Hepburn stars in Todd Alexander’s novel; Dodge Rose a wild ride

These two novels have little in common beyond their Australian origin, yet both can be adjudged as successes.

The life of actress Katharine Hepburn serves as a plot device in Todd Alexander’s Tom Houghton.

How often does a book insist upon a reader its made-ness, the miracle of its wrought-from-nothingness? We regularly honour writers for their insights, compelling characters, the tautness of their plots, and as an afterthought throw appreciative nods to a beautiful prose style or original voice. These two novels have little in common beyond their Australian origin, yet both are successes under means of assessment so radically different and almost mutually hostile that it reminds us, once again, that the novel can contain anything and everything.

Both — like all books — are made of language. Only one of them seems intrigued and haunted by this phenomenon.

Tom Houghton is, by most criteria, a deeply conventional novel. It’s both a coming-of-age and midlife crisis narrative, toggling between the two modes on a chapter-by-chapter basis. The elements of young Tom’s life are familiar: lonely child, missing dad, frequently absent mother, nascent sexuality. What’s new, and what drives much of the plot, is cinephilia. In particular, that pre-digital fandom well-known (and missed) by anyone growing up in the 80s, the era of the VHS cassette and handwritten index card.

Happiest lost in Sunday matinees of Hollywood classics, Tom discovers one night, while reading a biography of Katharine Hepburn, his double, his doppelganger-in-name-only: Hepburn’s older brother, and a suicide at 16. Haunted by this connection, he imagines himself into the life of the famous family, a life richer and more vivid than his humble suburban existence.

In Tom, Todd Alexander has created a protagonist who evokes genuine readerly fondness. Though his adolescent longing is somewhat stock, the fragility and passion with which he sustains his private universe is rendered with feeling and skill. Alexander is careful to not play to our easiest sympathies, though, and whatever attachment is cultivated in one half of the book is skilfully undone in the contemporary half, as the tender and lost young man reveals himself, again and again, as a maudlin, needy drunk, prone to extravagant bouts of self-sabotage. There is a corrective measure here that cancels easy conclusions: the trials of youth do not always provide strength or resolve, and instead haunt people deep into adult life. There is a grim inevitability to Tom’s adolescent travails that is nonetheless moving when the expected arrives.

Alexander’s prose is clear and functional, rarely rising to memorability yet serving its characters and scenario well. The book’s weakness is often the dialogue, particularly in the contemporary setting, which frequently strains for bitchy and knowing, yet often lands tin-eared and strained. Still, these are cavils. For the most part, the novel finds fresh mileage and moving conclusions from well-trod material.

In contrast, Dodge Rose, the debut novel of Sydney writer Jack Cox, is a wild, untamed work, one of the most ambitious, unusual and difficult first novels in recent Australian literary history. That it is published by the US-based Dalkey Archive Press — better known for its intimidating list of contemporary European writing and modernist and postmodernist reprints — is telling.

Its plot is simple on the surface. The novel’s first half, set in 1982, details the arrival in Sydney of Eliza, who has travelled from Yass to finalise the estate of her deceased aunt, the titular Dodge. Eliza and her cousin Max, who is still living in Dodge’s house, meet lawyers, assessors and collectors.

In the novel’s second half, presented in a wholly uncapitalised and often fragmented fashion, we are presented with the life of the departed Dodge, from birth to — well, if not death, some grand dismantling of consciousness. If this all sounds like a bunch of spoilers, rest assured: it’s just not that kind of book.

Language is the game, the medium. Cox is regularly capable of glorious, burnished phrasing. An old phone rings with “cankered traces of its preterite neglect”, while an empty hallway glows with the “coloured rhombs of a leadlight portal”. The prose, while able to easily operate in a more conversational and plainly descriptive mode, frequently shifts into flights of high rhetoric, or as quickly drops into a vertiginous stream of consciousness. It’s easy to lose one’s way at times, or make sense of every line.

The book delights in various modes of the antique. The first half is near-contemporary, yet its vocabulary is frequently arcane (versicles, orphinon, periplus, tergiversation), while its second half is an even stranger affair. It’s a now unforgivable cliche to say the past is another country, but here is a novel that lives up to the geographical claim. Unlike much historical fiction, solidly researched then made comprehensible to a modern reader, this book instead presents a thrilling but often baffling mixture of faded names and references, overheard, half-remembered and, at times, deliberately misspelled or mistranscribed.

There’s no denying the difficulty here, and never more so than in two extended passages — one in each half of the book, and each running to 15 pages — involving legal and financial wranglings, and written in a merciless blitzkrieg of obscure jargon. Cox doesn’t just lightly sprinkle his prose with appropriate terminology for a pleasing Grishamesque verisimilitude, but goes all in with a cranky mania that will delight the ghost of Ezra Pound, if no one else. There is satire and knowing assault at play, but it’s all too tempting to quote Eliza’s first response to this onslaught: “Please what are you talking about.” But also, perhaps, just as wise to also quote the words of the rambling lawyer responsible for one of the monologues: “I exaggerate these incoherencies.”

Dodge Rose is a book in thrall to language, to evocation and rhetoric. The “exaggerated incoherencies” are frequently Cox’s roundabout attempt at addressing a tainted colonial legacy, or a young woman’s torrid life, or the casual cruelty of money, in language that seeks to expunge cliche and familiarity and return words instead to a state of fundamental strangeness. As an unnamed figure — Eliza? Max? The author? — puts it at one point, seemingly out of nowhere: “Now that was a sentence that didn’t make sense.”

If this all sounds tiresomely po-mo and knowing in a review, it plays quite differently on the page. There is no cosy winking at the reader — we are up against it, fighting our way into the text. Yet for all the ghosts of modernism haunting the book — portions of untranslated Latin and French, Joycean echoes, a love of lists — this is an unmistakably Australian book. There is something of the piss-take about its playfulness: half-friendly to hostile, seeking no approval. That such game-playing sits side by side with such erudition only adds to the allure, and a sense, to this reader, that after two readings there is still fruit to shake free from its recalcitrant branches.

Adam Rivett is a Melbourne-based writer.

Tom Houghton: A Novel

By Todd Alexander

Simon and Schuster, 315pp, $32.99

Dodge Rose: A Novel

By Jack Cox

Dalkey Archive Press, 165pp, $US15