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FICTION
Swimming: A Novel
By Enza Gandolfo
Vanark, 330pp, $29.95
The Paperbark Shoe
By Goldie Goldbloom
Fremantle Press, 288pp, $32.95
88 Lines about 44 Women
By Steven Lang
Penguin Viking, 266pp, $32.95
Smoke in the Room
By Emily Maguire
Picador, 282pp, $29.99
ON the first page of Smoke in the Room, we're told that "blind love was one thing, being seen and loved another". It's the kind of upfront insight about intimacy and implied shame that characterises Emily Maguire's writing, in this novel as well as in Taming the Beast (2004) and her nonfiction work Princesses and Pornstars (2008). Coupled with a moment two pages later when Katie, a rental blacklisted 23-year-old, grabs the arse of her new flatmate, Adam, within minutes of meeting him, it signals the author's intention to expose the characters' skin from the outset.
Not that there isn't plenty left to expose. The Mormon-like Adam has turned up with minimal baggage, but his glum surrender to Katie's insistence on sex in a park quickly suggests he's carrying other loads. "An undamaged person would not be so easily dragged down," notes Katie, within the wry narration that typically implies as much about the beholder as it does of the beheld.
The two flatmates are joined by a third, Graeme, a senior aid worker whose habit of appearing perennially self-possessed seems to attract and disgust everyone within arm's length. "On his good days he thought his colleagues saw him as too busy for socialising, too preoccupied with saving the world to make small talk. On his bad days he thought they saw him for what he was."
This coming together is the choreography of Katie's grandmother, anxious to see her bipolar granddaughter flanked by apparently safe men. The tenants sweat out an oppressive Sydney summer, rubbing up against one another's self-harmed, tattooed or strangely cold skin, desperate for whatever intimacy may stave off opportunities to face themselves with compassion. Katie is a vaguely repugnant distraction for Adam in the wake of his dead marriage: "[He] kissed her on the forehead so she wouldn't know how ugly he found her. She sighed and a sickly familiar sense of protectiveness surged through him." Insomniac conversations with Graeme offer Katie respite from daytime alcohol and from...