Life flares in suburban void

SYDNEY'S greater western suburbs are home to a little less than 10 per cent of Australia's population but in terms of Ozlit it barely registers.

SOME fun facts: Sydney's greater western suburbs are home to a little less than 10 per cent of Australia's population - larger than South Australia, for example, or the Northern Territory, ACT and Tasmania combined. It is also the youngest and most culturally diverse part of the country (one in three residents is under the age of 24, while the suburb of Auburn alone boasts 100 nationalities) as well as being home to Australia's largest urban indigenous populations.

And it is expanding still. By 2036, the region is set to grow by one-third again. It will then number almost three million souls.

In terms of Ozlit, however, it barely registers.

Imagine London without writing that touches on the East End and its offshore arrivals, from Huguenot weavers to Bangladeshi restaurateurs; or New York narratives that leave out Brooklyn, where successive waves of European, African, Russian and Caribbean migrants have come to make up half that borough's massed humanity.

The absence of writing from and about the western suburbs is a gap in our national experience so large, so inexplicable, that Luke Carman's debut An Elegant Young Man arrives as a special kind of shock. It is as though a Madagascar-sized island suddenly materialised off Sydney Heads.

Carman is a native of Mount Pritchard, a suburb formerly known as Mount Misery, obscurely wedged between Cabramatta, Liverpool and Bonnyrigg. An Elegant Young Man, published under the estimable Giramondo Shorts imprint, gathers together several quasi-autobiographical narratives that relate, in alternately vivid, doleful, comically surreal and painfully stark terms, what it is to grow from innocence to experience among Sydney's invisible majority.

Though, to be fair, there really isn't a great deal of innocence to begin with. Here is the opening of In Granville, an account of the child narrator's time staying with his father and stepmother:

For a while Clyde Street went to war with itself. Houses were firebombed, and a charcoal chicken too. It didn't make the news, or if it did, I didn't see it. I stayed at my dad's every second weekend and he took me to see the burnt-out carcasses of houses and cars gutted and smoking in the daylight, a thin line of blue and white tape hanging around the ashen remains that seemed so obscene between green even lawns and tidy fibro homes set in tight rows.

The cause of such discord is transparent to the narrator's father: " 'Typical bloody Muslims!' Dad said when we were back at the house, and he crouched down to peer out the living room window at two skinny brown kids in singlets walking past the front yard."

Our young narrator, who shares a name and what appears to be a deal of backstory with the author, lays out many of his wares in these lines: a sense of menace, of embattlement shading into paranoia, as well as isolation from the official currents of Australian life; droll humour ("a charcoal chicken too") that seamlessly slides into late afternoon elegiacs; and an acknowledgment of casual racism, decoupled from middle-class judgment, that is complicated by the ambiguous ancestry of the narrator's family (the author intentionally obscures his background).

Olive-skinned, hard-drinking, obsessed by the achievements of Greek civilisation, the father here bears all the outward markers of southern European ancestry - yet Carman is often an English surname, old as the Norman conquest.

As we trace the narrator's passage from childhood to maturity - years spent in balkanised schools, moving through suburbs, from Liverpool to Cronulla, where racial origins are ineluctable determinants of tribal affiliation - this withholding starts to make sense. Carman wants us to see his fictional creation, not as a wog, Lebbo, fob, Serb or any other facile cluster of cultural identifiers, but as a bogan flaneur: part connoisseur, part anthropologist of the rich and fractious field of difference through which he moves. The narrator is a local, yet he lives at a watchful remove from people and place.

What distinguishes and estranges the narrator is books. He's a reader, avid, omnivorous, of the American beats and Australian modernists, of Melville and Whitman, Tolstoy and Homer, and the battle of his progress emerges from the difficulty of applying such distant voices to his experience in a way that is neither absurd nor a form of class betrayal.

In this he follows a similar figure (and evidently a personal icon), Henry Rollins, former frontman of legendary hardcore band Black Flag who went on to become one of America's best-loved monologists. His spoken-word pieces fuse rhetorical sophistication with punk's rawness: Nietzsche with a black T-shirt and a mess of tattoos.

Carman is also a monologist - these pieces leap about instead of lounging on the page - and a canny manipulator of tone and register. Whenever his narrator threatens to get too high on the words of, say, Jack Kerouac, and feels the siren call of that author's visionary bombast, the narrator makes sure to inject an Aussie note of self-mockery into the mix. Sitting on a train headed to the south coast to confront a girl who dropped out and joined a commune after he sold her on the author of On the Road, the narrator inwardly rages:

... Kerouac was wrong ... you really can fall off a mountain, you can fall and fall again ... His idea of God is a sad paradise of nonsense ... and Australia is not the place for ecstatic truth.

The narrator has a point: as a people we are wary of the grandiose. Nevertheless, Carman's brand of ironic, essayistic, freewheeling fictionalised life-writing flirts with flamboyance and sometimes loses its head. But at their best, these pieces bring a vast suburban emptiness to brilliant life. For all the violence and poverty, ignorance and despair Carman records, there is life in the west; and loveliness also, if you are willing to take a longer look.

An Elegant Young Man

By Luke Carman

Giramondo, 186pp, $19.95

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.