Millennial satire, historical fiction and Eldritch horrors are among this week’s fiction reviews, while non-fiction books include guide to sleep and parenting, and a study of why we love the footy. Our critics deliver their verdicts on 10 new releases so you know whether they’re books to buy, borrow or skip.
Fiction
The Shampoo EffectJenny JacksonHutchinson Heinemann, $35
In her latest novel, Pineapple Street author Jenny Jackson hooks a quirky contemporary romcom to an astute portrayal of a friendship group in midlife. Caroline Lash is heading to Greenhead, Massachusetts by train start to a writer’s residency, when she steps on a jam doughnut that sprays red slime all over her crotch. Luckily, a hot guy with a napkin helps her out. The offbeat meet-cute gets a reprise when she runs into him again and explains that their initial encounter was a doughnut accident rather a menstruation mishap. Caroline soon falls for Van Whittaker. She’s introduced to his social circle of lifelong friends, thirty-somethings parenting young kids while managing dysfunction and debaucheries of various kinds. (The group has a kidult quality, and Jackson keenly observes the last fumes of youthful recklessness wafting into disillusionment.) The central romance has deepened into cohabitation when Van’s former girlfriend turns up pregnant. Complications ensue, bleeding into a Millennial satire, written in the spirit of John Updike, that’s full of juicy melodrama, with a goodly dollop of sex and scandal.
The Calamity ClubKathryn StockettFig Tree, $35
Seventeen years after her bestselling debut The Help, Kathryn Stockett returns to her native Mississippi with another historical novel that’s bursting at the seams with incident. It’s set in the Depression era and at first resembles a Deep South version of the musical Annie. Plucky 11-year-old Meg refuses to believe she’s been abandoned by her mother. Her nemesis is the horrible head of the orphanage, Chairlady Garnett, who regards older children as unadoptable and makes their lives a misery. When unwed bookkeeper Birdie Calhoun is hired to audit the institution’s accounts, Meg befriends her and a Dickensian plot unfolds. Will Meg be adopted despite Garnett’s machinations? What did happen to Meg’s mother, and if she yet lives, what will happen if she ever comes searching for her child? At a sprawling 600+ pages, The Calamity Club is a sizeable novel, yet the plot is intricate, with twists and revelations galore. Fans of The Help might be especially pleased by this lively and engaging historical fiction.
I Hear A New WorldAlan MooreBloomsbury Archer, $35
The five-part Long London fantasy series from Alan Moore plans to set one novel in each of the five decades of the second half of the 20th century. It began with The Great When and continues with I Hear A New World (a title borrowed from an electronic concept album, released by Joe Meek and the Blue Men in 1960, which creates a sonic simulation of life on the moon). Moore is a legend in the comics scene, having written V for Vendetta among other things, and this series is just as ambitious and subversive. Its central conceit is the existence of Long London within The Great When – a monstrous alternate metropolis, full of surreal and horrifying dangers. Young Dennis Knuckleyard first stumbles into the strange dimension while trying to obtain occult and esoteric books for his boss, Ada. This time, it’s 1958. Dennis isn’t keen to tangle with Long London again, but he has little choice when the key between worlds falls into ignorant hands. Eldritch horrors start to contaminate London, and the investigation was always going to get weird, quickly. Fans of Arthur Machen, H.P Lovecraft and Michael Moorcock might enjoy Moore’s grandiloquent prose and out-there imagination the most.
The FollowersMarie SprattAllen & Unwin, $35
Lifestyle influencer Lacey spruiks self-esteem and body confidence to her legions of followers. Most of them lap it up, but not Teresa, who went to school with her in Brisbane in the 2000s and remembers Lacey very differently – a mean girl who kept her friendship circle, including Teresa, on a tight leash. The Followers promises to reveal the duplicity of social media, and it does, though it’s mostly a coming-of-age novel in which Teresa revisits their childhood. I would have liked more storyline about the women these girls became. The portrayal of girlhood is fascinating, though, containing an unusually honest and complex exploration of feminine forms of violence: bullying, social manipulation, crushing peer pressure and ostracism in the face of a desperate need to belong. High school habits and hierarchies aren’t so easily abandoned in adulthood, and Spratt digs into how social media can amplify them. The Followers might give anyone flashbacks to awful truths they’ve repressed about adolescence and should give those who were young in the 2000s a decent nostalgia hit.
LandMaggie O’FarrellTinder Press, $35
British-Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell helped turn her 2020 novel Hamnet into the much-acclaimed recent film. Land is written with another movie adaptation in mind, sadly at the expense of its quality as literary fiction. It’s an episodic epic with roots in the devastation of the Irish famine. In rural Ireland in 1865, surveyor Tomás and son Liam are mapping the countryside for the English. Every piece of lore and legend, every empty house and overstuffed graveyard, he will record for posterity. When Tomás stumbles upon an ancient well in a wooded copse, he is totally changed – charged with prophecy or madness or some trick of the fey – and he refuses to help the English again. Bizarre episodes of magical realism mixed with Celtic folklore emerge, fablelike, as the family saga unfolds across multiple generations and three continents. There’s a cultural explanation for the looseness of the plotting and the lack of depth in the dialogue (O’Farrell invokes the idea of a seanchaí – a traditional Irish storyteller and lorekeeper.) Even so, it’s the kind of book that makes you want to tell people to wait for the movie.
Non-fiction
AudenPeter AckroydReaktion Books, $40
From an early age, W.H. Auden – well-known in undergraduate years for strewing cigarette ash everywhere when talking or gulping down food – seems to have been a bag of contradictions: ingratiating but with eyes that seemed to be laughing at you, casual in conversation about his poetry but utterly dedicated to it, sententiously confident in argument, full of bravado, but not so self-confident as appeared – especially sexually. Ackroyd, in his usual thorough way, explores the many sides of the figure some regard as the most significant 20th-century poet after T.S. Eliot. There’s a lot of anecdote and detail about Auden’s family and the over-shadowing figure of his mother, his emerging homosexuality at school (interestingly though, he lost his virginity to a German woman), his intimate and creative friendships with the likes of Christopher Isherwood, his flirtation with Marxism in the 1930s, which ended with the famously problematic line “Poetry makes nothing happen”, and his religious side. But it’s his devotion to his poetry and the writing life that emerges as the unifying, informing factor, in what, by anyone’s standards, was an intensely concentrated life.
Why We Love FootyMartin BlakeAllen & Unwin, $35
Real “footy” – AFL/AFLW – is one of Australia’s greatest cultural innovations, and this collection of 50 legendary moments is an entertainingly astute homage to the game. Blake, a veteran football writer and former Age journalist, was (to borrow from Bruce Dawe) swaddled in the club colours (St Kilda), played a high level of footy and writes as both observer and player about the many distinguishing aspects of the game: the artistic grace of the “specky”, the “gladiatorial brutality”, the speed and the intense tribalism of its supporters. Blake covers such iconic moments as Jezza’s mark in Carlton’s comeback in the 1970 grand final, Mark Yeates’ calculated shirtfront of Dermott Brereton in the ’89 granny, the near perfection of Essendon’s 2000 premiership team (statistically the greatest team ever, led by one of the greatest ever, James Hird), and the long over-due introduction of AFLW on a balmy Carlton evening, when 24,000 fans turned out. With the finals in sight, this is perfectly timed footy reading.
The Parenting ParadoxDr Jenny BrownBloomsbury, $45
“How could this happen to Jessica? We’ve thrown so much love at her” This question, from a baffled mother, is one of the key case studies from this examination of modern parenting. In this case, “Jessica” was a teenager from a happy family who took an overdose and wound up in hospital, leaving her parents bewildered and totally at a loss. At the core of Brown’s study (she’s had four decades of experience in child and family health), is what she calls the “parenting paradox” … that truly loving our children means not loving or focusing on them too much”. Apart from knowing when to step back, it also involves the idea of parental self-awareness, which becomes crucial in the unfolding tale of Rachel, Sam and Jessica, part of the idea being that when we are “able to grow ourselves … [we] create the conditions for our children to grow”. A sophisticated, sometimes challenging guide through the complexities of being a parent.
That Was Close!Philip BlakeAffirm, $37
This story of life in the fast lane starts at 140km/h when Philip Blake (a long-time competition driver who has won the Targa Tasmania) and his son “left the road” and bounced sideways through the Tasmanian scrub at high speed. From there, this combination of memoir and motor racing anecdotage goes back to his childhood in the seaside town of Portrush in Northern Ireland during the Troubles – the connecting themes being speed, fear and near misses. His relationship with speed and exhilaration began when he was a baby in a pram being looked after by his brothers, who decided it would be a great lark to take him to the top of a hill overlooking the port and launch the pram downhill, baby still in, brothers clinging to the sides. Whether its rallies or devilish childhood pranks, there’s no shortage of seriously close shaves described here, but always with an ironic, comic edge, as the author walks away from near disaster telling himself, “That was close.”
Sleep FirstDr Jemma KingWiley, $36.95
According to one survey, about 68 per cent of adults report that they don’t get enough sleep, and on average, we’re getting one to two hours’ less sleep than adults 50 to 100 years ago. King, a behavioural scientist, says in this guide to getting better shut-eye that we tend to regard sleep as an afterthought. The fact is, it’s pivotal to wellbeing and determining how we function during the day. When we sleep cells are repaired, the brain detoxes and the immune system strengthens, for starters. Not to mention the creative benefits, as Paul McCartney composed Yesterday in his sleep. King provides practical advice on a range of sleep issues (as well as looking at the phenomenon of sleep itself), from the benefits of the Mediterranean diet to an assessment of sleep aids such as melatonin, why we wake at 3am and the benefits of sleep duration as apart from the timing of a sleep, among others.
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