I reviewed Alex Miller’s Lovesong for The Big Issue. It’s a lovely book exploring the ownership of one’s story and the proposition that when someone tells you a story it becomes a gift. Ken, an ostensibly retired writer, has returned to Melbourne after a sojourn in Venice. Before long, though, he’s captivated by the exotic smell of pastries wafting out from where the drycleaner’s used to be, the beautiful dark-eyed woman who runs it and her husband, an Australian man with beautiful hands, ‘the hands of a capable man’. He discovers their names – Sabiha and John Patterner – and clamour arises within his writer’s heart for the ‘ancient buried sorrow’ he sees in Sabiha’s eyes; the ‘simple love story between them, this Aussie bloke and his exotic bride’.

There is a lot of pain in this book, but Lovesong is also unexpectedly playful. Ken’s circumstances mirror Miller’s own: Ken’s ostensible last book was called The Farewell – a barely disguised Landscape of Farewell; and the accomplished writer cherishes his memories of the Tunisian city El Djem. John Patterner is not free of Miller’s arch self-mirroring, either. Patterner’s Melbourne University education, favoured North African restaurant in Paris and country town provenance are all lifted, bare-facedly, from Miller’s own history. ‘Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait,’ says Ken (pace Lucian Freud) to a nosy interviewer.

Miller is a fantastic writer who is equally capable of the lyrical and the laconic. An example of the latter:

The coffee was steaming. His mother had named Tip for the white tip on her tail. John had not given names to his animals. His father’s old horse had been a big lumbering brown gelding named Beau. A great farter. A monumental farter. When his father spurred Beau up the bank of the creek the horse let out a series of mighty farts. Real stinkers. It would take your head off if you were tailing him too closely.

The other thing is that Miller has a real knack for names. I don’t know how many times I read a modern realist novel or short story and roll my eyes at the names. Wrong names can pull you right out of a narrative – if they’re too sterile, too pretty or too odd, they don’t work. Of course, it’s hard to pick monikers that could come out of a phone book without just flipping open the White Pages. But it’s not often you come across an author with the knack for picking proper nouns that lend a heartbeat to what is really just ink on a page. Sabiha and the two Hourias; John Patterner; Andrea and Tumas Galasso; Ken and Clare. Just kind of strange enough, kind of pedestrian enough, just they-live-right-round-the-corner enough.