Praise – Andrew McGahan

Gordon’s life is going nowhere fast – an insecure asthmatic with a small penis and a newly acquired tobacco habit, he quits his job in a drive-through bottle shop when the new manager fires the rest of the crew. Now unemployed, living in a run down house with a bunch of old men, he hooks up with ex-heroin addict Cynthia, a casualty of the mass firing. She has bad eczema, a tattoo she regrets, and loves penetrative sex. The woman Gordon has loved and lusted after since he was thirteen isn’t interested in him, but Cynthia will do in the meantime. She introduces him to drugs – acid and heroin – and how they combine with sex and alcohol; he introduces her to the temporary high of nitrous.
That, in essence, is the plot. This is quite clearly Literature – existential angst, alcohol and drugs, non-erotic sex (lots of it), ennui, desultory excursions that go nowhere and achieve nothing, relationships that are the same, and tormented but essentially boring characters. 1988, the prequel (written later and set earlier), really was a taste of things to come.
I kept reading it, which may say something about the superior qualities of the writing, but I felt like a friend of mine who, switching from Coke to Diet Coke, said she kept drinking it by the bucket load because her tastebuds insisted that there must be sugar there, somewhere. Between that sense and the memory of how much I enjoyed McGahan’s later work, I persisted to the end.
Lauded by critics (short listed, prize winning, “throb[bing] with intensity,” “one of the few Australian novels of the 90s that really matter,” “a bracing slap in the face to conventional platitudes and hypocrisy,”) it left me cold. Actually, no – it left me depressed, flat, and a little grey. Partly because of the subject matter and the depiction of the meaninglessness of (some people’s) life, but mostly because I’ll never get back the time I spent reading it. Perhaps my response was coloured by the fact that I started reading it on the way home from a funeral, but I don’t think so. This is the kind of Literature that ruins reading for neophytes; it almost put me off books, something I wouldn’t have thought was possible. - Alex