By Jack Cameron Stanton
FICTION
Somebody Down There Likes Me
Robert Lukins
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, a character is arrested for an unrevealed crime. He begs the authorities for information but is passed along the chain of bureaucracy and command, with every individual deferring explanation onto the next. According to official record, Kafka never finished The Trial, which is a suitable fate for an absurdist novel about an excessively complex and vague system.
The plot in Kafka’s novel does not abide by the grand edict of cause and effect that defines so much fiction. This eventful but circular or inertial style of storytelling takes a risk, however. It withholds or defers plot development. In narrative fiction, this is a risky game. But in Somebody Down There Likes Me, Australian writer Robert Lukins is ready to play.
This novel, Lukins’ third, occurs over a week in 1996 when the crimes of the wealthy American Gulch family are uncovered. In what follows, the four family members scheme against one another to save themselves as they await the collapse of their business empire. When the week elapses, the authorities will come knocking on their tall, expensive door.
The storytelling is distributed among the family. There is Honey, the Machiavellian matriarch who runs business and family with equal ruthlessness; her husband Fax, a cultural aristocrat who spends his days contemplating life’s meaning while getting stoned poolside; and their adult children, the narcissistic yuppie Lincoln and their wayward daughter Kick, who scorns her privilege.
Lukins’ third novel is centred on the unspecified crimes of an ultra-wealthy American family.Credit: Eve Wilson
Each of these characters are variations on a theme; they are self-aware composites. Lincoln, for example, is a master in search of a universe. As a ’90s yuppie, Lincoln is a stock character anxious about his cliché status. He notes the similarities between his life and television - “I’m a cliché, of course” . . . “this was a movie script and not a good one” . . . “my rawest desires as television episodes.” Similarly, Honey reflects on her transactions with a corrupt FBI special agent by comparing it to “something from television. The man with a dictaphone from Twin Peaks. The mopey pair from The X-Files.”
By recognising themselves as cliché, the characters signal that the novel we’re reading may not be as familiar as it appears on the surface.
In a telling passage, Honey reflects on her business ethos and concludes that “the thing, the simple and colossal thing, is that the specifics do not matter”. Money goes in, more money comes out. We’re never provided details about their business empire. Is it oil? A media conglomerate? Construction? Honey is “at the steering wheel of a business with $65 billion in assets and management”. That’s all we know. Likewise the crimes, naturally connected to the work, are never revealed.
By averting the specifics, the novel inhabits rather than critiques wealth and privilege. Since the story is told from within the family, perhaps the details do not matter to them – even though I can’t take Honey’s point, given that the details are imminently destroying her life. And because Lukins has committed to the detail-free narration, it also results in several passages in which characters speak about “the coming cataclysm” in euphemisms: “the dealer is laying down the final cards and Ma and Pa went all-in long before I joined the table”.
As a critic, I suspect Lukins is likely withholding specifics to displace expectation and open different narrative terrain. This is not a streaming-era melodrama about an empire laid to waste. But as a reader, I craved those details. Character, as much as plot, is revealed in the specifics. I did not need exhilarating and implausible occurrence, one after another. But I wanted to determine for myself whether the Gulch family deserved their reckoning. I wanted to see how despicable they were.
And when the novel claims that “the family deserved justice”, I didn’t know whether it was true. I just had to take their word for it.
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