review : black painted fingernails

black painted fingernails, steven herrick (allen&unwin)

in steven herrick's newest book, published a couple of months ago now, student teacher james is heading to a country town for his very first teaching experience. ostensibly, james is ready - he's got the job, somewhere to stay (and all paid up), he's got the keys to a bmw and a healthy cut lunch for the drive.

luckily for the reader, who might be despairing at this point for james' lack of imagination and sense of adventure, he stops to fill up with petrol and is somehow conned into giving sophie a lift on his way.

sophie is older. she's hair, legs and black painted fingernails. and she's got james pegged immediately and she goes out of her way to encourage, entice and embarrass him out of his shell.

she brings out a tube of lipstick and elaborately applies it to her full lips , then kisses the hankie, leaving a big red pout above my name. she hands it back to me. 'don't wash it. leave it for your mum.'

it soon becomes clear that james is far from ready, and far from willing to enter into the teaching life. and sophie - so cocky and apparently self-assured - is hiding, or has masked, some painful secrets and sadness. the characters are all big-hearted, very real people. they talk, they're awkward.

sophie's third-person narrated chapters deal almost exclusively with her back story and the reader learns how she developed her tough exterior. the scenes with cardigan madrigal, the gentle hippie boy - the only boy in town who didn't like football - of sophie's teen years in her rough country hometown are such a highlight.

and in an unusual move, a number of the chapters are narrated from james' parents point of view. ok, so you don't really want to read about (spoiler) parents having sex, but at the same time it's kind of special to be privvy to angela and michael's experience of being left behind by their only son - coping with his absence and torn between trying to protect him from the world while also wanting him to discover it. complete pic of family and when the time comes, at the end of the novel, we are able to understand the parents' motivations and responses.

on one hand you think you have this story figured out: road trip, coming of age, boy meets a quirky girl and is bewitched. on the other hand...this is steven herrick and it's beautifully written and a truly lovely story.

lovely new things to read...

two newbies that arrived at the shop today, and one i borrowed from a friend:


cannot wait to start beauty queens because it has such a kickarse cover and because i loved going bovine so much. black painted fingernails i have already had a sneaky sneaky peek at, but can't wait to sit down and luxuriate in herrick's wordy words.

but first, reading matters. yes, my reading does matter, but no. it's the reading matters conference this week. be there, and be a square. a cool, hip, melbourne bookish square.

then i shall retreat to the hons cupboard and catch up on what darling fanny and her husband alfred are up to. this book is set in paris (!) but i hope there shall be at least one visit to alconleigh. "Life is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake, and here is one of them."

"a kid who can't leave well enough alone"

steven herrick spoke at the melbourne writers festival to a very full auditorium of school students, their teachers, other writers, friends and me. he spoke to the students, with the students, and not at them. he had the lights put on so he could see them. he singled the cheeky ones out and laughed with them. he listened kindly when a girl, inspired by one of steven's characters, shared her sadness at her mother's death. he talked about drinking, kissing, vomiting. masturbation. fathers. sons. how he left (or rather, it was suggested that he not come back) school at fifteen and now has twenty books to his name, and two sons and a football team of middle-aged men who wear pink. it was session that will not be forgotten easily.

"i mean what i say, i just shouldn't say it aloud"

slice: juicy moments from my impossible life is the perfect example of less-is-more, of well-chosen words, of understatement and poignancy. and, it's very funny.

darcy is in year eleven at school, a bit of a shakespeare fan, definitely not a soccer guy (in spite of his middle name - pele - and all of his football-mad dad's encouragement). he can't shut up, mostly just blurting out whatever shoots into his head. even when it's not the best thing to say.

there's the totally awesome english teacher, ms hopkins, who wears t-shirts with great slogans on them, whose reaction to the class dismissing the romantic poets as crapola is to piff shelley out the classroom window.

and there's the beautiful audrey, girl of darcy's dreams. audrey who meditates in her backyard while darcy lies out on his roof...pretending not to watch her. audrey's not afraid to say what she thinks.

and there is noah, chess-obsessed and darcy's unlikely friend. there's also tim harris, the bully. but our characters don't stay pigeonholed or one-dimentional. these are normal, smart, thoughtful teens who are awkward but somehow confident, they've got their problems but nothing is blown out of proportion (tho darcy does spend a lot of time worrying about one little blackhead on his nose) and when it's revealed that noah's father has suffered a stroke darcy isn't so blinded by his love for audrey that he can't realise when others need support. these are good people.

slice looks at what it is to be a man. it's a coming of age story and includes a gorgeous scene in which darcy goes to buy condoms and reminisces about going for ice cream with his dad, wishing he was getting ice cream now instead. such beautiful sentiment about childhood and moving forwards, and it only takes herrick three short paragraphs. i can't help thinking about other books (err...and my own work) that blather on and on, in an effort to get to their point.

herrick is master of writing relationships. in particular, relationships between fathers and sons (like jack and his dad in love, ghosts and nose hair ; the father-like relationship between billy and old bill in the simple gift) and in slice it's hilarious and beautiful as dad frets about darcy thinking suicidal thoughts, to the point of kneeling at the bathroom keyhole as darcy wills his blackhead pimple away. there's nothing clichéd, nothing mean or brutal in here, the dads and their sons are always friends - even if they are annoying and stupid at times.

on my first read i thought that it would have worked better in the free verse form of herrick's older work, that it was too short as a conventional novel. but reading it through for a second time, giving myself time to really enjoy the way it was written i decided it's pretty damn perfect how it is.

read my reviews of some of steven's other books here. or read his blog.

ooh-err!

there's been a bit of discussion about and around the topic of sex in YA books. an inside a dog discussion forum a few weeks ago got me really thinking. i discovered that a lot of the people who would prefer to read books without sex were embarrassed. natural; this is something that is private, sometimes scary, that makes you nervous. but it isn't as though YA books are pulsing with pornography. at least, i hope not.

i think it is lovely when a book can explore the fumbling, awkward moments that occur between two characters - letting the reader experience, or be introduced, to sex and sexuality in a safe and gentle way. you've got the more explicit (and here i don't mean porn, but sex scenes without metaphor) scenes in john marsden's the dead of the night, judy blume's forever and maureen mccarthy's cross my heart - and i can't help but think of poor sophie from joanne horniman's my candlelight novel just waiting to get away from the boys and back to her books.

then there are the more metaphoric or poetic depictions. for example, here's a really beautiful sex scene from steven herrick's the simple gift:

Making love

It was like falling headlong
into the clear waters
of the Bendarat River
and opening my eyes
to the beautiful
phospherescent bubbles of light
and trying to catch those bubbles
iin the new world of quiet and calm
that carried me along, breathless,
and too late, or too early,
I surfaced
and broke the gentle tide,
and I gasped and rolled
and wished Caitlin and I
could return to the hush
of that special world
and we could float
safe for a lifetime
lost
and hoping never
to be found.

but now i am hopping off my soapbox and back to reviewing. that's what i'm here to do.