Tegan Bennett Daylight explores young adulthood in Six Bedrooms

Here’s a book to look out for in coming weeks: Six Bedrooms, a short story collection by Tegan Bennett Daylight.

Tegan Bennett Daylight’s short story collection Six Bedrooms is published in July.

Here’s a book to look out for in coming weeks: Six Bedrooms, a short story collection by Blue Mountains-based writer Tegan Bennett Daylight.

Regular readers will recognise Tegan’s name from reviews and essays she has written for these pages, which of course means her new book is a matter of some anxiety. I mean for me — I like the author and hope the book does well — but no doubt it’s even more nerve-racking for her. Well, Six Bedrooms (Vintage, 215pp, $29.99) will be reviewed here when it comes out next month, but my apprehension vanished when I opened its pages last weekend. This collection of 10 stories, several of them linked by an enigmatic central character named Tasha, is an assured, absorbing exploration of young adulthood, tricky terrain indeed. (Tasha has an even more enigmatic older brother, who I am now keen to see in a story of his own, like JD Salinger’s Seymour Glass.)

Daylight, the author of three novels, acutely navigates those cripplingly self-conscious early steps into the adult world. If there’s a line that sums up this experience — but typically also puts it in a slightly different, more forgiving light — it comes in the story Trouble, when the young narrator, living unhappily in London with her older sister, thinks, “I understood, too, that ... awkwardness and trouble would always follow me, because awkwardness and trouble are part of being alive’’. Daylight writes beautifully about the external world, especially the air and light and heat of Sydney, the setting for most of the stories. I admire how she withholds details and information, such as in Chemotherapy Bay, where the relationship between a cancer patient and a woman who visits him is unclear, and somehow more moving for that. This withholding nurtures unexpected twists in some of the tales, such as the stark, confronting conclusion to Other Animals. The relationships between young adults and their parents (and other adults) are mercilessly drawn, and often funny. (“Dad switched off the wireless.” “That bastard.’’) And the final story, Together Alone, in which the narrator has a young son, opens with a beautiful meditation on parenthood. When the boy asks his mum a funny question, she thinks: “I will miss this exchange when he is older. I’ve been a mother long enough to know this. But it doesn’t stop me from letting streams of gold run through my fingers, day upon day.’’ After reading that, I closed the book, went inside, turned off the WiFi and gathered up some gold.

The American novelist, poet and critic Ben Lerner has a fascinating piece in the June 18 London Review of Books on the “failure’’ of poetry. It’s an attempt, he explains, “to account for a persistent if mutable feeling that our moment’s poems are bad, that we hate them or at least strongly dislike them, and that it’s their f..king fault’’. It’s not an anti-poetry piece, though it does explore anti-poetry feelings, including from poets. It’s well worth reading if you can track it down. While on poetry, Perth-based writer Richard King reminds me that this month marks 100 years since the publication of TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, from which this column borrows its name. Happy 100th to that attendant lord, “full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse’’.

Quotes of the week: “So barbaric that this should still be allowed … No conservation laws in effect wherever this is?” Joyce Carol Oates, on Twitter, commenting on a photo of Steven Spielberg striking a hunter’s pose next to a “dead” triceratops to promote the film Jurassic World. Writer Joanna Rothkopf responded: “There are only three possibilities … 1. Oates was making a joke (5 per cent chance) 2. Oates didn’t click on the photo and thought it was a picture of a slaughtered elephant (80 per cent chance) 3. Oates thinks a triceratops was murdered (15 per cent chance).”