I’ve only read five short story collections this year so far. It’s been a big-book year; I’ve schlepped my way through two Game of Thrones books, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, an advance copy of Isobelle Carmody’s The Sending (!!!) and am currently engaging in the bicep tussle that is Don Quixote. And I also suspect I have a little bit of short-story fatigue. Reading bad short fiction is exhausting in a way that needs no explanation, and reading good short fiction can be draining too. I always need a bit of a temporal or psychological break between even each short story in any one collection, whether single-authored or multi-authored: if the writer is doing their job right, you need some time to absorb and then recalibrate for the new world each story brings.

But I had no hesitations in buying Wayne Macauley’s Other Stories ahead of his MWF session (which I didn’t end up attending in the end). This 2010 collection has been much lauded, and I’m impatient to read his new novel The Cook, which I think is spectacularly well-timed: the collective fever-dream of MasterChef is beginning to fade slightly, but notifications from every publishing corner, including the meteoric rise and power of food blogs and the success of McSweeney’s Lucky Peach point to the middle-class obsession with food and kitchens being a stayer.

To return to Other Stories. It’s a collection that should breed excitement in short fiction aficionados. Macauley’s fiction is clean, the tales made almost ridiculously accessible by his use of simple prose. In some stories, chummy, confessional first-person establishes character with the naturalism, attention to vernacular and easy representation of foible that made Cervantes’ Sancho Panza the most memorable simpleton in literary history.

In ‘A Short Report from Happy Valley’, the (unnamed) narrator, a pathologist, is dashing off an epistle to a colleague about ‘strange goings-on’ he recently observed (‘My invoice will follow shortly, by the way’). The serene people of Happy Valley display a tendency towards sleep; one man has been asleep for thirty years, waking only for meal-times or other necessaries, while others ‘hover precariously between sleep and wakefulness’. The business-like diagnostician can’t put his finger on the cause, but while possible theories range from the pathogenic to the philosophical, he’s laissez-faire about the odd phenomenon: ‘Leave them alone! Let them rest in peace!’ – his mind’s already on his next case, a sick cow in Brisbane.

Macaulay does this oblique and unperturbed chronicling of curiosities very well. ‘One Night’ contains the simplest and most charming form of this signature; the vignette describes the summer night when ‘Michael Ebeling, the panel beater’ took his mattress down into the street and was gradually joined by all his Boxstead Court neighbours. And when Macaulay refracts these anomalies through his satiric filter, which he does often, the result tickles the fancy while disturbing the civic sense. ‘Bohemians’ seems like a fun example, at first; an agent assures a client that he can lease some ‘bohemians in their purely decorative role’ so as to create some character and ambience in a community. But the bohemians, so prized for their louche inertia, can’t afford to live in the area, where ratepayers have ‘bought up all the bohemians’ houses and taken over the bohemians’ cafés’.

If this seems like a slightly dated complaint (vale affordable North Fitzroy, Brunswick and Northcote living), note too that the collection comprises stories that have been written over almost twenty years. But when Macaulay aims his sights at the prickly end of the rectitude scale in ‘The Farmer’s New Machine’, the lengths to which a farmer is prepared to go to attain bucolic bliss are chilling because very little about the story – the proud farmer, the advances in industry – places it far outside of contemporary experience.

It’s not only groups that become bewildered, slipping into interstices that protect them from the onslaught of increasing complications. One of the collection’s best, and longest, stories, ‘The Bridge’, tells of a lone soldier who attempts to maintain his loyalty while defending a post that has been cut off from all communication. In ‘So Who’s the Wrecker Then?’, the Premier – ‘a man with a wicked sense of humour and a great flair for the dramatic’ decides during an appearance at a building site in outer suburbia to use his new-found bulldozer skills to chase dignitaries and photographers around ‘like sheep’.

With his restraint and talent for observation, Macauley clads what might usually be thought of as dystopian themes in the familiarity of realist garb, and this lends real frisson to his work. He has also written two earlier novels, which I haven’t read, but what with the sharp execution and imaginative premises, Other Stories is an excellent way to introduce yourself to Macauley’s gimlet pen.

Thanks to Favel Parrett for making me actually start weeping uncontrollably on public transport.

Another week, another upbraiding from a friend for only posting links to external content. Too bad!

Here’s my podcast interview with Meg Mundell, whose novel Black Glass envisions a future Melbourne where people without official documentation are forced to the fringes of society. At the same time, it’s a tale of two sisters’ search for each other in a city increasingly moulded by opportunistic shysters and government spin doctors.

Meg has been published widely in Australian newspapers, journals and magazines, including The Age, The Monthly, Meanjin, The Best Australian Stories 2010, The Sleepers Almanac, harvest and The Big Issue. Have a listen.

I have a short review of Patrick Holland’s short story collection The Source of the Sound in this month’s Australian Book Review, which magazine is now available in an online edition – you can buy individual issues or subscribe for a year. (Of course, the paper version is still available.) Go forth and modernise.

I was shocked and saddened to learn a couple of weeks ago that Hazel Rowley had passed away. As many of you know, Rowley was scheduled to do an Australian tour to talk about her latest book, Franklin and Eleanor.

My acquaintance with Rowley’s work began when I heard her interviewed on The Book Show about Richard Wright on the centenary of his death. Not a reader of biographies, I was surprised to find myself totally absorbed in Rowley’s details of the American writer, whose protest novel Native Son sold hundreds of thousands of copies when it was published in 1940. Rowley was a delightful interviewee, so obviously entranced with her subject, so humble:

How can I be so stupid? Who’s going to talk to me? What the hell do I think I’m doing?…Writing about a man, a black man, an American man? What do I know about this? Zero!

I planned to seek out Rowley’s biography of Wright – I’d never heard anything about him before, and his story was electrifying (an angry black writer, read widely by white readers and deeply influential upon later black writers, who became a communist, joined the John Reed Club, then moved to France).

But I came across Tête-à-tête first, which I couldn’t resist – being as I am conditioned to treasure great love stories. As Rowley writes in the preface, the book ‘is not a biography of Sartre and Beauvoir … This is the story of a relationship.’ Which for me was a sort of relief – I’m not well acquainted with the work of either, and haven’t particularly enjoyed Sartre’s fiction (which I suppose is akin to saying ‘I don’t think Shakespeare was so great at making paper planes’). Nevertheless, it was good to approach this book not burdened by my lack of philosophical knowhow – which was more than supplemented by Rowley’s familiarity with these existentialists’ oeuvres.

It’s a pleasure to track how Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s work developed and changed, and equally wonderful to discover how they supported and encouraged one another. Named after the type of communication the pair found most satisfying, the book is a tender portrait of how, among emotional and political upheaval, Sartre and Beauvoir continually returned to their particular brand of intimacy until Sartre’s death in 1980.

For a biographer to gain this reader’s trust, they must prove their depth and breadth of knowledge, and present themselves as a balanced teller of the particular story. Having interviewed Beauvoir in 1976, as well as many of Sartre and Beauvoir’s friends and family members, Rowley certainly does the former, also providing endnotes, a selected bibliography and a ‘note on sources’ that briefly describes the location and status of the various diaries, letters and other materials she studied. As to the latter – on the one hand, it’s clear how close to Rowley’s heart the two writers are, particularly Beauvoir:

When I read Beauvoir’s memoirs in the late sixties, I was exhilarated – intoxicated, one might say. She made the impossible seem possible. Didn’t we all want an intellectual partner with whom we could share our work, ideas, and slightest thoughts? Didn’t everyone want to write in Paris cafes amid the clatter of coffee cups and the hubbub of voices, and spend their summers in Rome in complicated but apparently harmonious foursomes? Who wanted monogamy when one could have freedom and stability, love affairs and commitment?

This is the kind of passion a biographer needs to stay the course with a subject, but a reader also wants a biographer who can be even-minded with the material, not a hagiographer. At once admiring and tongue-in-cheek, Rowley tempers her obvious interest in the two – as writers and as partners – with a clear-eyed view of the tangled family they eventually wrought. Small details help deconsecrate Sartre (‘He had been keen to get himself a German girlfriend but found he lacked the language skills’) and humanise him – at one point there’s a great image of the ambitious, workaholic academic carrying lunch to an ill Beauvoir, ‘taking great care not to spill it on the way’. Seen through the eyes of later lovers, though, the man is not so appealing. In particular, Sartre’s pursuit of the Kosakiewicz sisters wears its facts sordidly. Wanda, the younger ‘Kos’, was ‘appalled’ when the fifty-six year old Sartre kissed her – then twenty years old – in the back of a taxi. It wasn’t just Sartre who had grand appetites, though: both Sartre and Beauvoir pursued younger lovers, often sharing them. When she was a teacher, Beauvoir seduced a couple of her baccalaureate students.

From the beginning, Sartre and Beauvoir’s relationship was a singular one, with few precedents even in the pair’s social circle. Sartre was non-monogamous, and to counter jealousy, he suggested to ‘the Beaver’ that they tell each other everything, which he called ‘transparency’. Sartre wanted her ‘to share … all her thoughts with him’, and Beauvoir found this ‘as frightening as it was exhilarating’. This was to be a central tenet of their relationship, which Sartre called ‘primary’ and ‘essential’, but they did not extend the courtesy of transparency to their other, ‘contingent’ lovers; indeed, they often lied to them. The tension between the pair’s devotion to the ideal of transparency and the emotional consequences of their manipulations held for the rest of their lives, with many of their other lovers constantly requiring assurance, time, continued falsehoods and even funds. Sartre, particularly, continued to accumulate dependants, until he and Beauvoir were supporting several young women. Complicated affairs like these provided ample material for the pair’s creative endeavours, such as Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay and The Mandarins (though her memoirs arguably caused more commotion; one-time lover Nelson Algren reviewed one of the volumes, ending with ‘Will she ever quit talking?’).

Beauvoir was often worse off in these taxing situations. Only once did Sartre admit to having felt jealousy, and being attached to so many young women was eminently satisfactory for him; towards the end, he even said he lied to Beauvoir more than to anyone else – despite their pledge to be honest with one another. On the other hand, Beauvoir struggled with jealousy and was often tortured by worry – she was a woman; society found ‘freedom’ just that much more condemnable in her – and suffered no small anxiety about the edifice of lies the couple constructed in claiming the transparent life for themselves, and leaving the contingent life for others. After Sartre broke off his relationship with Bianca Bienenfeld, a former student and lover of Beauvoir’s, Beauvoir wrote: ‘I blamed us – myself as much as you, actually – in the past, in the future, in the absolute: the way we treat people. I felt it was unacceptable that we’d managed to make her suffer so much.’ It makes for uncomfortable reading, the The Second Sex‘s author bearing weary witness to her partner’s etiolated women. The bitter taste of Beauvoir’s reassessment is echoed in an affecting part of Rowley’s Book Show interview:

The disappointment came really when Simone de Beauvoir’s letters were published after her death and we did find out that she had lied to people and that they had both lied to people, and that she, to some extent, had lied to us readers as well as her lovers, and that was the disappointment.

Yet there is something incredibly salutary about reading this non-judgmental account, in respect of a story that could easily have been rendered merely as farce or muck. Rowley’s inquiring and fair mind has laid out what she discovered, for all to read, as if to regale us with ceaseless tales of her most treasured, high-functioning and flawed friends. This book is a wonderful, naturalistic feat of reverse engineering – from letters, books and interviews to lives.

Sartre and Beauvoir’s philosophical project – resolving to create their own lives’ meaning without recourse to any traditional rubric – was a difficult one. As Rowley puts it, ‘It is not easy, freedom. It brings with it the anguish of choice. It comes with the burden of responsibility.’ And though they did not always discharge that burden creditably, Sartre and Beauvoir forged memorable paths as readers, thinkers, writers, lovers. Tête-à-tête gives those of us intrigued by their work a chance to be caught up in the excitement and newness of the legend as if it were happening now, rather than forty, fifty, sixty years ago.

Just a little peep from me: a review of Kirsty Murray’s India Dark on Radio National’s The Book Show.

Also, something a bit novel. If you’d like to read a book with me, and hear me discuss it with some special guests (very special guests!), get cracking on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. I’ll be reading it for the Kill Your Darlings Culture Club podcast. Believe me, you want to read this book. It was Fitzgerald’s sophomore book, and it actually features a scene in which one of the characters refers to his first, extremely successful, novel, This Side of Paradise. It’s just like staring into a tortured soul. Seriously. The podcast airs on Tuesday December 14. Get thee ready!

In Aida Edemariam’s Guardian profile of Christos Tsiolkas that ran over the weekend, she enumerated the numerous garlands laid at Booker-longlisted The Slap‘s door. Among them is Colm Toíbín’s favourable descriptor: ‘reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Don DeLillo’s Underworld‘. As Edemariam notes, this is rather naughty, ‘as it is produced [in the UK] by an imprint he co-runs and [he] has been friends with Tsiolkas for years’.

As much as I’d like to be someone who regularly smashes a few cans with Cormac McCarthy while trading fusillades in a competitive round of ‘Imagine the Worst Apocalyptic Future Possible’, or the possessor of a personal epistolary trove that will be raided after my death for examples of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s handwriting, the truth is that I haven’t really had to deal with having that many people who have written books.

The recent publication of young Melbourne (via Byron Bay and Adelaide) writer Daniel Ducrou’s novel The Byron Journals has propped a stick in those works, however, because I’ve read the book, and I know him.

What to do? Even having disclosed this, I know that when I read something complimentary about an author’s work that has been said/written by someone who knows them, there’s always a small part of my brain that goes, ‘Yeah right, you goddamned BFFs’. Needless to say, I’m therefore on the alert not to produce anything like Nicole Krauss’s over-the-top blurb of David Grossman’s To the End of the Land (not that, to my knowledge, those two writers know each other). Here’s a quote from Krauss’s blurb, ganked from Alison Flood’s Guardian piece about it:

“Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime, you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude,” [Krauss] writes. … “And she doesn’t stop there. To read the book, she says, “is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being”.

I hope to steer clear of anything approaching that level of praise – about anything, actually, not just Dan’s book. But knowing you are unlikely to be moved by anything positive I say (‘goddamned BFFs’), I’m just going to have to forge ahead regardless, because I’ve laid it like I’ll play it.

***

‘I think I was born into the wrong city,’ says Andrew, as he buckles up. ‘Definitely the wrong family.’ He’s on a plane with his mate Benny, and they’re escaping Adelaide for Byron Bay. As comments go, it’s casual, but the sentiment is warranted. Andrew’s got plenty of cash from his dad, whom he caught having sex with one of his young students. As well as being cashed up, he’s recently been beaten up – a legacy from someone who wanted to convey a message about his mother’s work as a criminal defence lawyer.

Anxious but attracted to the sound of music at a house party, he joins in on a drummers’ jam, translating what he knows of classical music to the spontaneity of the gathering. His gaze falls easily on Heidi, a girl with a lazy but confident manner, and a drummer named Tim compliments him on his drum solo. But back at his digs, Richie, who lives next door to Benny in Adelaide, Richie prods Andrew about his mother: ‘it seems to take a special breed of person to do that kind of work.’ Andrew returns fire, and the two are soon brawling; and Andrew is soon without a place to stay.

Andrew takes his necessaries – phone, wallet, pot – and scouts out the house from the party the previous night. Tim lives there; as does Jade, pouting and scantily clad; and Heidi. With his new housemates, Andrew falls into street drumming for money. And with Heidi, he quickly falls into lust, consummated early in the warm Byron water. But Heidi is unpredictable: she explodes when he tells her he’s from Adelaide, too, not Melbourne, which he’d lied about to avoid a topic that clearly caused her pain. And music isn’t the only way of life here; once Tim finds out that Andrew’s mother is a lawyer, he cuts Andrew into the household’s marijuana operation in exchange for her legal assistance.

Byron Bay is a byword for escapism, sunshine and renewal. In The Byron Journals, people take phone calls by frangipani trees; they watch surfers from low dunes made of powdery sand. On his first plunge into the ocean, Andrew feels ‘baptised by the silence and the purity of the water [,] cleansed of his past and his future’. The drugs he takes for the first time in Byron give him new dimensions of feeling, and the excitement of sex binds him to Heidi. But the place is Janus-faced: it also breeds dissolution and stagnation. The Byron Journals isn’t winkingly ironic about this duality, but genuine in its affection and unflinching in depicting the limbo-like existence led by many of Byron’s inhabitants.

Good intentions and mistakes go hand in hand, and Andrew, who wants to be nothing like his parents, gets to grips with both. Andrew is gently ablaze with difficult feeling and eager youth. What we see as an unconsidered rush headlong into a relationship with the troubled Heidi and the drug-drenched activities of his new friends, he sees as preferable to the hell of home. So much, in fact, that he’s willing to go along with a dangerous plan – a plot turn that I didn’t really buy. However, the avalanche of complications teaches Andrew that the hell other people have made for you is often nowhere near as bad as the hell you can make for yourself.

The Byron Journals has been a few years in the making, having been shortlisted for the 2007 Australian/Vogel Literary Prize and the 2008 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for an Unpublished Manuscript, and it shows. The prose is relaxed and effective: beautiful yet matter-of-fact. The dialogue in particular is lifelike: character-apt and unfussy.

The Byron Journals is a love letter to Byron: the surf, the love, the freedom. It’s also a witness to the irrevocable passage of carefree youth, which bestows, sometimes violently, gifts that resist understanding. At the end of the book, Ducrou gives us a fitting coda: an urgent, impressionistic swell of music that seems to come both from within Andrew and from without, accompanied by fragments of his time in Byron – the crazy ones and the perfect ones side by side. All these things being, for the moment, irreconcilable, but nevertheless lingering in the air.