Penguin

‘Look, here I am, I’m sixteen and I’m hundreds of miles from home! I want adventure! I want excitement! I want to boldly go where no Noble has gone before. Look at me! Look! Look!’ In Leonie Stevens’s Eat Well and Stay Out of Jail, Vicky Noble has left Melbourne to escape the tedium of a shelf-stacking job at the supermarket and the torment of a publicly failed romance. Vicky wants more than just to run away from her life. She craves a brand new one, preferably on the Jack Kerouac model.

Andrea Goldsmith’s second novel, Modern Interiors, is about a family, and marked out by its goodies and baddies. This is a moral novel about capitalism and the choices open to people within its system. Goldsmith uses outrageous caricatures to represent the baddies – those seduced and corrupted by the family’s damned money. And all of the goodies have an interest in and strenuously pursue the higher knowledges – poetry and fiction, philosophy and philanthropy. They are all good, and fair-minded people, if sometimes with too much sweetness and light.

Marion Halligan’s new novel has as its centrepiece, shiny and assertive, flagged by its title, a dress made with loving care but, nonetheless, improvised just so that the fabric will go far enough. A dress that Molly Pellerin wears to a party at the laundry where she works, an event that becomes a defining moment in her life, the dress a legacy, offering an image of Molly as dazzling, beautiful, and loved. The photograph sustains her memory, potently, permanently.

Popular fiction is often character-driven. An immediate distinction between these heavily-populated novels would be that if I met the main protagonist of Scott’s book I’d want to have coffee with him whereas if I met Aitken’s I’d want to slap him.

Still fondly remembered as one of the Doug Anthony Allstars, although most recently known for biding his time in the depths of Channel Nine between those twin peaks of high culture, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and Little Aussie Battlers, Tim Ferguson has obviously not been idle, instead indulging in everyone’s favourite pastime – Canberra-watching. Inspired (or possibly horrified, if Left, Right and Centre is anything to go by) by what he has seen, Ferguson has created a monster – Luther Langbene.

The funny ways we have of writing about sex and how rarely it really works. The memory of how it feels, what is involved, what it means. How strenuously we, as writers and as people who have done it and then talk or write about it, try to capture the movement and intensities we remember. And how ludicrously it so often comes out at that second division, once removed from the flesh and heat.

It is a truism that poets don’t need to write their autobiography. Roland Barthes, with his ‘death of the author’, may have thought otherwise but in Barbara Giles’ new book, Poems: Seven Ages, published in her eighty-seventh year, there is no mistaking the autobiographical core.

Though neither the title nor the blurb suggests it, Poems: Seven Ages is really a ‘selected’. Giles has gone back over her four earlier books, chosen what she (or perhaps her editor, Judith Rodriguez) thinks are the best poems and arranged them in chronological order according to subject, rather than date of composition or publication. Thus we have sections corresponding with her childhood in England, her earlier married life, her mid-life preoccupations, and the poems on women’s ageing from which she has been most anthologised.

‘Gordon Jacobs …’ Glass’s voice echoed around the columns of City Hall’s marble foyer as they climbed the stairs to Tuesday Reed’s office. He was as bitter, as irascible and stirred as she had ever seen him. ‘Was your Al, teflon-hearted scumbag.’

Incorporating photographs, diagrams, idiosyncratic typography, and even a list of references, Chris Gregory’s Twins is a media kit as much as a short story collection. It beings with a kind of parable about reading:

This attractive collection of short pieces – mostly fiction – reminded me of the old music-hall adage: start with a bang and leave the best acts till the end. Robert Drewe’s selection certainly begins with a bang. John Updike’s ‘The City’ is the story of a man who arrives in a unnamed city, and sees no more of it than an anonymous hotel room and the hospital where he has his appendix removed. By the end of this cunningly crafted fable, we realise that the city’s fascination for Carson, the central character, is directly related to its being unknown, unseen and as much a cipher (and perhaps a menace too) as it was when he arrived, decidedly queasy from the airline’s freeze-dried peanuts – or so he thought at the time.