From Hollywood scandals to transhuman futures: 10 new books to read
From Hollywood’s notorious Chateau and transhuman futures in fiction to Franco’s Spain and the Gallipoli trenches in non-fiction, this week’s picks span the high-stakes and the highly personal.
Fiction
Python’s Kiss
Louise Erdrich, Corsair, $35
Louise Erdrich’s accolades include a Pulitzer and a National Book Award – for The Night Watchman (2020) and The Round House (2012), respectively. Python’s Kiss collects her short fiction. If you’re a regular reader of The New Yorker you might have seen some of these, including the title story, but they’re worth revisiting. The memorable tale of a ferocious guard dog named Nero in Python’s Kiss opposes untameable wildness and incarceration and doubles as a chiselled lesson in life and death. Hardscrabble Midwestern lives pervade some of these tales, though the anthology runs to Venetian vampires and some rather spectral speculative fiction set in a transhuman future. Such flights of fancy are less impressive than the grounded imagination Erdrich displays when the speculative yields to the tangible, and her mastery is at its height when she invokes the vanishing of the natural world with an unvarnished directness, or tells tales that deliver the grind, and the unexpected solidarity, of working-class experience. It’s an essential collection from a celebrated contemporary American writer and each story is accompanied by a beguiling cartoon from Erdrich’s daughter, artist Aza Erdrich Abe.
The Chateau on Sunset
Natasha Lester, Hachette, $35
The storied Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard is one of Hollywood’s most famous hotels. Its history blends notoriety and fame, from the overdose death of actor John Belushi in 1982 to the annual Oscars after-party thrown at the venue by Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the present day. It’d be a weird place to grow up, and for teenager Aria Jones, that just what happens when she’s tragically orphaned and sent to live with her reclusive, pill-popping starlet aunt. Aria will be haunted by Hollywood secrets, guided by friendships with wannabes and washed-up stars, and as a young woman she will be drawn into the orbit of rock star Theo Winchester, who buys the hotel. The Chateau on Sunset is, in some ways, a retro-Hollywood retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – a celebrity-tinged coming-of-age novel with literary echoes. Our heroine’s path to agency strains valiantly against the damage wrought by the dream factory, though it’s true the Hollywood scene from the 1950s to the ’70s was chronicled with more oomph by writers – such as Eve Babitz – who lived through it.
The Old Fire
Elisa Shua Dusapin, Scribe, $28
Translation is the crux of this slightly gothic philosophical novel from French-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin (The Pachinko Parlour), so it’s fitting that the recent English translation by Aneesa Abbas Higgins achieves an enigmatic, parable-like force. On her father’s death, Agathe returns from New York to the French countryside and a sister, Vera, she hasn’t seen in 15 years. The pair must contend with a dilapidated childhood home. Memories surface as they clear out the property, but there’s a rupture in their shared history – Vera hasn’t spoken since she was six and communicates only via phone texts and, of course, body language. That challenges Agathe, who discovers unanticipated constraint in her own obsession with words, and becomes frustrated by the mystery of Vera’s mutism, and the freedom her sister seems to find in it. It’s a strange and melancholy novel, powered by a tense yet tender sibling connection, and certain paradoxes of language and silence.
To the Moon and Back
Eliana Ramage, Doubleday, $35
It’s 1987, and Hannah flees her abusive husband with daughters Kayla and Steph in tow. She lands in a small Cherokee community, and Steph – only five at the novel’s opening – begins to dream of becoming an astronaut. Most such dreams come to ground before adulthood, but Steph is dogged in pursuing her ambition, from backyard games played as a kid to living on a “hab” – a remote station training astronauts for the rigours of spaceflight. Eliana Ramage’s To the Moon and Back follows Steph’s romantic and sexual awakening as she discovers she’s a lesbian, her relationship with her sister Kayla, a likeable Cherokee influencer, and her own relentless drive to reach the stars. The author excels at tragicomic set-pieces and explores with wry compassion various intersections and contradictions of identity and desire her characters experience. Spanning decades before circling back to the trauma Steph lived through as a girl, the novel blends Bildungsroman, romance and Indigenous resilience, with a few flourishes of magical realism for good measure.
Slip
Abbey Lay, Penguin, $35
Young linguist Grace travels from Melbourne to Sicily on a research trip to study Italian dialects. Her barrister husband Jack is to join her six weeks later, after his first major trial. Booking a room in an apartment owned by a local writer, Nico, Grace soon immerses herself in Sicilian life and language. Intimacy blossoms just as Jack is scheduled to arrive, and the “will they, won’t they” tension is accentuated when the allure and passion of her attraction to Nico is contrasted with the familiar and unsatisfying contours of her relationship with Jack. Despite straying at times into hackneyed prose, this slender novel pulls you into the ambivalence of its central love triangle. Grace’s internal conflict turns into a subtle examination of the psychology of tourism, language and desire, and what eventually happens plot-wise is, mercifully, free from cliché.
Non-fiction
El Generalísimo Franco
Giles Tremlett, Bloomsbury, $59.99
After leading a military coup that deposed a democratically elected government, Francisco Franco – part of that age of dictators that bears an eerie resemblance to contemporary politics – ruled Spain with an iron fist for 36 years, overseeing famine, the incarceration of political opponents (many of whom were never seen again) and the execution of thousands. Yet, even today, some Spaniards look back nostalgically on this murdering dictator. Giles Tremlett, a Spanish history expert, sets the record straight in this authoritative, epic study. What fascinates Tremlett is the disjunction between Franco’s “uncharismatic presence … often tediously dull” that led many to completely misjudge him and the “cold and ruthless” general. That and the stated aim of, more or less, making Spain great again by turning against the Enlightenment values that had previously prevailed – “numbing … Spaniards into a state of passivity” over years of indoctrination. But he’s also aware of the complexities of the tale in this deeply informed, quite masterly work.
You With the Sad Eyes
Christina Applegate, Headline, $34.99
US actor Christina Applegate may have risen to prominence as part of the TV sitcom Married With … Children, but, as is so often the case, there is a dark, sad side to the clown. She has, she says, been playing the role of Christina Applegate for most of her life. Now, in her early 50s and stricken with debilitating multiple sclerosis, it’s time to dismantle the image. Using diary entries and poetry she has written over the years, she tells it how it really was: a father who shot through when she was a baby, a violent drug addict stepfather, sexual abuse at the age of five, a long, dysfunctional, violent relationship, and an abortion. And, all the time, acting on TV and film – the gap between the role-play and reality all too painfully obvious. The bright lights in her life were her musician mother (who dated Stephen Stills), her daughter and long-time friends. And although the eponymous “sad eyes” make sense, somewhere in the brutal honesty of this self-portrait, there’s also a buoyant spirit attuned to the wonders of life.
How to Find Flow
Dr Cameron Norsworthy, Blink, $36.99
There is a moment in Hemingway’s remembrance of 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast, when he is in a cafe looking at the people around him while writing about Michigan. At some point he disappears into Michigan and when he looks up again the clientele has completely changed. In today’s terminology, Hemingway had entered the “flow”. Norsworthy first became aware of it when playing international tennis, lost it when chronic injury forced him to retire at 17, then regained it a few years later via a busker in Peru. Most people, he tells us, are dissatisfied with themselves, and the point of this guide to finding “flow” is to enrich the everyday experience of living. It may be in sport (he is a professional coach), work or the arts. One of his conclusions (taken from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) is that people are enriched by the process of creating, not the end result. An artist, for example, derives the greatest satisfaction from the doing, be it writing a book or painting a picture. The task is to transpose this into everyday life. To this end he provides three steps (Ready, Steady, Flow) in the quest for this elusive state of being. As with most such books, there’s an element of the coach addressing the team, but it’s also measured writing.
Migrants, Television and Australian Stories
Kate Darian-Smith, Sue Turnbull, Sukhmani Khorana and Kyle Harvey, Routledge, $88.99
In 1947, 1.9 per cent of the population came from a non-English-speaking country – by 2023, the figure exceeded 30 per cent. As the authors of this highly informed, engaging academic study point out, television has been a constant throughout that massive demographic shift, and in what amounts to a kind of cultural symbiosis, has both mirrored that change and failed to. Using oral histories, archival material and interviews with actors, writers and technicians, they explore how migrants watched TV, how they changed it (from the racial stereotypes of early TV sitcoms to the Netflix reboot of Heartbreak High) and made it more authentic, representing a diverse country. They have an eye for the quirky too – as in the enduring Kosovo TV Repair shop in Fitzroy North founded by a Yugoslav in 1956 and emblematic of the migrant presence behind the scenes. An intriguing keyhole view from postwar Australia to the present day, this is first-rate cultural history for students and teachers alike.
Sailor, Soldier, Vicar, Farmer
Daniel Reynaud, Signs Publishing, $34.99
As the title indicates, Chaplain Walter Dexter (1873-1950) was a man of parts. Born near Liverpool, UK, he went to sea at 14 and spent his early years on ships (even deserting one, but rising to be Master), before joining up to fight in the Boer War. On returning home, he married; his first wife dying of shock after a stillbirth. At about this time, his adventuring life took a religious turn. Dexter eventually fetched up in Australia to become a senior chaplain to Anzacs at Gallipoli and in France, earning the nickname the “pinching padre” for his foraging abilities. This is a portrait of a colourful character, often misunderstood even by members of his own family, that Reynaud argues has been ignored by history. This meticulous and lively biography is an act of retrieval.
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