OK, it’s 2 am. In a darkened front bar. There’s a game of pool behind you. You’ve had some wine. Well, actually quite a lot of wine. It’s the time of night when you can get to the heart of the human experience – or the heart of contact. (Or alcohol is a powerful persuader in that direction). Your drinking companion leans over – we’ll call them Y - and says “I’ve got something to tell you.” Y is married. What emerges is that they ran into an ex (Y met an ex) at a conference. The frisson is still there. Big time. So big time that Y feels like throwing up the marriage, the kids and seeing what life might have been like with ex. I was surprised – Y’s marriage had seemed solid. I was engaged by the passion and potential heartbreak of the situation. Do you go for what you know, or try for something different/better? What do you settle for in your life?It was a hard and sad story to hear and I’ve thought about it many times in the intervening years. I know how the story ended up but not whether Y feels like they made the right decision because we’ve never been in a bar at 2 in the morning again.This is the terrain for Catherine Deveny’s book. It’s a rich terrain – we have all had exes and all wondered about the life not lived. In short, main character Lizzie, married with two kids, re-meets old flame Tom, who lives in England. The book is a kind of will they / won’t they shuffle from that point on. There’s quite a lot of energy to the telling of the story and I was initially quite engaged – mostly because of the impact of Y’s story. Ultimately, I think this novel fails to grapple with the dimensions of the story, with the hard bits of the situation. I can’t write about this easily without giving the ending away so I won’t.It’s hard to read Deveny without hearing her voice and projecting her ‘self’ onto the main character Lizzie. They seem alike. I resisted this – I don’t do this with other writers, but maybe other writers are not as likely to be in our face (as has been Deveny’s public mojo). I’ve liked her brashness (the asylum-seeker stuff) and also been irritated by it. Deveny describes Lizzie, “She was one of those earthy Australian girls, disarmingly and hilariously abrupt and with no idea how sexy she was. She had an amazing bullshit detector; just when everyone was thinking it, she’d say something like ‘get your hand off it, you wanker.’” There’s something about the character Lizzie that fills up the space; the other people in her life are not fully realised in the writing, so the passion, the potential heartbreak, the yearning implicit in being torn between two men and two kinds of futures, is not quite there.Have just finished Tim Winton’s latest and been thinking about the difference between someone who really can write well and someone who can write. In ‘Eyrie’, I was struck by the ways in which character emerged in subtle ways, especially through the dialogue and the way people said things. No way would he need to write a sentence (like the one in the last paragraph) with all those adverbs and adjectives. Both books revolve around one main character but in Winton’s book, the bit players are nuanced – I am reminded of those little Impressionist 9 by 5 pictures. They are smaller players, subservient to the story of the main character but Winton applies little brushstrokes to given them dimensionality. This is Deveny’s first novel – so the comparison may be unfair!One last thing. The riff on The Happiness Show – an opportunity to do something way more interesting than she actually does – very disappointing. Hmmmm....not sure. It's not that I didn't enjoy this, but there is something about it that annoyed me and I'm not quite sure I can put my finger on it. Maybe it's my inability to truly understand why someone who is in a happy, stable, loving relationship is willing to risk it. If you do happen to come across your missed chance and it sends you into as big as a whirl as it did Lizzie, then I find it hard to buy that your current relationship is as wonderful as we are led to believe. And I cannot, no matter how hard I try, buy into it being ok to cheat on your partner - it's not - even if you are never caught.Lizzie came across to me as selfish and willing to risk her marriage and friendships for a second chance at a earlier romance. If you don't take the book too seriously, then it's a fun, light holiday read. Other than that, I'm not a fan.
What do You think about The Happiness Show (2012)?
Think of the worst chick lit you have ever read, this is worse.
—aladhivya
A light read. Easy to relate to the characters
—LLHR
Great holiday read . Really enjoyed it .
—phippsac
