lynnenad's review
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Short stories. Some lovely language and quintessentially Australian but not much punch.
annieg's review
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.75
The description of the ocean and coastal living was vivid and made me living down in the city homesick but the stories were a bit nothing - felt like there was always supposed to be some deeper meaning that I was missing? But would read again to feel some tropical heat again
klb72's review
3.0
A pretty depressing collection of short stories, my favourite being The water person and the tree person which illustrated the slick ugly side of pretentious literature types (fitting as reading for book club). It was great to read generally aus characters in an aus setting; some stories had fun humorous moments eg pink flip flops on blokey guy, but overall the cast of broken relationships made this a less than enjoyable read for me.
larrys's review
2.0
Overall impression:
If these stories were as femme focalised as they are 'blokey' then the collection would be deemed chick-lit, not serious Australian literature. This applies not only to the work of Robert Drewe, and is an issue I have across the board. I don't think this is the work of someone at his heights, and I don't think anyone without a marketable name would've gotten this published.
Who are we paying attention to, folks? Moreover, whose voices are we *missing*, because books like this are taking up valuable space in the review columns etc.? After reading this collection thinking it'd be better, I really need to double down on my mission to read more diverse voices. Drewe knows how to craft a short story. But so do a lot of people, frankly.
"The Lap Pool" is a strong story about a disgraced man who ends up killed by nature. It's strong because the story world connects so well to the character but it is also a story in which a non-sympathetic character ends up punished by nature, suggesting some sort of logic to the universe. In general I'm not a fan of those sorts of stories because they don't line up with how I view the world. I'm more of an Annie Proulx fatalist, I think. In other ways, "The Lap Pool" is basically an Australian Wyoming story.
"The Obituary of Gina Lavelle" didn't resonate with me at all. It feels like a music video committed to paper -- imagine a woman on a treadmill. Behind her, the gym fades away, replaced by different scenes from her life. I'm yet to be convinced that Robert Drewe can write women as authentically as he can write middle aged white men. Clare Wolfe is a bit of a female stereotype who reads the newspaper end to end, but 'not sport, finance or the classifieds' and is focused on her appearance. I'd have preferred a story about the snake woman from "The Lap Pool", but we only saw her through the male gaze. I might enjoy "The Obituary of Gina Lavelle" if I understand what the hell it's about, but I don't. I looked, but I can't eke more than a montage of random images out of it myself. All I get is a woman trying to exercise herself away from her own impending death. (Could that be it?)
"Sea Level" was written before the Fukushima disaster and this story of a boy who is not collected by anyone despite tsunami warnings made me think of the Japanese school kids and teachers who would've been saved had the teacher in charge heeded warnings to move to higher ground. Check out Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry, or some of the interviews he did when releasing the book. It's harrowing. Robert Drewe's is a simple story which isn't about a tsunami really -- it's about the moment a child realises his parents don't care for him as much as other parents care for their kids, though it's written with the adults (teachers) as focalisation characters.
"The Water and the Tree Person" is a portrait of a middle-aged marriage from the point of view of a melancholic ad-man husband. He spends most of the story complaining about his wife. This is a reflection of his own insecurities -- he feels his tastes are too low-brow for her and her friends. (She's a literary critic.) He in turn criticises these book reviewers for idolising the bush when they've clearly (in his mind) been nowhere near real trees themselves. He himself prefers the water. Drewe might be saying something about the literary pretensions of Australian reviewers, I'm not sure. I don't know enough about that. Anyway, the wife buys him a kayak, which rejuvenates their relationship because it's finally a recognition that his love of the water is valid. He kayaks to this island, meaning to wave to his wife, who's meant to be watching him the whole way, and watching his journey from their verandah. But when he looks back and waves she is not there. In fact, the story ends like one of those supernatural tales in which a character looks back and solipsistically realises everyone else in the story was a ghost. In this case I guess the guy realises the kayak was the gift of freedom, and also of further emotional isolation. Rather than coming together as he'd thought, they are drifting further apart.
I enjoyed "The Whale Watchers". There's a surface similarity to John Cheever's "Reunion", also about a father and son who visit a cafe and the father gets shitty with the staff. But this son is fully grown so the relationship is different. This time, father and son are sexual competitors, as perceived by the father. He is grappling with his own advanced age, his younger, more handsome son, and his new, much younger wife. All of this runs under the surface, in a simple plot about a family outing to see some whales. Are the whales symbolic in some way? Perhaps whales are important because most of what's going on in this story is happening under the surface, in the same way whales remain under the surface, until the very end of course, when the father has an epiphany: That his new, vacuous wife is more interested in his tall, dark-haired son than in him. Go back to the opening sentence and you realise this marks the end of the father and son relationship. We don't know for sure if this is because the father dies or because he has terminated their relationship.
New Zealand poet Urusla Bethell wrote about stones once, and how they look beautiful under water but as soon as you take them home they dull and deaden. "Stones Like Hearts" opens with the same observation, which is clearly going to be some kind of metaphor. In this story, a mother and daughter visit the beach where the mother's philandering husband proposed. Unsubtly, the daughter is busy looking for rocks shaped like stones. (The mother's heart has turned to stone, get it? Get it?) But while the mother is thinking where best to hiff the wedding ring where it will lie in the depths forever, a group of beachgoers huddle around a dead man's body. Later, over a Happy Meal at McDonalds, the mother realises she's still got her ring on and she is 'rolling it back and forth, back and forth, seeking it with an urgency that surprised her'. Is this an ambiguous final sentence, or not? Taking the whole story into account, it reads to me like the mother has imagined her own husband dead and reconsidered leaving him so dramatically just because he's had a little ole affair. Yeah, okay. Again, I don't think Robert Drewe really knows how to get into the heads of women when in a peculiarly female situation. So actually he hasn't even really tried. The focalisation remains distant, and for that very reason the story remains highly ambiguous. If we aren't let inside the mother's head, we don't really have much meat in the story. Nothing to see here, folks.
In "The Aquarium At Night" we have yet another story which rests upon the premise of a man objectifying a woman and basing his actions around that. In this case a prisoner sort of falls in love with a Black woman teacher while he serves time in prison. By the end he realises prison isn't such a bad place if he can moon over the teacher and decides to plead guilty. Meanwhile, an aquarium is a clear metaphor for the prison environment.
"Masculine Shoes" is a character study of an unpleasant movie guy from America, too short to conform to male beauty standards, so he buys very expensive cowboy boots to make himself two inches taller. But then he comes to Australia and must wear sneakers because he's shooting near the beach. These get taken from him and he is emasculated shamefully when forced to buy the only pair of footwear available -- pink thongs. The object of his sexual interest surprises him by suddenly becoming interested in him, mistaking him for someone who takes himself -- and masculinity -- less seriously than he does. It's unclear why a pair of pink thongs would be enough to turn a young, good-looking woman around when the old guy himself is so unattractive, but we can deduce it's because he's a powerful influence in Hollywood. The young, objectified woman is thereby positioned as a sexual opportunist.
The main character of "The Cartoonist" is much younger than the others in this collection -- a high schooler who has recently moved from the city to a new coastal, surfy kind of school where his main objective is to avoid showing his peers his notoriously ridiculous 'concentrating face'. This kid also likes drawing cartoons. At the end of fitting in unobtrusively at his new school he returns home and hears grunting coming from inside. He thinks of his poor father back in the city. I assume his mother is having sex with someone new. We never find out, though. Siding with the teenager, we are encouraged to find the act disgusting and unforgivable.
"Prometheus and Greg" sounds like it could be based on real characters. The narrator notices an old guy in at a bar and launches into the backstory of Alf and his sons, two of whom the narrator went to school with. The sons are Cain and Abel types. One ends up in prison and the old man is now ruined, partly by his own sons, partly taken advantage of by the (very) young women who have 'suckered' these men in, taking them for all they've got. The final part of the story shifts to a party full of successful hippie-types, with Alan Alf's second, brainy son, who has changed his name to Prometheus. He is still on the receiving end of childish bullying. I wonder what kind of symbolism Drewe is hoping we'll take from Prometheus. Prometheus is kind of a womanly figure because he seemed to have a desire to create life, much as someone with a womb is able to do. Prometheus is basically the wish fulfilment fantasy for men to create life in the visceral way women get to create life. Is this why the bullies are trying to turn him into a woman? I don't know. The parts of this story don't quite connect up for me.
"How To Kill A Cane Toad" is black comedy with cane toads as the main victims, though also people murdered in the outback, in a gleefully hyperbolic view of the Australian Outback as a deadly place. (Australians who cling to the coast love this narrative.) Another middle-aged man is in another unhappy marriage with an emotionally distant wife. (We get insight into his take on things but not hers.) This is becoming a pattern. It's almost as if the dominant culture expects women to be emotionally giving the entire time and when women are not that way all the time, the husbands just can't work out what's happened! I see no story reason for Dan's wife's emotional distance. This story is a weird blend of comedy and plain old low affect family stuff.
"The Rip" doesn't feel like the standout story in the collection, so I guess it's been chosen for the title of the book because of its metaphorical meaning. Each of the stories could be said to contain some kind of 'rip'. In this story a father-daughter combo juxtapose against a husband-wife combo. The father reassures his daughter "nothing happened!" when in fact the five-year-old just witnessed something traumatic. The aftermath of a shark attack and a husband and wife having a relationship-destroying argument.
"The Life Alignment of the Coffee Grower" is the closest we get to a 'twist' ending. A storyteller narrator tells us about a conservative farmer with no time for woo-woo. HIs wife has left him for a hippie guy. Ironically, the farmer falls for a hippie woman, into feng shui. They are all brought together through the common goal of saving the landscape for koalas as council plan a motorway through his property. I think this story says something very true about human nature. People who voted liberal are very recently saying (in the wake of massive bush fires) that they're not voting liberal again. (I wonder how many of them will vote Green.)
If these stories were as femme focalised as they are 'blokey' then the collection would be deemed chick-lit, not serious Australian literature. This applies not only to the work of Robert Drewe, and is an issue I have across the board. I don't think this is the work of someone at his heights, and I don't think anyone without a marketable name would've gotten this published.
Who are we paying attention to, folks? Moreover, whose voices are we *missing*, because books like this are taking up valuable space in the review columns etc.? After reading this collection thinking it'd be better, I really need to double down on my mission to read more diverse voices. Drewe knows how to craft a short story. But so do a lot of people, frankly.
"The Lap Pool" is a strong story about a disgraced man who ends up killed by nature. It's strong because the story world connects so well to the character but it is also a story in which a non-sympathetic character ends up punished by nature, suggesting some sort of logic to the universe. In general I'm not a fan of those sorts of stories because they don't line up with how I view the world. I'm more of an Annie Proulx fatalist, I think. In other ways, "The Lap Pool" is basically an Australian Wyoming story.
"The Obituary of Gina Lavelle" didn't resonate with me at all. It feels like a music video committed to paper -- imagine a woman on a treadmill. Behind her, the gym fades away, replaced by different scenes from her life. I'm yet to be convinced that Robert Drewe can write women as authentically as he can write middle aged white men. Clare Wolfe is a bit of a female stereotype who reads the newspaper end to end, but 'not sport, finance or the classifieds' and is focused on her appearance. I'd have preferred a story about the snake woman from "The Lap Pool", but we only saw her through the male gaze. I might enjoy "The Obituary of Gina Lavelle" if I understand what the hell it's about, but I don't. I looked, but I can't eke more than a montage of random images out of it myself. All I get is a woman trying to exercise herself away from her own impending death. (Could that be it?)
"Sea Level" was written before the Fukushima disaster and this story of a boy who is not collected by anyone despite tsunami warnings made me think of the Japanese school kids and teachers who would've been saved had the teacher in charge heeded warnings to move to higher ground. Check out Ghosts of the Tsunami by Richard Lloyd Parry, or some of the interviews he did when releasing the book. It's harrowing. Robert Drewe's is a simple story which isn't about a tsunami really -- it's about the moment a child realises his parents don't care for him as much as other parents care for their kids, though it's written with the adults (teachers) as focalisation characters.
"The Water and the Tree Person" is a portrait of a middle-aged marriage from the point of view of a melancholic ad-man husband. He spends most of the story complaining about his wife. This is a reflection of his own insecurities -- he feels his tastes are too low-brow for her and her friends. (She's a literary critic.) He in turn criticises these book reviewers for idolising the bush when they've clearly (in his mind) been nowhere near real trees themselves. He himself prefers the water. Drewe might be saying something about the literary pretensions of Australian reviewers, I'm not sure. I don't know enough about that. Anyway, the wife buys him a kayak, which rejuvenates their relationship because it's finally a recognition that his love of the water is valid. He kayaks to this island, meaning to wave to his wife, who's meant to be watching him the whole way, and watching his journey from their verandah. But when he looks back and waves she is not there. In fact, the story ends like one of those supernatural tales in which a character looks back and solipsistically realises everyone else in the story was a ghost. In this case I guess the guy realises the kayak was the gift of freedom, and also of further emotional isolation. Rather than coming together as he'd thought, they are drifting further apart.
I enjoyed "The Whale Watchers". There's a surface similarity to John Cheever's "Reunion", also about a father and son who visit a cafe and the father gets shitty with the staff. But this son is fully grown so the relationship is different. This time, father and son are sexual competitors, as perceived by the father. He is grappling with his own advanced age, his younger, more handsome son, and his new, much younger wife. All of this runs under the surface, in a simple plot about a family outing to see some whales. Are the whales symbolic in some way? Perhaps whales are important because most of what's going on in this story is happening under the surface, in the same way whales remain under the surface, until the very end of course, when the father has an epiphany: That his new, vacuous wife is more interested in his tall, dark-haired son than in him. Go back to the opening sentence and you realise this marks the end of the father and son relationship. We don't know for sure if this is because the father dies or because he has terminated their relationship.
New Zealand poet Urusla Bethell wrote about stones once, and how they look beautiful under water but as soon as you take them home they dull and deaden. "Stones Like Hearts" opens with the same observation, which is clearly going to be some kind of metaphor. In this story, a mother and daughter visit the beach where the mother's philandering husband proposed. Unsubtly, the daughter is busy looking for rocks shaped like stones. (The mother's heart has turned to stone, get it? Get it?) But while the mother is thinking where best to hiff the wedding ring where it will lie in the depths forever, a group of beachgoers huddle around a dead man's body. Later, over a Happy Meal at McDonalds, the mother realises she's still got her ring on and she is 'rolling it back and forth, back and forth, seeking it with an urgency that surprised her'. Is this an ambiguous final sentence, or not? Taking the whole story into account, it reads to me like the mother has imagined her own husband dead and reconsidered leaving him so dramatically just because he's had a little ole affair. Yeah, okay. Again, I don't think Robert Drewe really knows how to get into the heads of women when in a peculiarly female situation. So actually he hasn't even really tried. The focalisation remains distant, and for that very reason the story remains highly ambiguous. If we aren't let inside the mother's head, we don't really have much meat in the story. Nothing to see here, folks.
In "The Aquarium At Night" we have yet another story which rests upon the premise of a man objectifying a woman and basing his actions around that. In this case a prisoner sort of falls in love with a Black woman teacher while he serves time in prison. By the end he realises prison isn't such a bad place if he can moon over the teacher and decides to plead guilty. Meanwhile, an aquarium is a clear metaphor for the prison environment.
"Masculine Shoes" is a character study of an unpleasant movie guy from America, too short to conform to male beauty standards, so he buys very expensive cowboy boots to make himself two inches taller. But then he comes to Australia and must wear sneakers because he's shooting near the beach. These get taken from him and he is emasculated shamefully when forced to buy the only pair of footwear available -- pink thongs. The object of his sexual interest surprises him by suddenly becoming interested in him, mistaking him for someone who takes himself -- and masculinity -- less seriously than he does. It's unclear why a pair of pink thongs would be enough to turn a young, good-looking woman around when the old guy himself is so unattractive, but we can deduce it's because he's a powerful influence in Hollywood. The young, objectified woman is thereby positioned as a sexual opportunist.
The main character of "The Cartoonist" is much younger than the others in this collection -- a high schooler who has recently moved from the city to a new coastal, surfy kind of school where his main objective is to avoid showing his peers his notoriously ridiculous 'concentrating face'. This kid also likes drawing cartoons. At the end of fitting in unobtrusively at his new school he returns home and hears grunting coming from inside. He thinks of his poor father back in the city. I assume his mother is having sex with someone new. We never find out, though. Siding with the teenager, we are encouraged to find the act disgusting and unforgivable.
"Prometheus and Greg" sounds like it could be based on real characters. The narrator notices an old guy in at a bar and launches into the backstory of Alf and his sons, two of whom the narrator went to school with. The sons are Cain and Abel types. One ends up in prison and the old man is now ruined, partly by his own sons, partly taken advantage of by the (very) young women who have 'suckered' these men in, taking them for all they've got. The final part of the story shifts to a party full of successful hippie-types, with Alan Alf's second, brainy son, who has changed his name to Prometheus. He is still on the receiving end of childish bullying. I wonder what kind of symbolism Drewe is hoping we'll take from Prometheus. Prometheus is kind of a womanly figure because he seemed to have a desire to create life, much as someone with a womb is able to do. Prometheus is basically the wish fulfilment fantasy for men to create life in the visceral way women get to create life. Is this why the bullies are trying to turn him into a woman? I don't know. The parts of this story don't quite connect up for me.
"How To Kill A Cane Toad" is black comedy with cane toads as the main victims, though also people murdered in the outback, in a gleefully hyperbolic view of the Australian Outback as a deadly place. (Australians who cling to the coast love this narrative.) Another middle-aged man is in another unhappy marriage with an emotionally distant wife. (We get insight into his take on things but not hers.) This is becoming a pattern. It's almost as if the dominant culture expects women to be emotionally giving the entire time and when women are not that way all the time, the husbands just can't work out what's happened! I see no story reason for Dan's wife's emotional distance. This story is a weird blend of comedy and plain old low affect family stuff.
"The Rip" doesn't feel like the standout story in the collection, so I guess it's been chosen for the title of the book because of its metaphorical meaning. Each of the stories could be said to contain some kind of 'rip'. In this story a father-daughter combo juxtapose against a husband-wife combo. The father reassures his daughter "nothing happened!" when in fact the five-year-old just witnessed something traumatic. The aftermath of a shark attack and a husband and wife having a relationship-destroying argument.
"The Life Alignment of the Coffee Grower" is the closest we get to a 'twist' ending. A storyteller narrator tells us about a conservative farmer with no time for woo-woo. HIs wife has left him for a hippie guy. Ironically, the farmer falls for a hippie woman, into feng shui. They are all brought together through the common goal of saving the landscape for koalas as council plan a motorway through his property. I think this story says something very true about human nature. People who voted liberal are very recently saying (in the wake of massive bush fires) that they're not voting liberal again. (I wonder how many of them will vote Green.)
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