There’s a reason I avert my eyes from multi-author short story collections, and it’s this: you have favourites among the throng, and nothing can stop you from loving those bright-eyed scamps more than the others. I’m an egalitarian reader, and love to love everything the same. But it’s difficult to shy away in the case of a book like Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books, a collection no doubt published because independent Melbourne bookshop Readings has a clientele able to discern their Carver from their Chekhov, their Kennedy from their Lahiri. An editorial team headed by Jason Cotter and Michael Williams has brought together the shining lights of the short fiction form in Australia, including Alex Miller, Peter Goldsworthy, Cate Kennedy, Paddy O’Reilly and Tony Birch. The book not only brings good literary will to its readers; in addition, proceeds from the book go to The Readings Foundation, which supports local community and arts projects.
So, a book full of treasures. But the heart is wilful, and it goes where it pleases. Can I say how surprised I was by where it took me, and how grateful I was to discover the final destination? For example, I know who Mark Seymour is – he’s indirectly responsible for the longstanding but one-sided love affair I had with Paul McDermott when I was but an impressionable teen. But I had no idea Seymour was such a master of voice, of getting into a fictional skin. ‘The Scragger’ is a masterpiece showcasing the laconic Australian sporting male. Shawsie is a footballer, the ‘new dog in the kennel’. His anxieties are necessarily more hidden than others’, but his desires are plain for everyone to see. It’s the last game of the season, and he wants a run, badly. But he’s new in from the state league and the opposition players are huge, vicious, scraggin’. Coded in expletives, Shawsie’s verbiage is a wonderful couch for the ‘first run’ dream and the ‘couldn’t give a shit’ attitude expected of the sportsperson:
As if I don’t care about people’s feelings. Course I care. I mean, if I look at your face and you’re upset about something I’m going to notice that, right? And I’ll probably ask you what the matter is. On the other hand, I’m not soft either. I don’t suck up to anybody. I mean, there are bullshitters everywhere, don’t you reckon? Some people really know how to get the sympathy vote. ‘Squeaky wheels’ Dad calls ‘em … Mum too for that matter. ‘Watch out for the squeaky wheels,’ she used to say. That was a long time ago though.
Seymour’s writing is immediate and physical; it feels like it feeds straight into the part of the brain that perceives three-dimensional movement.
Like sentiment and football, youth and small town boredom are uncomfortable bedfellows, and Jenny Sinclair’s ‘Postcards’ is a bang-on sketch of what a kid with an adventurous bent might do: ‘Technically speaking it was a motorbike.’ In four skilful pages, Sinclair wraps the teenaged Owen in well-meaning relatives and benign promises and also the promising dust of the road. It’s a great little piece, with a focus on loving escape.
Now that I look again at Robbie Egan’s ‘Snake’, I’m starting to see a theme in the stories in Readings and Writings that have so enthralled me. ‘Snake’ begins with some kids playing around a river on a day Melburnians won’t need to try too hard to imagine, a day of blazing heat and lazy languor. Fans oscillate and boys smoke while their friends on the riverbank mangle their turn jumping into the water. But every action has its reverse and a single event has the day in tragic rewind.
Plenty of the other stories are great companions. David Cohen’s ‘Woodcutter’ is whimsical and fatalistic in the way of George Saunders, and Alex Miller’s ‘The End’ is a seemingly gentle story that groans terrifically at its end with a brutal kind of respite. In ‘Icarus’, Leanne Hall figures the remembrance of an installation artist in a way that foregrounds the allure of both the work and the strange unknowable person behind tangible flights of fancy. The foreword by Shane Maloney laughingly captures the character of the Readings enterprise, a place where ‘Helen Garner freewheeled past with a gasfitter’s apprentice over her shoulder’ and ‘The proprietor, a ruffian named Rubbo, stood behind an oak-laden counter, idly slitting the pages of uncut hardbacks with a switchblade stiletto.’ Rubbo’s introduction is a great read too, telling the story behind the big blue R.
Such were my bright-eyed scamps. Perhaps yours are different?
