‘The North is a growing, pulsating sore on the map of my city, the part of the city in which I, my family, my friends, are meant to buy a house, grow a garden, shop, watch TV and be buried in. The North is where the wog is supposed to end up. And therefore I hate the North…’

– Christos Tsiolkas, Loaded.

I have a memory I cannot trust. After a party in Brunswick some time in the late 1980s, I tried to walk back to town, half-drunk and on unfamiliar ground. It took a while for me to realise I was going the wrong way; then I turned and walked back down the hill until the city’s towers came into view and the sun was rising. The memory of that walk is all mixed up with Ari, in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded, walking home at dawn from innumerable nights with a Walkman drowning out ‘the sound of trams, cars, the familiar voices of shop owners, the familiar landscape in which I have spent all my life’.

There are other places I’ve been: a grubby share house in North Fitzroy with old seagrass matting on the floor and a back gate that scrapes against the concrete paving; a fancy parliamentary chamber with decorative plasterwork and gilt finishes; a town that is ‘a flat place, divided up into a grid of streets by a draughtsman’.But they’re not my places. They belong to Helen Garner, Shane Maloney, Peter Carey. They’re Melbourne, translated into fiction.

The curve of the Yarra between Swan Street and Princes Bridge, the ‘electric blue water’ of the Fitzroy Pool or the way the bells of Melbourne’s trams sit in the background of the soundscape: when I come across these things in fiction, my reaction is not jealousy that others also have them, but pleasure that they’ve been noticed, a kind of vicarious pride that I recognise from motherhood: look at my town. Isn’t she gorgeous?

Frank Hardy, Nevil Shute, Martin Boyd, Christos Tsiolkas and Michelle de Kretser have set novels here. Cate Kennedy’s short stories, Henry Handel Richardson’s threepart The Fortunes of Richard Mahony and C.J. Dennis’s proto-ocker A Sentimental Bloke all take a piece of their life from Melbourne.

It makes me wonder: why do we need to write about the city, when it’s all around us? Then I realise I might as well ask: why do we need to write about life?

When the writer’s subject is their own town, the result is often dismissed as thinly disguised autobiography – not proper fiction. The world around us is supposed to be somehow easier to wrestle onto the page. Fiction that imagines a completely different place, a different era, is admired, much as an actor who undergoes a dramatic physical transformation is Oscar material.

And yet they say: ‘Write what you know.’ And let’s be honest, it can be a lot of fun to read what you know. If evocative writing is the art of revealing to the reader what they had only dimly felt, evocative writing about Melbourne reveals what makes the city feel like ours. It does more than even the best guidebook, dispensing with exact truths in favour of capturing the zeitgeist.

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In ‘Up North’, the fourth story in The Dead Fish Museum, a man whose wife is having a string of affairs says, ‘Our marriage was like a constant halving of the distance, without ever arriving at the moment in time where, utterly familiar, I’d vanish’. In the collection’s final story, ‘The Bone Game’, a man comes across a crystal clear stream, but the fish, which the native Americans believe are their ancestors, are ‘thin and weak and mutilated, their flesh ripped and trailing from their bodies like rags’. Charles D’Ambrosio’s second short story collection is full of these inexorable equations: lives diminishing without fully disappearing.

One way of coming to terms with the diminishing returns is to accept that life is a pretty low-stakes deal. Tony, the narrator of ‘Blessing’, describes heavy misfortunes as ‘gyps’. He’s an insurance broker, so he knows all about hedging bets: ‘You expect a normal life, but wager against it.’ Boons aren’t of much consequence either; Tony’s wife, Meagan, an actress for whom parts are proving elusive, says, ‘I love you … At least there’s that’. In ‘The Scheme of Things’, Lance and Kirsten live off small amounts of money – ten bucks a pop – that they procure by posing as charity workers.

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Picador $32.99 178pp
ISBN 978-0-330-51709-6

‘I’m freaked out by you kids,’ says Greenberg, in Noah Baumbach’s film of the same name. A paranoid forty-year-old could-have-been rockstar, Greenberg, confronted with a room full of confident Gen Y-ers concludes: ‘I hope I die before I end up meeting one of you in a job interview.’ Life seems to hand all its best opportunities to the young, and getting old is an alienating experience. Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel contains a strain of the same fear: ‘my eyes wander over to the boys barely old enough to drive swimming in the heated pool, girls in string bikinis and high heels lounging by the Jacuzzi, anime sculptures everywhere, a mosaic of youth, a place you don’t really belong anymore’.

This is Clay, the anti-hero of Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero, now returned in Imperial Bedrooms, older (though not necessarily wiser) to relive the past in the present. In the earlier narrative Clay was preoccupied by his own isolation, his resentment at having to enter the meaninglessness of adulthood, and somewhere out there was a billboard beckoning him: ‘DISAPPEAR HERE’. Now, narcissistic alienation has been replaced by paranoia and anxiety and Imperial Bedrooms offers the middle-aged Clay a mysterious text message that reminds him regularly, ‘I’m watching you.’

The now much-quoted opening line of Imperial Bedrooms – ‘They had made a movie about us’ – serves to remind us just how much being watched counts as a form of social value. This time around, despite a promising start, Clay fails to hold an audience. Perhaps the problem is that this Clay is, as he says, ‘the Real Clay,’ rather than the fabricated version documented in Less Than Zero; created by ‘someone we knew’ who had used real life as fodder for a novel. Real Clay is now a screenwriter living in New York, returning to Los Angeles to supervise the casting of a film. It’s a convenient opportunity to catch up with old frenemies (Julian, Blair, Rip) and have the past catch up with him via those mysterious messages (‘Who is this?’).

Much of the pleasure of this new novel comes early in the book, before Clay completely submits to the oblivion his paranoia seems to demand. Imperial Bedrooms has some fun replaying the structure of Less Than Zero, but it’s a habit, like mini cupcakes or popcorn chicken, that though instantly delightful is only momentarily satisfying. Afterwards, you feel a little queasy about both the book and your own prurient interest in it (‘Who is this?’). In a recent interview, even Ellis admitted that the story is only temporarily engaging. Maybe that explains why the best elements of this work are themselves fragments: ‘young girls walk by in a trance holding yoga mats’. Ellis’s ability to capture dead-on the rhythm of banal conversation is also strangely comforting: ‘”I’ve noticed that writers tend to worry about things like that.” “About what?” She gets into the car. “Things like that.”’

Having published Less Than Zero when he was 21, it’s fair to surmise that Ellis knows a thing or two about precocious youth. Imperial Bedrooms might even be read as a riff on Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: Ellis’s art at first preserving and then exposing the corrupted souls he has created; his characters from the ‘80s held in place by plastic surgery and yet still so badly aged; Clay, now older, thinner, preying on over-confident but insecure Hollywood youth. The problem is that it’s hard to sustain interest the second time around. Revisiting Less than Zero seems like a fun thought experiment but the emptiness that characterised Clay’s original Christmas break in LA is now the centrepiece of so much daily entertainment on television and online (The Hills, Entourage, Chat Roulette, anyone?) that middle-aged brats, menacing as they might be, just can’t keep (it) up. ‘You’re a nice looking guy for your age’, a movie producer friend says to Clay, ‘but you really don’t have the clout’. In the LA of 2010, he advises, there’s no shortage of young, over-entitled kids looking for a Hollywood escape route: ‘On a daily basis there’s a whole new army of the retarded eager to be defiled.’

Caroline Hamilton is a research fellow in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne. She writes and researches on American literature and celebrity culture.

Publisher: Picador

ISBN: 9780330519533

RRP: $32.99

Jonathan Casper – father of teenage daughters Thisbe and Amelia; son of Henry, an ex-aeronautical engineer for the US Air force; and husband to Madeline, whose research into the behaviour of pigeons is yielding bizarre results – suffers from a rare form of epilepsy. Upon seeing the complex shapes of clouds, he collapses in a terrifying seizure. A New England Journal of Medicine article offers some insight into the condition:

Ongoing research suggests that the cloud itself represents an autonomic fear of complexity, and that this unusual neurological response to a terror-stimulus is simply the survival instinct of a species that inhabits a world which has, over such a short period of time, become much too complicated.

With this, two of the main co-ordinates of Joe Meno’s latest novel are mapped – cowardice in the face of complexity. Through the gradual collapse of the Casper family, The Great Perhaps explores each member’s fears, and their attempts to avoid as well as ameliorate them in an increasingly inscrutable world.

Everyone in this family is running from something. We have Jonathan, a dorky palaeontologist in search of a possibly extinct giant squid. Like a child avoiding the calamities of a dysfunctional family, Jonathan creates a fort in the basement, poring over his books to avoid the reality of his failing marriage and career. Madeline, his wife, also fleeing professional and marital disappointments, takes to following a human-shaped cloud across the city for nights on end. Navigating both the breakdown of their family and their fraught adolescence, beret-wearing Amelia throws herself headlong into a naïve and militant socialism, while Thisbe finds God. Henry, their grandfather, confronted with the choices he has made, chases redemption in oblivion, jettisoning his memories by writing them down and posting them to himself, while each day culling a word from his vocabulary. He has eleven left when we meet him. Read more

ISBN: 9780670918874

RRP: $32.95

Publisher: Penguin

If you were to read the title, jacket blurb or publicity material for Robert McCrum’s new book you could be excused for assuming that it dealt largely with a modern phenomenon. ‘Globish’ or Global English is, after all, a relatively modish expression. You may be surprised, then, that McCrum starts his enjoyable Globish story more than two thousand years ago in the tar pits of Denmark.

It takes McCrum roughly 200 pages of the 268-page book to reach the postcolonial ‘Globish’ speaking world of the recent past. The bulk of this material – the history of the English language – has been well covered elsewhere, including a number of times by McCrum himself. Nonetheless, Globish offers a lively, entertaining account at a brisk pace and on this basis alone is a worthy addition to the fold. McCrum offers all the usual elements, from the Norman Conquest to the Gettysburg Address, with humour and a journalistic gift for anecdote. But it was always through the prism of ‘Globish’ that this book was going to offer something different. Read more