Sam de Brito/The Lost Boys

Coming-of-age stories usually bore the hell out of me. I dutifully read the canon of Australian, UK and American books as a younger fella and could never quite figure out why they didn't seem to speak to me, or echo my own experiences. Not that they had to - other people's lives are always interesting - but they were almost universally promoted as...universal. I found, however, that in most cases fiction writers would mix a youthful naivete of the passing of events with a wry older understanding that smacked of memoir, rather than fiction. I don't know why this annoys me, in fact, it has probably been a factor in my own resistance to writing a novel-length project: I didn't want to sound like one of those self-satisfied narcissists that have decided their own proclivities or immature observations are worthy of a 80,000 word novel. Examples? Many of my favourite novelists have resorted to this tawdry device - and I call it a device because the essential element is this: I am writing this novel about growing up in London/Tallahassee/Bathurst because my upbringing was so unique/depressing/remarkable that everyone who has been a kid/teenager/young adult will find something in it to relate to. Or, they may be writing on the advice of their therapist. Whatever the reason, these books are too often thinly-veiled memoirs of the authors own lives, autobiographies masquerading as fiction. You could play "spot the actual experience" or Google the author's life and work out the person or event the are alluding to in their "novel", if you so desired. But I am being bitter. Perhaps I am jealous of the jetset lifestyles of some of these "characters", or their early sexual experiences (much earlier than mine), or their uncanny foreknowledge that afforded them the capacity to choose the right friends or lovers or job opportunities. I just generally find these sorts of stories lack the observance of the many periods of pure boredom, the powerlessness, the formless playing or watching of TV or eating or going to school or talking on the phone that defined my childhood years - and many others I have shared this idea with. True, these are not engaging topics for modern novels, and when you think back to that time they are not the occasions that first come to mind, but yet they do form the bulk of our coming-of-age, and are most decidedly universal.

You might argue that I would probably be quite content with the new genre of biography that is so successful nowadays - the Difficult or Oprah Childhood Autobiography - with titles such as Shame, Disgrace, Wasted, or my favourite title Ma, He Sold Me For a Few Cigarettes. While worthy, and clearing allowing their authors the chance for closure, these are dire, often badly- or ghost-written pieces that turn my theory of why writers enjoy fictionalising their own coming-of-age on its head - these guys revel in the candour of revealing their painful and masochistic lives. And the books are quite clearly non-fiction.

This brings me, finally, to my latest review: Sam be Brito's The Lost Boys. With obvious knowledge of the current climate (the post-James Frey world) de Brito writes leaving you no doubt that these experiences and events are from his own life. The book charts the experiences of first a teenage boy completing and leaving school, then his older self who hasn't moved much beyond the suburb, friends, and self-abusing habits of his youth. It's a good effort, and I enjoyed it, and I'd like to explain why it got past my memoir radar. I should have put the first two paras of this in brackets so you could choose whether to read it - not wanting to get you offside if you love a good coming-of-age story, or even a Difficult Childhood Autobiography, or if you can forgive James Frey. Firstly, de Brito is not a Great Writer, its his first novel so you are not expected to be familiar with his style or seek out his pithy observations. I'm not sure if he is even a Very Good Writer, maybe that's what I like about him - he doesn't make me feel lowly by comparison. But he is a Good Writer, and I suspect edits have been made to tie the book together more neatly. Its a very warts'n'all, almost Gonzo-style novel, where the self-deprecation of the author successfully removes the need for the reader to judge them.

A style emerges, however. Its a staccato, short chapter construction where time vacillates chaotically between the main character's ages as schoolboy, thirty-something, and the current time, within a few years of the thirty-something chapters. Its a successful technique, particularly since the message of the book is that we keep repeating ourselves and seldom learn from our mistakes. A chapter will often start and its not until a few sentences in that you can tell which time period the characters are in. The technique works a bit like our memory, linked by feelings, faces and symbols more than chronology. De Brito is careful not to bleed the drama out of his novel while doing this, creating a unique sort of tension in that he focuses on characters or events briefly then leaves them suspended in time - to be fleshed out later or never returned to as he desires.

But this is never achieved with cynicism or cleverness. He is almost a writer who doesn't appreciate his own power as the novel avoids pretension and only submits to that one stylistic device. The book reads like the rantings of a literate pub drunk; disconnected, repetitive, at times tender and sometimes brutal. He adopts, or maybe tries to recreate, a hard, masculine language that is replete with expletives: the c-words, cock, cunt, cone and coke appear on almost every page. I thought this would become tiresome but it creates its own authentic harmony in a coarse kind of way. Its forgivable because the men in the story are not gangsters or even particularly hard-nosed, they are average Aussie blokes who, for better or worse, display all of the many foibles of their ilk.

And it was probably this that impressed me the most. Like a noughties Puberty Blues, The Lost Boys documents a sort of Australian youth experience that I can't say is universal, but it is very similar to mine. De Brito's Eastern Suburbs of Sydney is laced with drugs, booze, unsafe sex, and surfing - the sort of peak growing experiences many Aussie kids experienced to varying degrees - just choose your own drug, sport, or unsafe practice. It grates at times, and you howl at the book for the characters' stupid choices, but it is starkly real, and allowed me to view my own choices now and then in a comparative light. This is a refreshing reading experience: safe, yes, because I'm not comparing my youthful surrounds with Soweto or Sao Paulo, but illuminating in that I could actually discover that someone else's world view could be coloured through a similar set of events as mine. 

But is it a memoir? I can't say. I suspect it is; doctored to cut out the boring bits of course, and perhaps teetering towards the moralistic just through the absolute worthlessness of most of the characters while walking the tightrope between championing their actions and damning them. So, a warning: there is a melancholy that suffuses the book, a sense of wasted opportunities that can become depressing, if that sort of stuff has that affect on you. One of the aspects I liked about the book most is the shadowy figure of the writer attempting to produce this book. He only appears in five or six chapters, providing a throughline for the disconnected story as he paces through a day of trying to write, feeling like he cannot, reverting to online porn and trying to stop smoking rather than actually sitting down to write. With this character, who is undeniably de Brito himself trying to write the novel you are now holding, he reveals that his is a writer's soul, and that is always something to champion. I may even have to review my opinion of coming-of-age novels. Got any recommendations?

The Wrap-up:

Australian themes - Don't know, can't say. I only had one childhood and this book often echoes it so there are definitely universal Australian themes here.

Australian characters - Some absolutely classic Aussie characters are impaled by this writer's pen.

Australian settings - Events occur around Sydney's Eastern suburb beaches but it could be any coastal populace - which includes most of us.

Australian voices - This is a very authentic Australian voice, unfettered by style or pomposity, and therefore immensely engaging.

Australian focus - Almost essential reading for anyone trying to understand the Australian male psyche, in the same vein as Luke Davies or Nick Earls or Andrew McGahan.

Max Barry/Syrup

I picked this up for a lightweight read after plowing (happily) through Philip Jones. Kimberley from my old work read and reviewed it a few years ago and she highly recommended it, but with the proviso that she doesn't really read any Australian fiction. This intrigued me as I didn't know anything about Max Barry, and also because Kimberley always has immaculate taste in books. But why not Australian?

It wasn't long before I understood how the book slipped through K's cultural cringe radar. Syrup is possibly the least 'Australian' book I've read this year, choosing instead to locate itself in California, and the cutthroat world of corporate marketing. Barry is a satirist, and chooses his victims well: superficial marketing execs, two-dimensional corporate wage slaves, money-hungry twenty-somethings, vacuous Hollywood stereotypes. It all revolves around the central character, Scat, and his belief that all of us have three million-dollar ideas per year. One of his is to invent a new type of cola, called FUKK, which he intends to market to Coca-Cola. He does this, and sets off a chain of events that allow him to exercise his great ideas in ever-increasingly farcical situations.

So, its a free-flowing and funky anti-establishment romp, with plenty of hip cultural references, an undercurrent of sex and fame, and a spattering of editorial-esque comments on the clandestine tools used by marketers, appearing in different fonts outside the text a la Douglas Coupland. And it was when this dawned on me that the experience started to sour. So much of Syrup has been said before, and better, by the cultural bowerbirds that preceded Max Barry - Bret Easton Ellis, William Gibson, and Coupland. I mention Gibson because Barry is remarkably prescient in some of the novel: written in 1999, it predicts the black Coke can of Coke Zero, the merging of advertising and media we see all around us nowadays, the propensity for celebrities to invent names to make them stand out from the crowd like Beyonce and Fifty Cent. But conversely the book almost feels like a dinosaur already - characters still use payphones and shoot film on 16mm stock - to the point where a member of Gen Y reading it could find some of the references quaint but not cool or clever like Barry tries to be.

This is no fault in itself - writers do not necessarily create for the generation that succeeds them - but it is a danger when the writer starts to riff on their own imagination and loses the reader. Even for a farce, the situations Scat and his partner 6 find themselves in are completely unbelievable, and Barry keeps ramping them up by placing even more unlikely obstacles in their path, and allowing his characters to overcome them, often through a brilliant 11th hour lightbulb moment. For some reason this seems to actually leech out the tension that he is trying to create - you start to expect the clever rebuttal or the cunning stunt - and this becomes boring. I read the book in just a couple of days; easy, because it lacks much in the way of description or analysis of the character's motivations and relies almost entirely on the plot and how it is played out. This smacks of an expected readership with a limited attention span, and this may be exactly who Barry wrote the book for. Funnily enough, his most recent project is a stream-of-consciousness style novel that he is writing then emailing to recipients one page at a time.

I don't know, maybe I'm just getting too old for clever, or just learning to prefer substance over style. I think Barry is a good writer, he can tell an engaging story and his jokes are pretty funny; but for the American market, where this book seems to be aimed, they already have Jonathan Franzen and David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk doing this really really well, while also saying some pretty important things. In this book, Max Barry reminds me a bit of Clive James, a writer I have never warmed to, who always seems to be the loudest person laughing at his own jokes.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - We are all guilty of materialism in the first world, Australians as much as any, but its interesting that Barry didn't choose to set his book here, maybe we just aren't shallow enough?
Australian characters - There is a vague reference to Scat being born in Australia but these are all ultra-American figures, instantly recognisable.
Australian settings - The book is set completely in Los Angeles.
Australian voices - Can a non-American skewer Americans better than a native? The only Australian voice is the author's.
Australian focus - In the world of these characters, nations are just facets of the global market, and nationhood is just another button to be pushed.

I guess that's all fine, but why?

Okay I admit I've probably been avoiding this post - the raison d'etre, the justification, the explanation post - why am I doing this? Or, more precisely, what am I doing this for? Or even more exactly, what am I hoping to learn or gain by blogging my year-long Australian reading saga?

I've been developing answers to this question over the past few months of reading, and I've come up with some. . . questions. Hopefully by the end of the reading year I'll be able to answer them for myself, and provide a suitable reason for all this. Not that its a chore: I've really liked almost everything so far, and it has fulfilled an earlier justification to give some form to my previously chaotic book-choosing method. But I'm now almost three months in, and reaching ten books, so here are some conclusive questions for me (and you, maybe) to consider. I may add to this list later as more questions arise.

In order of questions coming to mind:

1. Is there a distinct Australian writing "voice" that could be discerned even if you didn't know the nationality of the author?

2. Can we read as widely as we like, covering many literary forms and categories, while still staying within one geographical setting?

3. Do Australian writers pay credit to their birth or adopted country in their books? And should they?

4. Are Australian writers as "good" as their international counterparts?

5. What leads some readers to love Australian writers and read them avidly, and others to consciously avoid them?

Now, back to reading!

Philip Jones/Ochre and Rust

Written by a curator and historian from the South Australian Museum, this excellent book was the winner of the Non-fiction category in the 2008 Prime Minister's Literary Awards. Philip Jones obviously has a deep fascination for Aboriginal culture and history, and, married with his comprehensive knowledge of the Museum and its collection, is in a prime position to unearth some of the less well-known episodes in early Aboriginal-European contact.

He does this through the simple but powerful device of starting each of the nine chapters of the book with a photograph of one item from the Museum's collection, and using this item to provide a flashpoint for the historical events surrounding it. There are weapons and artefacts, of course, but also some unexpected items, like an early artistic work by Albert Namatjira and one of the dresses belonging to outback heroine/eccentric Daisy Bates. Jones chooses his items well to present his thesis that objects themselves can become historical examples of the grey area where one culture overlaps another. Each chapter is embellished with many more images of further items, documents, geographical settings, and most evocatively for me, contemporary photos of Aboriginal people peering hauntingly at the camera in some of our most remote locations. Much like the recent photo book First Australians, which accompanied the TV series of the same name, these photos are almost incredible records of that time when the photographers were stealing their subjects' souls while their countrymen were likewise stealing the very ground the people sat on.

Jones writes, however, with great restraint. For this is a scholarly work, despite the user-friendly images reproduced within the text and the helpful maps of the areas discussed, and he refrains from judgements of either side in these often bloody cultural struggles, saving his criticism for professional misconduct like the greed and insincerity of some of the Lutheran missionaries and the questionable map-making methods of some explorers. But while Jones always remains objective and thus humble I could not help but be impressed by his familiarity with so many disciplines. He jumps effortlessly from ethnography to historiography to anthropology to art history to lexicography to cartography and even to pyrography, the process of burning designs on wood or leather, in case you don't know what that is (I didn't). This makes for a fairly focussed reading effort, but as I said it is amply leavened with images and other prompts.

Not that the events he describes need a whole lot of "sexing-up". Every chapter reveals more and more obscure episodes from Australia's early settlement history; all of them fascinating if only for the extreme conditions faced by the Europeans, and the poignancy of what we know to have occurred as a result of European occupation of this country. Its hard to chose a favourite vignette, but the ochre-gathering expeditions that were once a staple annual event for the peoples of the Central desert and eventually warded then killed off by selfish white landowners came close for me. This chapter opens with a photo of a luminous, almost other-worldly lozenge of ochre collected around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, and it is that powerful image that keeps intruding on my thoughts, of how dust from a rock can be such a potent symbol of one civilisation's long decline and another's usurpation. The word Jones keeps coming back to is syncretism - the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles or practices - and the elephant in the room is that it has been always the earlier, less aggressive culture that has had to give way. Like a one-man museum himself, with Ochre and Rust Philip Jones successfully saves some of these items, people, and episodes from oblivion.

The wrap-up:
Australian themes - Covers some of the most important Australian themes - our connection to country, our shared history, our stained future.
Australian characters - Features unforgettable but largely forgotten Australian characters like the doomed Cubadgee, linguist John Bennett, and first curator of the South Australian Museum Edward Stirling.
Australian settings - Here you will find language group maps, photographs, and extensive cultural backgrounds of vast areas of Australia often passed over in popular Australian colonial history writing: the Central Desert, Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.
Australian voices - Always fascinating, Jones reproduces many letters, scientific articles and journal entries to enhance his book with the weight of primary sources.
Australian focus - It is refreshing to read something so unapologetically focussed on the Australian experience, giving equal importance to the contributions of the colonisers and the first Australians.