Alice Aigner is the head of history at a Sydney girls' school; a twenty-eight year-old Wiradjri woman, she's very happily single. At least until her friend Dannie (married, a child, and still interesting) convinces her to attend their ten year high school reunion, where Alice discovers that every other attendee is married and obsessed with babyhood. Disturbed by the apparent evidence that marriage and children make formerly-interesting women boring, insipid and suburban, Alice decides that she will be married by her thirteenth birthday, in sixteen months. She'll prove that a woman can be married, a mother, and still have a career and a mind of her own.
Between making wedding plans (the cake will be chocolate) Alice recruits her friends - Dannie, Aboriginal Legal Service lawyer Liza, and policy adviser Peta - to help her create a game plan and strategies for meeting the man of her dreams.
Alice isn't interested in just any man - he has to be single, straight, interested in commitment, good to his mother and children, love his work, vice-free (alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gambling), think Alice is gorgeous, unprejudiced, filled with faith for something (not necessarily religion), punctual (but happy for Alice to run on "Koori time"), debt-free (except for a mortgage), "loyal, faithful, honest, chivalrous, witty, competent, responsible and a good listener", free of baggage and a compatible star sign.
With her shopping list in hand, Alice embarks on a string of dates with men sourced through her family, friends, colleagues and newer methods (singles ads, internet dating and Sydney's Singles uprising (to which Alice charmingly wears a lilac slip dress and no underwear). On the way she has a fling with what looks like the Real Thing, but isn't. After months of hard man hunting, Alice decides that she really is happier single. And once she stops looking, she finds real love, which was under her nose all the time.
I really wanted to like this novel by first time author Heiss - partly because I think there should be more Indigenous representation in mainstream media and partly because I liked the premise. I've attended a few reunions of my own...
It's unfortunate, then, that I found Alice as generally unlikeable as I find a lot of chick lit heroines - inflexible, unrealistic in her expectations, and selfish. She meets several nice potential candidates that she abandons for relatively inconsequential reasons, for she has significantly higher standards for her future partner than she has for herself.
There were a few bright moments - I particularly liked fellow teacher Mickey (when they meet in Darlinghurst "He always made me acknowledge 'the gay community whose land we gathered on'"), Alice doesn't have the chick lit staple obsession with designer shoes (thank god), and her litany of horror exes (dispersed throughout the novel) have the ring of real life.
Heiss does a nice job of depicting the experience of a young urban Indigenous woman in modern Australia. Alice's dad is Austrian, and Heiss is able to convey the information that Aboriginality is about culture, identity and tradition rather than (just) appearance. That Alice doesn't look stereotypically 'Indigenous' allows Heiss to expose some of the very real racism that is still strongly present in Australia, and Aboriginal issues are woven throughout the book (the one Torres Strait Islander depicted doesn't come out of it as well).
But I wasn't convinced by Alice's abrupt turnaround from resolutely single to marriage obsessed, or that a woman so logical and intelligent in other arenas of her life could be so linear and inflexible in her requirements. I found the level of detail about personal grooming (down to plucking stray pubic hairs) unnecessary, and I really didn't like the word "fucken" used in lieu of "fuckin'/fucking". Plus (and I acknowledge this is picky) the word 'malt' being used instead of 'moult' (regarding a shedding Siberian husky) is careless editing.
I'm interested in what Heiss writes next - I suspect that Not Meeting Mr Right was heavily autobiographical, and something a little less close to home, that retains the better elements of her writing, will be more accomplished and less predictable. - Alex
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