousands of students, what else can I possibly say about it?” Even though the act of reading the novel can be immensely pleasurable, when it comes to writing about it I freeze. I even considered rewriting the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” to reference Cannery Row (“Mack and the boys they’re restless/they need somewhere to go/as Doc and I look out tonight/from Cannery Row” it could work, I tell you.) in order to avoid actually talking about the book itself. (You have to wonder, what will I be like when I get around to that William Faulkner marathon I have planned? Interpretive dance review of The Sound and the Fury?)

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries or corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.

John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is set in the waterfront street known as Cannery Row in Monterey, California. Somehow, in the space of what is comparatively a novella, Steinbeck lets us into the worlds of a multitude of characters who reveal themselves to be more than our initial impressions of them and a testament to the necessity of community. The narrative is fractured, with short chapters dedicated to different characters as the poorer inhabitants of the street attempt to throw a party for Doc, a marine biologist who has offered much to the community. While the intention, led by the bums of the Palace Flophouse, is good, the follow through just doesn’t go quite to plan; but, the community eventually pulls together to throw a party that honours the kind-hearted Doc.

Within the narrative itself, Steinbeck – mainly through Doc’s observations of marine life, but also through the omniscient voice of the narrator – reflects on the natural world and how it reflects our own. Seemingly tranquil sea life proves to be capable of the the most vicious violence, the bums catching frogs for money is described with the detail of a bloody battlefield, a gopher builds a home in a safe area but cannot find a mate so moves on to a more dangerous area. The attention to these aspects of nature reveals life on the Row to be similarly delicate ecosystem.

Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row. In the grey time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light. The street lights go out, and the weeds are a brilliant green. The corrugated iron of the canneries glows with the pearly lucence of platinum or old pewter. No automobiles are running then. The street is silent of progress and business. And the rush and drag of the waves can be heard as they splash in among the piles of the canneries. It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era of rest.

Despite the brevity of the text, the nuanced cast of characters and their stories feel complete. To add more to them would be going overboard. Steinbeck’s simplicity, he possesses an innate awareness of the aspects of these characters which make them a.) interesting to a reader and b.) integral to the Cannery Row hive. They may not be extraordinary people, but their talents, their humanity and their generosity lend them a dignity which cannot be denied. Dora, the madame of the Bear Flag brothel, sends her girls out to look after the children of the town when influenza strikes and the ill cannot afford medical assistance, despite it being the busiest time of year at the brothel. Lee Chong owns the grocery store, and though the locals owe him large amounts of money, he doesn’t chase it up – knowing that eventually they’ll repay him rather than trek to the market in the next town. Henri the local artists constantly builds and dismantles his boat, never wishing to complete it.

Financial bitterness could not eat too deeply into Mack and the boys, for they were not mercantile men. They did not measure their joy in goods sold, their egos in bank balances, nor their loves in what they cost.

After the first disastrous attempt to give Doc a party – to which he doesn’t even arrive, and great damage is inflicted upon his house – the street not only makes outcasts of the perpetrators; but begins to suffer itself. It’s as though if one part of this community is ill at ease, the whole community faces great misfortune. As Mack and the boys are gradually forgiven, the town heals, the illness and misfortune lifts. It’s a beautiful illusion, and it is impossible not to feel a deep yearning for a sense of community as deep and essential as is evident in Cannery Row. Does community like this exist anymore? Did it ever?

‘It has always seemed strange to me,’ said Doc. ‘The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.’

Cannery Row is a deceptively simple story – the inhabitants of a street gather to throw a party for an honoured resident – but the heart and the faith in humanity that Steinbeck imbues this story with is amazing, and difficult to forget. Celebration of good deeds and genial warmth are essential to the proliferation of the human spirit, and despite their lack of ambition or lofty pursuits, and in this the folks of Cannery Row are richer than most.

Sweet Thursday is a sequel set years after the events in Cannery Row, although I will be trying to get a copy soon, I think I’ll let the pleasures of Cannery Row linger a little while longer.

Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds from Plato to Norma Khouri is a refreshingly different look at the variety of hoaxes perpetrated throughout the annals of Australian history. Rather than recount our colourful history through the usual method of what we have deem truth, Simon Caterson takes a look at the events, publications, and cultural ephemera that were discovered to be elaborate hoaxes. As the subtitle suggests, the history of Australia has always been marked by misunderstandings and falsified accounts, and Caterson relishes in reviving these historical deceptions. A selection of quotations from everyone from Marcel Proust to Matt Damon on the art of the lie or the fallibility of truth adds an extra dimension to the work.

What I appreciated about Hoax Nation was the breadth of topics covered, however the limitations of space in Arcade’s signature small sized books meant that some foundational information was left out, leaving this particularly ignorant reader to seek out more about the Ern Malley affair and Bodyline scandal in order to better understand the hoaxed material related to them. Nonetheless, Hoax Nation works as a brilliant starting point for the reverse side of the official Australian history. Covering the famous literary hoaxes of Norma Khouri and Helen Demidenko which played to cultural perceptions and caused debate about the accountability of publishers, it seems that for every hoax that was executed for fame, fortune and glory, there were many that worked on a multitude of levels.

It certainly seems as though hoaxes originate in response to a demand, or are created to fill a perceived gap in culture (in the 1980s and 90s there’s little doubt the advent of multiculturalism coincided with a proliferation of ethnic and indigenous identity frauds in the arts, especially literature – impostors, in particular, flourish when we regard the background and identity of the singer as being as important as the song). And in the heat of the battle, whether the conflict is over politics, culture, history, science or religion, truth is often the first casualty and hoaxes can appear on any side.

While many of the hoaxes seem to have been carried out for the sheer joy of mischief, many including the curious case of George Barrington, appear to have been committed for more politically motivated reasons. A pickpocket sent to the convict colony of Australia in the late 18th century, a number of best-selling books telling of the imagined life in the new colony were published under Barrington’s name. Known as something of a celebrity criminal in England, the move to Australia saw Barrington eventually become a police superintendent, and supposedly, halt a potential mutiny on the journey over. Largely plagiarized from other sources – and yet still quoted today as legitimate historical sources! – there is little to suggest that Barrington actually wrote the stories. Nonetheless, the books not only whet the appetite for tales from Australia and narratives of convict life, but also as proof, as it were, that criminal reformation in the antipodes was a successful endeavour.

Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds from Plato to Norma Khouri features a wide array of hoaxes – from art, literature, fauna, landscape, and Australian legends – bursting with fascination and a salute to the numerous bullshit artists who have peppered our history with intrigue and humour. Not always merely for the fun of deception, many of these hoaxes force us to ask important questions about identity, about authenticity and about our preconceived cultural perceptions.

[Disclaimer: publisher supplied copy, with thanks to the team at Arcade Publications. For my reviews of other Arcade titles, please see: Madame Brussels: This Moral Pandemonium, E.W. Cole: Chasing the Rainbow and Our Girls: Aussie Pin-Ups of the 40s and 50s.]

John Green’s second novel An Abundance of Katherines again relies on the trope of feisty female as the emotional saviour of a socially awkward young male, yet manages to be an inviting, and very funny, look at teenage relationships and friendships. After being dumped by his nineteenth girlfriend named Katherine, child prodigy Colin Singleton sets of on a cross-country road trip with his best friend Hassan in order to clear his mind and work on a mathematic formula which predicts the rate of relationship failure. Colin does come up with his desired formula, but more importantly, learns along the way, with a little help from a smart and sassy young woman named Lindsey, that the unpredictably best parts of life cannot be measured. Despite An Abundance of Katherines following a very similar track as Green’s previous novel, there is enough quirky characters and genuine humour and warmth to distinguish it in its own right.

“May I be excused for a moment?” he asked.
“Is it important?”
“I think I have an eyelash in my pupillary sphincter,” replied Colin and the class erupted into laughter. Ms. Sorenstein sent him on his way, and then Colin went into the bathroom and, staring at the mirror, plucked the eyelash from his eye, where the pupillary sphincter is located.
After class, Hassan found Colin eating a peanut butter and no jelly sandwich on the wide stone staircase at the school’s back entrance.
“Look,” Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life, and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.”
“It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.”
“Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, everybody’s just wondering how the hell you got an eyelash there.”
And so they were friends.

Socially awkward and intellectually gifted, Colin Singleton is broken up over his most recent break-up with Katherine #19. (I’ve tried not to over think how such a socially inept young man has managed to charm nineteen Katherines, when he is completely and utterly devoid of social skills.) His best friend, the hilarious Hassan, takes him on a cross-country road trip to heal his wounds, landing finally in Gutshot, Tennessee via a visit to the grave of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There they meet Lindsey Lee Wells and decide to stop in Gutshot working for her mother. Bonding with Lindsey and her friends, and working on his formula to predict the outcomes of his Katherine relationships, Colin learns a little about himself, and a lot about life.

The reading quieted his brain a little. Without Katherine and without the Theorem and without his hopes of mattering, he had very little. But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

My main issue with Looking for Alaska [review] was the use of Alaska as a narrative device rather than a fully fleshed out character; her motivations are hidden, but only to be uncovered by our sleuthing protagonist. In An Abundance of Katherines, the female romantic lead, Lindsey, forms a more genuine connection with Colin without the manic mood swings or mysterious air, before exploring their relationship further. Though Colin does come to see the unpredictability of life as a grand pleasure through Lindsey’s influence, it seems to shift based on more a shared experience – they both overcome heartache and find each other, and happiness, despite of it.

An Abundance of Katherines is full of random trivial tidbits and a number of seemingly insignificant subplots, all of which somehow manage to strengthen a reader’s perception of the story and the characters. The friendship between Hassan and Colin is very funny, a pair of more unlikely friends you could not imagine, but their sincere affection and friendly vernacular are so endearing. Even if his use of female characters is a little problematic, John Green knows how to write about close friendships and An Abundance of Katherines is a clever and amusing look at the complexity of friendships, relationships and our own understanding of life.

In John Green’s Looking for Alaska, Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter, a fan of the last words of famous individuals, decides to act on the advice of Rabelais’ supposed last words to seek the “Great Perhaps” by transferring from his high school in Florida to the boarding school Culver Creek in Alabama. Moving from a mostly friendless school life to the constant companionship of Culver Creek, Miles learns to combine social and educational responsibilities. His immersion into a group of merry pranksters, including his roommate the Colonel, introduces him to the desirable and yet distant Alaska Young. Alaska is the teen literature equivalent of film’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl, eccentric in her behaviour and tastes, with carefully affected quirks, which exist solely in order to teach the young, male protagonist about Life. Or, as is the case in Looking for Alaska, death.

Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

The novel is divided into two distinct parts, Before and After, although until the After we can only guess what the before and after refers to. I have a soft spot for boarding school stories, stemming I think from a youthful foray into Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers series, which is why the Before section of the novel was so appealing. I really loved the Before section, as the group bonded and went through requisite teenage rituals of drinking and smoking and pulling elaborate pranks, learning to deal with unrequited desires and sex. The companionable intimacy was warm, rich unlikely dialogue and a romanticized view of the banal daily realities of their lives (similar to The Perks of Being a Wallflower’s “we were infinite” moments.) Although Alaska did show signs of being another fantasy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for Miles, the one who would show him about life, love and making it through the labyrinth of suffering, it never reached that stage, as the event the Before has been leading up to is Alaska’s death. On the verge of consummating his desire for her, distraught and drunk Alaska asks for the Colonel and Miles to cover for her and she drives off into the night toward her death.

I hadn’t thought of her smell since she died. But when the Colonel opened the door, I caught the edge of her scent: wet dirt and grass and cigarette smoke, and beneath that the vestiges of vanilla-scented skin lotion. She flooded into my present and only tact kept me from burying my face in the dirty laundry overfilling the hamper by her dresser. It looked as  I remembered it: hundreds of books stacked against the walls, her lavender comforter crumpled at the foot of her bed, a precarious stack of books on her bedside table, her volcanic candle just peeking out from beneath the bed. It looked as I knew it would, but the smell, unmistakably her, shocked me. I stood in the centre of the room, my eyes shut, inhaling slowly through my nose, the vanilla and the uncut autumn grass, but with each slow breath, the smell faded as I became accustomed to it and soon she was gone again.

Wracked with guilt, and what feels like only the slightest suggestion of grief, After shows Miles and the Colonel not only dealing with the possibility of their role in her death but attempting to resolve the circumstances of her death. Was it an accidental collision, or illustrative of suicidal behaviour? Miles and the Colonel focus their attentions – perhaps as a way of showing their grief – to playing detective. As the pieces come together, their conclusion amounts to little more than a heartfelt response to a homework essay for a religion class. They don’t come to terms with death itself, only with Alaska’s death. Her role and her death is minimized to freeing them of their own guilt – the upstanding young men learn their lesson, but the manic, troubled young girl must die for them to do so.

All problematic issues aside, Green’s writing style is lively, littered as it is with interesting references and lively dialogue. I’ve a feeling I would have loved it as a teenager, as it focuses on bookish, slightly socially outcast students who manage to navigate the weird terrain of high school with style, smarts, charm and just the right amount of awkwardness. Nonetheless, the reduction of Alaska to a totem of male fantasy and deliverance from guilt is disappointing, but I intend to read more of John Green’s young adult fiction in the future.

The Temple-Goers, journalist Aatish Taseer’s debut novel, is a novel about friendships that cross socio-economic barriers, the distinction between the rich and the poor, ambition and pride, lust, love, religious faith,bitter hatred and the struggle for cohesive national identity in contemporary, postcolonial Delhi. The divide of traditional beliefs and practices collide with the contemporary and modern beliefs and practices brought to India by student émigrés shape the difficulties of developing a cohesive cultural and national identity. In The Temple-Goers, these issues are explored through the relationships of a privileged writer named Aatish Taseer who befriends an ambitious, significantly poorer young man, Aakash. Aakash’s assimilation into Aatish’s world sets in motion a number of irreparable changes in both of their lives.

Delhi drawing rooms. They were what I remembered of the city from my childhood. Perhaps it was Delhi’s fragmented geography, or that it had no real restaurants the way Bombay had – restaurants that were not attached to five-star hotels – or just that it was an old city, closely bound, with people who all seemed to know each other, but there was no setting, no cityscape more evocative of the city I grew up in than a lamp-lit drawing room with a scattering of politicians, journalists, broken-down royals, and perhaps an old Etonian, lying fatly on a deep sofa. And it was a dinner like this, with two blue and red glass fanooses burning in a corner, jasmine floating in a porcelain dish on a dining table draped in a white tablecloth, with white-on-white chikan-work flowers embroidered on it, and the over-strong aroma of a scented candle, that my mother gave for the writer.

After a stint in London, Aatish returns to Delhi to revise his novel, he spends his time with his devoted girlfriend, Sanyogita, and attend numerous parties and events. Recommended a gym by a family friend, he meets the enigmatic trainer Aakash. The two build a friendship which seems to be based on mutual admiration or envy of the other. Aakash, though living in a poor area of Delhi and with no entry into the privileged world that Aatish lives in, manages to integrate with Aatish’s social circle and significantly improve his social standing. Throughout the novel the writing is lushly floral and colourful, as Aatish casts a watchful and aware eye over his surroundings, both those familiar and unknown.

The light in Delhi had changed; it came now from another angle, and far from striking the surface of buildings, seemed to lose its footing on rooftops and columns. And though it was warm, you could sit in it for hours without breaking into a sweat. Hazy and scented with smoke, it rose like a glow from the city, heightening the sensory power of the Delhi winter. The bougainvillea, the occasional smell of kebabs, the wail of a garbage collector created so acute an impression that it was as if some part of an old photograph, having shed the inertia of years, had gently begun to move.

Using himself, or a fictionalized version of himself, characterized as a writer allows Taseer to subtly provide an interesting form of self-criticism, in a way preempting any criticism from the reader. It’s a clever technique, but not used to excess. Aatish receives the long awaited readers notes from the revised version of his novel; Aatish and Sanyogita discuss the merits of the work of Aatish’s writer friend and mentor; Zafar, Aatish’s Urdu teacher and renowned poet, and the writer friend provide him with writing advice – all of these incidences add a touch of self-awareness to the text. Not enough to distance the reader from the powerful narrative, but enough to give reason and evidence as to why The Temple-Goers is written as it is.

His face brightened. ‘Writing something modern, I hope,’ he said, ’something fresh and original.’ Then using the English words ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’ in both instances to mean fiction, good and bad, he said, ‘In the way men live today, the pressures upon them – and there are great strains and injustices – you’ll find fiction. The past is all non-fiction.’
‘And write in English?’
‘In English,’ he answered firmly. ‘The Indian languages are finished; or, at least, literature in them is finished. When I began there were magazines, poetry meetings, the progressive writers were still around, poets could write for the screen, there were readers, libraries, critics – all gone, swept away in one generation. It’s a very fragile thing, you know, literature; it needs an infrastructure. You can’t spend your life writing into the dark like me.’

The blurb and prologue of The Temple-Goers hint at a highly televised murder which doesn’t really come to the forefront of the narrative until the last fifty pages. While I did enjoy the rest of the novel, the gradual build up of Aatish and Aakash’s relationship and the gradual decay of Aatish and Sanyogita’s relationship, the vivid imagery of an India still trying to find it’s identity and the profound schism between the country’s rich and poor – the set-up in the promotional material or the introductory chapter of the supposedly crucial murder (and, presumably, who committed the crime, and all the how and why questions that come along with it) creates an expectation which is never quite fulfilled. When the murder and its wide reaching repercussions do reach their climax, it feels all too rushed, given the languid time spent on all the other details of the narrative. This horrific event, the brutal murder of a character we have come to know not intimately, but enough to feel the shock, however predictable it is, and the ways in which the convictions play out are accelerated so much that their effects aren’t as deeply felt as other aspects of the novel. Perhaps this expedited account is to suggest the stark difference between the daily realities of Delhi and how quickly events can change our circumstances, our relationships and our friendships. Regardless, I wish it had been drawn out more, reading another two hundred pages of Taseer’s vibrant writing would have been a pleasure.

A compelling narrative about friendships and rapacious ambition, and a portrait of a modern, changing India, The Temple-Goers really surprised me. From the promotional material and vague recollections of interviews and brief mentions in articles, along with the publicist-ready catchphrase of “the Indian Bret Easton Ellis”, I expected something a lot more dry, amoral and disconnected. Instead, The Temple-Goers offers a rich insight into another culture undergoing an immense shift, while personalizing this through understandably flawed and conflicted characters.

[Disclaimer: publisher supplied advance reading copy. An extract of The Temple-Goers is available online.]

Christos Tsiolkas‘ Loaded follows Ari, a nineteen year old of Greek heritage and a sexuality he is not entirely comfortable with, in the hedonistic events of one night out in Melbourne. Although he has no problem with his desire to sleep with masculine men, he feels some discomfort in labeling himself as gay; it’s not just his sexuality that he dislikes defining, but his entire self, his racial and cultural heritage, his taste in music, he refuses the delineations of identity that society, his family and his peers want him to define himself by. He eschews work and study, and becomes frustrated and impatient when people seem to demand that he “do something.” Caught between the traditional Greek culture of his immigrant parents and his position in the contemporary Australian society, and not feeling at ease in either, Ari struggles toward finding a place where he can just be himself without outside constraints or imposed definitions.

Speed is exhilaration. Speed is colours reflecting light with greater intensity. Speed, if it’s good, can take me higher than I can ever go, higher than my natural bodily chemicals can take me. [...] On speed I feel macho, but not aggressive. I’m friendly to everyone. Speed evaporates fear. On speed I dance with my body and my soul. In this white powder they’ve distilled the essence of the Greek word kefi. Kefi is the urge to dance, to be with good friends, to open your arms to life. Straight, I can approximate kefi, but I am always conscious of fighting off boredom. Speed doesn’t let you get bored.

Ari’s voice is undeniably passionate, confused as it is. He is full of adolescent generalizations about people who aren’t like himself, and he is not afraid to voice them. Though his experience of life is troubled by numerous conflicts, he cannot seem to see the same ruptures at work in the lives of others, choosing instead to take a simplified view of any one else. Even Johnny, Ari’s openly gay friend, whose confrontations with his father have been complex doesn’t receive much sympathy from Ari. When Johnny appears as Toula, his drag alter ego, Ari refuses to acknowledge or address him as Toula, instead insisting on calling him Johnny. While there is a friendliness between them, and a closeness, but these little things make up the sum of Ari’s personality. Even Ari’s sexual partners do not receive much thought, even objects of intense desire, especially after the physical act of sex has taken place. Then, for Ari, all mystery has gone. He has known them physically, so as Ari surmises, he has known them fully. This is all he has wanted them for, true, but the dismissal is abrupt and complete.

Inherently Melbournian, Loaded is divided into four sections – East, North, South and West – each representing time spent in the suburbs in the corresponding parts of Melbourne. As Ari articulates his frustration and rage, he manages to also pin down the divisions between different parts of the city – from the standards of living, the types of people who congregate there, what that represents and how it relates to his own experiences of life. Here is where the novel had so much power for me, though Ari’s outlook is much more cynical and pessimistic than mine, like the divides that ravage his search for identity, he sees the divides that separate the city:

The West at night, as you drive over the Westgate Bridge, is a shimmering valley of lights. In the day, under the harsh glare of the sun, the valley reveals itself as an industrial quilt of wharfs, factories, warehouses, silos and power plants. And the endless stretch of suburban housing estates. The West is a dumping ground; a sewer of refugees, the migrants, the poor, the insane, the unskilled and the uneducated. There is a point in my city, underneath the Swanston Street Bridge where you can sit by the Yarra River and contemplate the chasm that separates this town. Look down the river towards the East and there are green parks rolling down to the river, beautiful Victorian bridges sparkle against the blue sky. Face West and there is the smoke scarred embankment leading towards the wharfs. The beauty and the beast. All cities, all cities depend on this chasm.

Rife with a drug fueled frenetic energy that doesn’t let up, Loaded kept me up to the early hours of the morning. The complex issues of immigrant identity, second generation immigrant children, sexuality, racial tension, desire and family are all explored in a youthful, vivacious, unrelenting prose that hums with the energy of late nights, pills and booze.

Characterized in the blurb as the antithesis of the hedonistic exploits of the young rich of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis‘ fiction, Arthur Nersesian’s The Fuck-Up explores life at the other end of the scale, the destitute, the equally lost and the seemingly hopeless with the same amoral tone. A brief word about the cover design, you can probably imagine how the back cover looks from the front, and so when the reader is reading it the title forms a sort of caption which invites comparison. I can’t decide if it is appealingly minimalist design or self-consciously humiliating.

In The Fuck-Up, the unnamed narrator navigates the underworld of 1980s New York, getting by on lies and just enough luck. Having been dumped by both his girlfriend and his near-mistress, and being fired from his job at a movie theatre for asking for and receiving a raise which caused an upset among the other employees, the narrator moves in with a slightly older intellectual friend, Helmsley, and finds another low paying job in a gay porn theatre. Overhearing a conversation on a train, he goes for the job opportunity and lies to his neo-hippie businessman boss Miguel about his sexuality in order to secure his position. As he wanders the streets and contemplates his life, he accidentally finds himself the victim of a number of brutally violent incidents which propel him into further complicated arrangements, including an affair with an unstable older woman, taking up a sublet of a famous film director’s apartment, and shady business arrangements with Miguel, each destroying his life in their own way.

By the end of the second week, I stopped getting up before noon, and by the middle of the third week I stopped shaving altogether. I’d lie around in bed watching daytime TV, which is the first sign of nervous breakdown in an enlightened culture. First, I watched the noon news and talk shows, then the game shows, onto the late-afternoon talk shows, and finally I was glued to the soaps. After that TV-mangled period, I stopped watching and just slept a lot.

The narrator is far from stupid or clueless, but he manages to continually implicate himself in awful situations until, releasing himself from hospital after a vicious beating, Helmsley’s suicide, jobless after the scam is revealed, and homeless after the film director discovers he has been sleeping with his girlfriend, he finds himself made anonymous by complete destitution. Unlike most novels that let their characters sink to this level of physical desperation, of constant hunger and no glimmer of hope, there is never the sense that everything will be made okay by the last pages, which allows the physical and psychological abasement to be strongly felt. While things do eventually begin to look up for our nameless hero, it comes without any moralizing and from the most unlikely source, broadening our understanding of two of the characters.

Drifting up Broadway, past the youth industry, complete with all the latest fashion outposts, I was a ghost. I tried to look into eyes, but if anyone cast a fearful glance at me it was only so that they’d be sure they were avoiding me. I was no longer a member of the human club. But I had to get back in. I kept reassuring myself that if I thought hard enough I could find a solution. But I was working under a ruptured brain. Thoughts braced against the incomprehensible, straining to pick up a weight just an ounce too heavy for my thought muscles.

Engaging and darkly funny, like Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction of hyper self-aware characters without the explicit grotesqueries, The Fuck-Up isn’t afraid to delve into the lives and aspects of society we too often shy away from. The Fuck-Up takes hipster slackerdom and pushes it to its most extreme, and it is not pretty.

Seeing Helen Garner talk last week at the Wheeler Centre (some video footage from the event is now available online) has given me reason to return to her work, even though I was not wholly convinced by Monkey Grip. (Although, I think because at the time I was still recovering from removing myself from a similarly vicious and cyclic relationship, that may have been the cause of my vehement reaction to Nora’s actions. I do intend to return to it when my feelings about that situation aren’t so volatile. I suppose my point being that personal circumstances always effect how you read a book, but it isn’t the only way.) I had started The Spare Room in the lead up to seeing Garner’s discussion, but hearing her talk so eloquently about her craft has inspired me to further explore her writing.

I heard her moving about not long after midnight, and came out to check. Her shoulder and neck were hurting. Again she was wet, but not with piss. It was sweat: the bed-clothes were soaked, almost through to the mattress, and even the pillow was sodden. Three times that night I tackled the bed: stripped and changed, stripped and changed. This was the part I liked, straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease. We didn’t bother to put ourselves through hoops of apology and pardon.

In The Spare Room, Garner has fictionalized her own experiences; Nicola, a friend dying of cancer seeks refuge at Helen’s house in Melbourne while undergoing experimental alternative treatment. The conflict arises not from Nicola’s visitation, but rather her refusal to accept her fate and her endless hope in what Helen sees as disreputable. As the battery of the treatments take effect and require more and more of Helen’s physical assistance, the emotional impact begins to take its toll. Confrontations with the practitioner amount to vague threats and uncontrollably (and understandably) emotional outbursts of anger, the support of Nicola’s family members offers some respite but is all too brief.

We sat on the bench doubled over. Oh, I loved her for the way she made me laugh. She was the least self-important person I knew, the kindest, the least bitchy. I couldn’t imagine the world without her. She would not admit it, but her house was unreachable now. Unless someone carried her there on his back, she would never go home again.

The emotional impact on the reader doesn’t come solely from the question of the morality of shady alternatives that falsely encourage hope in terminally ill patients, but rather the strength of the relationship between Nicola and Helen, even at its darkest and when all hope appears to be lost. As an unashamedly selfish twenty-something, it made me ask myself the question of how far would I be willing to go for someone I care about? What responsibilities to our loved ones do we hold in our relationship with them? To what extent are we willing to accept responsibility of their well being? In The Spare Room, Helen is happy to take on the draining routines of care even though she wasn’t asked, but she also recognizes her own inability to fully deal with the situation.

Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches our virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

The Spare Room is moving, but not in an abrasive or showy manner. By outlining the daily routines associated with caring for the terminally ill loved one in clear-eyed and honest prose it presents it as a quiet reality. Littering it with references to iconic Melbourne landmarks, events and streets adds to this sense of everyday reality, but again, it’s not the sense of location that is the focus of the novel – it is in the relationships and the question of responsibility within them.

Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers‘ final novel, is permeated by a sense of illness, death and social disease. Set in a small town in the South of the United States, circling the lives of four very different men, two young, two old, their lives collide in the present and in the past in a series of violent, unsettling confrontations. Bleak and despondent as it is, McCullers imbues this darkness with an understanding of the fragility of the human heart, the futile rage against death and the necessity of the fight against social injustice.

The novel opens with J.T. Malone, the local pharmacist, discovering that he is suffering from leukemia and only has a few months to live. A mostly virtuous man, he begins to question and lash out at the world which offers him no hope, no cure and no redemption. He considers his life differently knowing that he has not much time left to live it. He maintains a somewhat close friendship with the larger than life figure of Judge Fox Clane. Excessive in opinion, body and stature, but with his mind succumbing to the senility of old age and having suffered a stroke which paralyzed half his body and dealing with diabetes, the Judge continually denies any evidence of illness to all outsiders. His wife’s death left a considerable gap in his life, and he tries to fill it with other women, women with similar habits or looks, only to find them all unsatisfactory. Having lost his only son to suicide, the Judge’s only relation is the idealistic and sensitive Jester Clane.

Several months ago he had read in these bylines the words: ‘How can the dead truly be dead when they are still walking in my heart?’ It was from an old Indian legend and the Judge could not forget it.

Jester’s relationship with his grandfather is bristling with their conflicting opinions over the issue of race. While the Judge longs for the old days of the South, Jester antagonizes him with his desire for full integration. Despite the Judge’s racist attitudes, his closest relationship is with his amanuensis, the blue-eyed black boy Sherman Pew. An orphan who is constantly searching for his unknown mother, and desperately seeking her in musical stars, Sherman is prickly to everyone that is around him. Nonetheless, he and Jester share a friendly competitiveness and antagonism which often becomes humiliating to both. Jester, it is suggested, harbours deeper feelings for Sherman.

Not only are their current lives and situations delicately intertwined, but as the novel moves along and revelations are made, their pasts are just as connected. Jester’s discovery of his father’s personality and circumstances before his suicide through the late night hysterics of the Judge answers the vital questions of identity for him, whereas Sherman’s own acknowledgment of his parentage only leads to more questions and his sense of self utterly destroyed. It is these questions and uncertainty that lead him to take action against the racist implications of the town, which in turn leads to the horrifically violent confrontation that ends in his death. Meanwhile, Malone, gradually closer to his death, stands up to his townsfolk and refuses their intense appetite for destruction in the name of morality, making his final grasp at heroism. Though he doesn’t achieve it in the eyes of the betrayed, hurt townspeople, he comes closer to peace with himself and the world around him.

As he sat holding the pestle there was in him enough composure to wonder at those alien emotions that had veered so violently in his once mild heart. He was split between love and hatred – but what he loved and what he hated was unclear. For the first time he knew that death was near him. But the terror that choked him was not caused by the knowledge of his own death. The terror concerned some mysterious drama that was going on – although what the drama was about Malone did not know. The terror questioned what would happen in those months – how long? – that glared upon his numbered days. He was a man watching a clock without hands.

The most somber detail of the novel is the profound sense of the failure of traditional spiritual or religious modes to explain death or to offer comfort to the dying. The Judge freely moves from church to church, mainly hoping to find someone who can mimic his dead wife than to find solace in religion; Malone too looks for comfort in the church but fails to find it, and yet refuses to commit the act of violence because he doesn’t want to endanger his soul. Redemption is made on earth, in humane actions, but Malone seeks justification for it in the sacred.

Yes, the earth had revolved its seasons and spring had come again. but there was no longer a revulsion against nature, against things. A strange lightness had come upon his soul and he exalted. He looked at nature now and it was part of himself. He was no longer a man watching a clock without hands. He was not alone, he did not rebel, he did not suffer. He did not even think of death these days. He was not a man dying – nobody died, everybody died.

As in all of McCullers’ novels, Clock Without Hands seeks to explore the injustices of society, spiritual isolation and confusion, the confounding nature of human love and affection, our own battles with ourselves prying us apart from those around us. Yet, as bleak as the issues it deals with are, one doesn’t leave the vivid world of Clock Without Hands feeling weighed down by the impotence of our struggle against death, but rather with the intimation that hope is always available at all junctures of life, even on the very cusp of death.