Simmering darkly with unspoken traumas and longings, Steeplechase is a compelling novel about the tremulous bond between sisters. The first non-erotic work from Brisbane writer Krissy Kneen, following on from the memoir Affection and short story collection Triptych, this is a stirring Australian Gothic where the tangled threads of art, desire and madness are sensually, unsettlingly evoked.

Bec Reich is 40 years old. A painter and a university art lecturer, she masks her loneliness with a cold sense of reserve and an obsessive devotion to her work. Against her judgment, she is slipping into an affair with one of her students, a talented 23 year old enamored both with her and with the legend of her sister Emily – a captivating figure of the Australian contemporary art scene now living in Beijing.

Brilliant, dangerous Emily – famous for her nightmarish paintings, her beguiling use of light, and her schizophrenia – is as passionate and erratic as Bec is withdrawn. A “terrible thing” from their childhood has created a schism between the sisters, and they have been estranged for over 20 years. Now, as Bec lies in bed recovering from a gall bladder operation, Emily calls, inviting her to visit her in Beijing for the opening of her latest art show.

As the narrative slips back and forth in time, Bec is drawn back into memories long smothered of her childhood with Emily. Growing up on a sprawling, windswept property in rural Brisbane with only their grandmother – a tough and wiry “nugget of a woman” – and their mute, mentally ill mother for company, the girls are locked in a claustrophobic bond. The gloomy wildness of the Australian landscape is richly rendered – the dry creek bed, the “flat scrubby paddocks stretching away over the hill”, the pale golden glow of the trees being stripped away as the sun sets. This provides the perfect backdrop for the dark, imaginary world of Emily’s games and delusions as she slowly slips further and further away from reality.

Kneen vividly captures the anxiety of fifteen-year-old Bec, despairing at being left behind while Emily is “taken” by schizophrenia. “All our hard-earned intimacy is stripped away,” she writes. “She whispers to herself when before she might have whispered to me. She plays games with the wind and the tall grasses by the gate but when I try to drag her to play one of our own games she stands and stares as if the real world is just an echo of something, a trick of the light.” It is a disorienting experience that is recreated decades later in Beijing, as Bec struggles to keep up with her sister’s wildly fluctuating moods and the same disturbing hallucinations.

The past and present continue to collide paths as the novel hurtles towards a visceral, unforgettable climax. There is catharsis, and moments of strange tenderness that bring relief from the chilling atmosphere of much of the novel. This blend of the warm and sensual with the dark and disturbing makes Steeplechase an impressive first novel, with clear, precise prose and expert pacing that will have you captivated from start to finish.

 -Review first published in 3000melbourne magazine

The other week I watched Howl, and now all I can think about is Remington typewriters and readings in smoky New York clubs, and James Franco as Allen Ginsberg talking about falling in love with Jack Kerouac, and about falling in love with Neal Cassady, and about wanting to write so that they would “understand, nakedly, how I felt”, and about being in the psych ward, and saying, “There is no Beat Generation. It’s just a bunch of guys trying to get published.”

And all I can think is that if I was a cute guy all I would ever wear would be big black Ray-Bans and white t-shirts and plaid shirts. And then I thought, well, maybe I’ll just do that anyway.

Indiscretion is a sensuous novel about desire, folly and love in all its permutations. Set against the alluring backdrops of the Hamptons, Manhattan, Rome and Paris, debut novelist Charles Dubow tells the story of the splintering of a seemingly perfect marriage. Though not exactly a literary masterpiece, this is an engaging beach read that blends the dramatic and the familiar, providing a bit of escapist fun.

To dispense with the negative comments up front: as a first novel, Indiscretion has its fair share of flaws. The dialogue often feels like it’s from a bad soap opera, unnatural and laden with eye-rollingly profound statements. The characters motivations are not always believable, and much of the action borders on the clichéd. And yet, if you can put all that aside and allow yourself to just be taken into this world, you’ll find it’s quite an enjoyable one.

The novel centres around Harry and Maddy Winslow, a glamorous and wealthy couple in their forties. They have an effortlessly charmed life, wrapped in a dazzling sheen of beauty, elegance and generosity that places them perpetually at the centre of their wide group of friends. He is a National Book Award winning author; she is sublimely beautiful, with a graceful humility and a talent for cooking delicious gourmet food for their frequent party guests. There is a natural ease between them, a comfortable love that has never been questioned. They capture the attention of every room they enter; everyone they meet places them on a pedestal.

There are whispers of F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night when the couple meets Claire, a pretty, winsome 26-year-old, during an idyllic summer at their Hamptons cottage. Like most people, Claire is immediately enamoured with the beautiful couple, and they are quickly charmed by her youthful naiviety and ambition. She is adopted into their inner circle, and the summer passes in a perfect series of parties, barbecues and tennis matches.

But by the end of the summer, when she learns that Harry and Maddy are heading to Rome for a year, it’s no longer enough for her to simply be part of their orbit. “Like those born without money, those born without love want it all the more,” Dubow writes. “It becomes the great solution, the answer to all problems.”

From the opening sections of the book, it’s no surprise that this is heading towards an affair. What’s interesting is the rawness with which Dubow renders the utter banality of the betrayal – the senselessness with which Harry gambles with the things he loves. “Did you think you were too special to live by the same rules as everyone else?” an angry friend asks Harry. “It wasn’t enough to be a successful writer and father with friends who loved you? With a wife who adored you?” Dubow explores a particular kind of discontentment, an “innate greediness” within the human condition that pushes us to find “activity to distract ourselves from ourselves… to alter our lives and risk losing everything we already had.” It’s a familiar story about having everything one could ever want, but somehow yearning for something more anyway.

Interestingly, the story is narrated by a peripheral character, one whose own background is deliberately left quite vague. Walter has been friends with Maddy since childhood and remains close to the couple, a quiet and dependable cornerstone of their friendship group. From his outsider’s vantage point, Walter pieces together the story from things he has observed, things he discovers later on, and things he imagines.

As a narrative device, this unfortunately doesn’t quite succeed – it often feels unnatural, and involves a fair amount of suspension of disbelief. Nevertheless, I appreciate the effect it is aiming for: creating a filter that would allow us insight into the characters’ inner lives while still holding them at arms length. To an extent this is achieved, and the story is experienced with a blend of intimacy and distance that keeps it entertaining, without ever becoming too heavy.

-Review first published in slightly different, shorter form in 3000melbourne.

Sometimes I get this feeling like, hey remember how I used to draw and stuff? And then I sit down with my charcoals and I realise how out of practice I am and it’s one of those things that just is not like riding a bike. So I cheat a little and I trace bits and copy stuff and I scribble and cry, and my cat walks all over it with his cute little paws and tries to eat it. But then I scan it in and adjust it a little and I feel kind of happy.

Anyway, I did this thing of Andrej and it was fun for me.

In a way I kind of hate going to fashion shows, because I feel so messy and unglamorous in my eBay hand-me-downs, and I’m a big poser pretending my knowledge of fashion goes any deeper than OMG LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY THINGS. But in another way I love it completely, because OMG so many beautiful people and beautiful clothes and you can drink champagne and get free cosmetics and everything is so beautiful and cool. And this year’s L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival was pretty great in that same miserable/exhilarating/inspiring/depressing kind of way.

Obviously, even if I could afford to buy this stuff I couldn’t actually wear the styles I love, but that’s not really the point anyway. Designer clothes just aren’t really made for women  who are shorter than 5’11″ or bigger than a size 6, or who, you know, have breasts and hips – which is a whole other complex kettle of fish in itself, but I’ve made my peace with it, mostly. But in an imaginary world where I look like Georgia May Jagger and have her bank account as well, this is what I’d fill my wardrobe with.

Blazers and suits with crop tops underneath, à la Ellery. I love the appropriation of masculine styles, worn in such a sexy and feminine way. Fun!

These hats. For the life of me I can’t find out anything about them, but there’s something very sexy and Johnny Depp about them. So much love! (I’m actually for reals pretty desperate for one of these, so if you know anything…)

Silky, paisley prints. Oh, so sweet and summery! Imagine being chic enough to just waltz down to the St Kilda foreshore in this with a cute little dog on a leash. Or throw on a blazer and heels and you’re the coolest girl at the bar, or at work, or kind of anywhere.

Leather everything. I know, worst vegetarian ever. But in imaginary-land I’ll have all the shorts and skirts and cuffs and boots and jackets please.

Printed skater skirts with bomber jackets. Not so practical for the windy Docklands maybe, but I think the blend of boyish and girly styles is incredibly cute.

I guess anything looks beautiful and ethereal when it’s floating down the runway to The XX’s Angels, but there’s something about this strange, fluttery dress that I find quite alluring.

 Black, black and more black. Well, I mean obviously. But you know when sometimes you see something or put something on and you think, yes, I DO love black, deeply and passionately. And you realise, maybe it’s not just that I’m boring and unimaginative and gloomy – maybe black is just amazing.

In the small French village of Clèves – a sleepy place, where the main attractions are a seedy nightclub and a yearly carnival, and where “the whole school is obsessed by sex” – teenage Solange is navigating the anxieties of her ever-growing sexual desire.

All the Way is the latest work from award-winning French author Marie Darrieussecq, best known for her 1996 debut Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation, a beguiling story of a young woman who is slowly transformed into pig. Here, she continues her exploration of the female body in a darkly humorous coming of age story that is both familiar and surprising.  Naïve and awkward, Solange is coming into an awareness of her body and discovering the pleasures and pains it is capable of. She is desperate to be touched, to experience, to have the reassurance that comes with being desired. But as much as she is obsessed with the idea of having sex, she is consumed by a feeling that she’s not pretty, not sophisticated, not quite the same as all the other girls.

The next problem for Solange is how she should be sexual – whether “in a superior, stylish way like Lætitia” or “cool and liberated like Nathalie”, though she fears her style is “a grubby, I-can’t-help-myself way.” The anxieties surrounding female sexuality are vividly captured in the way Solange and her friends try on different roles. They feign sophistication, pepper their speech with phrases and mannerisms they’ve picked up from parents and older cousins, and impart wisdom about sex, love and life in knowing, jaded tones. Conversations are rendered with an authenticity that humorously reveals the performative nature of so much of adolescent social experience – the charades we have all played to impress, to save face, to fit in.

Darrieussecq relates these moments with a lightness of touch that perfectly captures youthful glibness, but there is a real darkness simmering beneath the pages.

Solange’s desperation for sexual contact leads her to become infatuated with boys who treat her terribly. Her first sexual experiences are – from the reader’s vantage point – quite exploitative, but she comes away giddy and thinking, “maybe she is falling in love”. Some scenes are almost painful to read. The disrespectful, condescending way that Arnaud, an older boy who she convinces herself is sort of her boyfriend, treats her is infuriating, but more unsettling is the sadness and loneliness within Solange that leads her to accept it. And then there is the disturbingly sexually charged relationship with Monsieur Bihotz, the neighbour who has been babysitting Solange her whole life and whose house she still stays at most nights. All throughout the novel, there is a pervasive sense that it’s only a matter of time before things go too far and become very, very messy indeed.

Though much of the narrative feels familiar and almost predictable on the surface, Darrieussecq treats it with a rare perceptiveness and authenticity, providing an intimate insight into the obsessions and tensions of adolescence.

-Review first published on ArtsHub

Sufficient Grace has been longlisted for the very first Stella Prize, a major new literary award for Australian women’s writing.

Deep in the heart of rural Wisconsin, 13-year old Ruth and her cousin Naomi are grappling with sin, penance and the dark tensions of adulthood. Living in a small community tightly bound by their Pentecostal faith, the two girls are like sisters, wrapped up in an unconditional devotion to one another – “she is mine,” Ruth often reflects. They are also bound together by a horrifying secret, and as they seek help through prayer, their faith becomes as suffocating as it is a comfort.

Sufficient Grace is the debut novel from Melbourne-based American writer Amy Espeseth, and won the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. Narrated through the perspective of Ruth, the story stretches slowly over five months in a harsh winter, brought to life with an enchanting, almost folksy resonance. It comes as no surprise that Espeseth herself grew up in a Wisconsin fundamentalist community much like Ruth’s. This is an authentic rendering of a world created through intimate knowledge and a penchant for rich, earthy detail.  

Much of the novel centres on simple, nostalgic images of rural life, from Ruth hunting in the forest with her father and brother, to the cousins playing in a barn stacked with hay, to Ruth sneaking chocolate caramels into church. Ruth’s thoughts are peppered with Biblical references and meditations on the teachings of Jesus; the scripture pervades every aspect of life. Amid this small town isolation and religious sheltering, Ruth and Naomi’s naiveté in dealing with the awful secret they share is understandable, though disturbing. It is the wilful blindness of the adults in the family, and their strident principles in regards to sin and retribution, that is more unsettling.

The wilderness setting plays a large role in the world of Sufficient Grace. The winter is violently cold, and the landscape can be both beautiful and brutal. When Ruth seeks solace, the farmland and forest are her source of comfort. The ice shimmering silently on the lake, the peeling black and white skin of a birch tree, the sap that bleeds slowly from its cracks, the deer that eat from an apple tree “like dark, silent ghosts” – all are reminders of God. At the same time, images of hunted animals, slaughtered deer strung up from the trees and blood dripping onto the snow create a potent feeling of dread. As the smallest details slowly build, innocence seems always quietly under threat.

Sufficient Grace is a slow burning novel with a dark intensity that simmers beneath largely silent images. As Ruth reflects, “People on the land live close to the beginnings and endings of life. Death ain’t a scary thing that creeps in now and again in the night… We are people that raise, hunt and butcher.”

-Review first published in 3000melbourne.

A colleague brought this in to work for me, knowing how much I’d go crazy for it. And she was right – I’m nuts about this stuff.

The Successful Wife’s Pocketbook is a handy little pamphlet by Woman’s Journal from 1962 that offers kind, sisterly guidance on how to satisfy your husband – and to do it all with a sweet, pleasing smile. You wouldn’t want to annoy him by not having dinner ready on time, or not having your hair styled properly when he gets home, or by accidentally letting slip that you experience feelings like boredom and tiredness and frustration and sadness every once in a while. So take notes!

Are you successful in some field of living? I like to  think I probably am. But, I still need fulfilment in between all my cooking of fabulous meals and making myself pretty and providing charming entertainment for my husband and his friends… and a book of instructions on how to be better at all those things sounds like just the trick. Plus, it’s intelligent and forward-looking…

So, these are the main things you need to know. Whatever you do, please don’t insult your husband by looking less than perfect. A man needs to be pleased with his wife’s appearance at all hours of the day, even when you’re tired from slaving over the stove and the dishes and the kids. Put a little lipstick on and show him some respect.

Getting annoyed at your husband for behaving like he’s the centre of the universe is just unladylike, and pretty unattractive. Put your own selfish needs and feelings aside. Your job is to smile prettily, scurry around in the background taking care of all the little tasks he doesn’t want to do, and above all, make sure you never hurt his fragile ego. After all, only unsuccessful wives commit that heinous sin.

But it’s not all give and give and give. If you do it all right, you get rewarded with the major prize… a happy husband! And that, ladies, is called a partnership.

[Updated, maybe with slightly more collected thoughts this time.]

The Stars (Are Out Tonight), the second single from David Bowie’s upcoming record The Next Day, was released earlier this week, and it’s kind of everything. The song is beautiful, grungy and melodic, with a sweeping energy that is unmistakably Bowie. But what’s more exciting is the way it is brought to life in a strange, gorgeous and beguiling video, starring Tilda Swinton, Andrej Pejic, Saskia de Brauw, and Iselin Steiro.

It’s like a creepy little arthouse film – disturbing, sexy and utterly bizarre. Bowie and Swinton (who many have long suspected may actually be the same person) play a straight-laced, middle-aged couple living quietly in the suburbs. “We have a nice life,” Swinton says, kissing Bowie on the cheek as they do their supermarket shopping. He is starting distractedly at a magazine cover featuring an incredibly young, glamorous and decadent celebrity couple plastered on the cover. Then he tosses it aside. “We have a nice life,” he agrees firmly.

As the swell of the song kicks in, we see snapshots of their nice, pastel-coloured life, but there’s something strange going on. Slowly, their space is being invaded by this very celebrity couple, played by the astonishingly beautiful Pejic and de Brauw, swapping genders and looking predictably fantastic. The two skinny, androgynous figures creep up behind the older couple, making bizarre dancing movements. They sneak into their bedroom at night, Pejic brushing his lips against Bowie’s as he sleeps. They have wild sex that ignites something terrifying and exhilarating in everyone. Eventually they take their place completely. All the while, the stunning Norwegian model Iselin Steiro, looking uncannily like a young Bowie, is performing in the living room, singing, “We will never be rid of these stars/ But I hope they live forever.”

The video perfectly captures what makes Bowie so brilliant. Though there are strong links to the past, it references his legacy without being nostalgic – it feels as fresh and forward-looking as his best work always has. And it feels pretty exciting. The way gender is so effortlessly blurred and blended and just tossed aside feels incredibly refreshing – not because it’s a new idea at all, but because it reminds us that this kind of creativity exists. It reminds us of all the self-possession, individuality and insouciant self expression that people like Bowie and Pejic represent. And that’s something really beautiful and inspiring, whatever else you read into it.

I’m sure it’s also kind of making a comment about celebrity culture and our obsession with beautiful and famous people, but truthfully I’m too entranced by all the beautiful and famous people in it to really care much. But watch it for yourself:

Like a House on Fire has been longlisted for the very first Stella Prize, a major new literary award for Australian women’s writing.

A man takes a trip with his overbearing, difficult mother to scatter his father’s ashes. A new mother returns to work from maternity leave, feeling dislocated and empty in a suddenly uncomfortable environment. A young girl writes in her journal about her unstable family, longing desperately for a beautiful set of 72 Derwent pencils.

Intimate and familiar, Like a House on Fire takes a close look at domestic life and the quiet frustrations that simmer beneath the ordinary. This is Cate Kennedy’s second collection of short stories, returning to the form of her highly acclaimed Dark Roots, which earned her a reputation as one of Australia’s most masterful writers of contemporary short fiction. With her characteristic lightness of touch, Kennedy guides us quietly in and out if fifteen carefully distilled worlds, letting unexpressed aches and pains reveal themselves through simple actions.

A common thread throughout the collection is the underlying sense of dissatisfaction experienced by her characters. From a seventeen-year-old girl spending each day of her summer working as a hospital cleaner and yearning to start a new life overseas, to a woman feeding her anguish by endlessly trawling the internet for clues about her ex-partner’s new life (“I don’t know why they call it surfing. They should call it drowning”), to a young mother trying to gather herself, her newborn baby and her unreliable, delinquent boyfriend for a discount family portrait, the stories of Like a House on Fire explore the many ways a person can feel incomplete.

In several stories, these latent tensions, stresses and boredoms are brought to the surface when a character suffers an injury or illness. In Flexion, the opening story, a farmer is almost killed after being crushed by his tractor. As his bored, unhappy wife struggles to help him through his rehabilitation, his broken and crippled body becomes a symbol for their atrophied relationship. In the title story, a father is reduced to watching his family live their lives around him from the living room floor, suffering from a back injury that may or may not be psychosomatic, and that leaves him feeling paralysed, frustrated, unable to connect. In Waiting, a woman waits for an ultrasound, sick with despair and knowing already that the baby will be dead, just like the many others she has lost before it.

Yet despite their preoccupation with the discomforts of life, these stories are not as miserable and gloomy as they could be. Kennedy treats her subject matter with a deft and nimble touch, gently propelling each narrative along in an easygoing pace. The language reveals the beauty in small displeasures, so that each narrative comes across as bittersweet and often almost soothing rather than purely distressing.

One of the most understated and affecting stories is Tender, which takes place the night before a woman is scheduled to have a biopsy for a small lump she has found under her arm. The growth nags at her subtly, “like a pea, buried but resilient, a small sly sphere nesting disguised between layers of flesh and tissue.” While her husband and children are asleep, she stays up all night putting the finishing touches on a diorama her son is making for a school project. Distracting herself against “something dark and airless trickling through her bloodstream,” she trawls through the house and garden for materials to add to the little cardboard world. Kennedy allows us to watch her quietly, sharing in the woman’s meditative state through sensual details that create a subtly swelling sense of catharsis: “She crouches by the pile of paving stones. Her fingers search blindly into the damp crevices of the stack. Somewhere in here, she knows, is some moss: cool and velvety, perfect for the distant green hills behind the open gate in that little microcosmic landscape.”

-Review first published in 3000melbourne.