By Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Little Clothes
Deborah Callaghan, Viking, $34.99
Brilliant lawyer Audrey Mendes is pushing 40, but she has never made partner. Audrey gets constantly bulldozed and taken for granted by her extroverted colleagues at work, and her home life is lonely, eccentric. She spends nights in with her pet rabbit, between casual relationships, seeing her ageing parents, and inexplicably, buying baby clothes despite never having had a child. One evening, Audrey gets ignored at the bottle shop and nicks off with a bottle of vino. That theft is just the beginning of a rebellion that will allow a key childhood memory – one that has cast a long shadow over Audrey’s life – to resurface.
Former publisher and literary agent Deborah Callaghan has written a novel with features of Sad Girl fiction, but it isn’t remotely performative or infatuated with its own woe. Instead, it’s wise and darkly funny, with a convincingly lopsided protagonist whose story is full of acute observations on the psychological effects of trauma.
Mrs Gulliver
Valerie Martin, Serpent’s Tail, $32.99
It’s 1954 on the fictional tropical island of Verona. Brothel madam Lila Gulliver runs a classier type of establishment and tries to look after her girls. She takes a chance on 19-year-old Carita, stunningly pretty and blind from birth. When the son of a judge falls wildly in love with Carita on their first encounter, however, the stakes are high for everyone.
A tale of power, intrigue, corruption and murder unfolds, as the possibility of romance meets Carita’s hard-headed realisation (gleaned from her fellow, Marx-quoting sex workers) that swapping her profession for a marriage marked by radical power imbalance would be to trade one form of sexual bondage for another.
Valerie Martin might not write the most stylish or vivid prose, but the plot rollicks along, the battle lines with patriarchy are sharply drawn, and conflicts are resolved in an echo of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Psykhe
Kate Forsyth, Vintage, $34.99
Adapting the ancient myth of Psyche and Eros, Kate Forsyth’s latest novel strives to recentre the legend, emphasising Psykhe’s agency and her relationships with other women. As in the myth, Psykhe is a beautiful mortal woman who falls foul of the love goddess, while falling in love with her son (in this telling, Cupid becomes a Caravaggio-like hottie called Ambrose). After disobeying a divine injunction that she must never look upon her lover’s face, Psykhe is put through impossible trials mirroring the labours of Hercules – including visiting the Queen of the Underworld. Forsyth elaborates Psykhe’s friction with her elder sisters, and introduces a wise mentor, Nokturna, who teaches her charge the arts of healing and herbalism. Yet the heroine isn’t allowed much darkness – this version of Psykhe seems far too nice, and the complexity of the myth feels diminished by a well-intentioned feel-good vibe.
Mrs Hopkins
Shirley Barrett, Allen & Unwin, $32.99
Author Shirley Barrett died in 2022, leaving the unpublished manuscript for Mrs Hopkins, a haunting novel that looks back on a grim episode from Australian history. Idealistic schoolmistress Mrs Hopkins arrives on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, in 1871. She is due to take up a new post teaching at the Biloela Industrial School for Girls. The institution is quietly notorious – waifs and orphans and abandoned or neglected children – but nothing could have prepared her for the exploitation and abuse inside. Mrs Hopkins has good intentions, though they’re complicated by her own self-interest and experience of losing a child. They often backfire, and if the road to hell she paves for some of her charges can seem unrelentingly bleak, it’s also true to the historical record. This sobering novel will make you reflect on the dark history of juvenile detention and state institutional care of children, which remain plagued by problems today.
NON-FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
Personal Politics
Leigh Boucher, Barbara Baird, Michelle Arrow, Robert Reynolds, Monash University Publishing, $36.99
When 1970s activists (especially second-wave feminists) came up with the catch-cry “the personal is political”, they were rejecting the traditional liberal notion that the pivotal political individual was a male, argue these four academics, while women were tied to being mothers and consigned to the non-political “privacy of the home”.
It was the beginning of a groundswell movement concerned primarily with gender and sexuality that seriously rocked the ship of state (notably in abortion law reform and the legalising of homosexuality). In this ambitious, big-picture survey of our evolving culture, the authors examine the ways it has subsequently played out, especially regarding citizenship. There are lapses into academic-speak, but there is a strong sense of the tumult of the past 50 years and the anger that fuelled it.
Underestimated
Chelsey Goodan, Scribe, $35
At the beginning of this detailed study of the inner lives of teenage girls – put together over many years and countless interviews with a wide variety of subjects – Chelsey Goodan says that inside all of them is a suppressed scream waiting to be unleashed, something like a teenage version of Munch’s The Scream.
It’s partly self-help manual for parents, but also what Goodan calls “a gutsy dive” into the lives of teenage girls, seeing the world from their point of view and hearing the concerns they rarely speak about because they either can’t see the point or see anyone to tell them to.
It embraces such themes as the pressure to be “perfect”, authenticity, sexuality, pleasure and the impulse to please everybody. Goodan has a rousing, polemic style, and she makes some rather large claims about her own book, but it’s informative and timely.
Culture Is Not An Industry
Justin O’Connor, Manchester University Press, $34.99
In the early 1980s, Tom Stoppard said that opera was not a hamburger stall and shouldn’t be treated like one. That didn’t stop 40 years of neoliberal politicians doing just that.
In this academic, but often witty examination of the phenomenon of “creative industries”, Justin O’Connor argues that art and culture are intrinsic to being human, both creating it and in coming to understand how we want to live.
In some ways, he’s recovering the anarchic spirit of art, with its capacity to disrupt and challenge. Above all, he’s arguing that culture has never been an industry, the value of which economists can calculate in terms of jobs created and wealth generated. All of which de-politicised art. Rather, we have to see that we need art and culture like we need welfare and health, and they should be considered alongside them.
Narcoball
David Arrowsmith, Cassell, $34.99
In 1989, when billionaire Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar was on the run from the Colombian police, he and his henchman (“Popeye”) were hiding in a ditch. Escobar, who had his ear to a transistor radio, suddenly called out to Popeye. With a grin, Escobar told him that Colombia had just scored a goal.
This wryly written, sometimes grimly comic study goes into Escobar’s passion for money and power (he ran successfully for national parliament) and his murderous ways – he blew up a plane, killing 107 passengers, just to kill a political rival - who wasn’t on the plane.
But the emphasis is on his passion for football, its attendant corruption (referees were routinely “offered” bribes or death) and money laundering. All the same, when police killed him, thousands mourned. If you think you’re passionate about your footy, think again.
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