Over a languid Sydney summer,both Eleanor and Charlie will fall for the same woman. But the Hamor sisters will prove more reckless than their regency doppelgängers,more willing to risk each other’s happiness for their own. “Breaking a heart can be an act of kindness,” Reid begins,channelling Austen’s wry authority.
A beachside love triangle may seem like an abrupt shift for the Sydney-based writer who,just over a year ago,produced a brilliantly discomforting novel of campus rape culture.Love and Virtue – Reid’s fiction debut – defied easy answers (or questions). It was a tale of weaponised gossip,plundered trauma,and the quiet machinery of institutional power – a mordant snarl of a book.
Now comes an unabashed romcom,replete with meet-cutes,earnest declarations and a tied bow of an ending. Yet both are novels of the ethics and etiquette of desire – novels of manners.
Reid hasn’t lost her skewering wit. Here are the twenty-somethings of inner-city Sydney in all their self-curating glory. It’s a world of quirky sharehouses,tiny sunglasses and impeccable banter. “Woke boys are profiting from the low bar set by,like,all of human history,” one of Charlie’s housemates muses. “Like,they used to get applauded for just existing,now they get applauded for pointing out how unfair it was in the past when they got applauded for just existing.”
Reid spares no one. There’s Eleanor’s ex-boyfriend – a writer who doesn’t write – who “aspires to be somebody worthy of cancellation”;the local indi band who are so desperately countercultural they have “an anarchist’s passion for rules”;and Eleanor’s stiff-shirted manager for whom “being contradicted was as good as being flirted with”. And of course,the Hamor sisters themselves. Romantically wounded,Eleanor reaches for her phone:“she selected a history podcast that purported to – in 22 minutes – ‘explain’ the Taliban,” Reid writes. “She thought it might give her some perspective.” Charlie meanwhile,always has time to “admire her own pain”.
The snark is delicious,like the bright,citric fizz of popping candy. It’s a welcome reprieve from the novels of middle-class malaise that have been so painfully fashionable of late – all torpor and wallow. Those sad,listless books with sad,listless covers:young women faceplanting into furniture,or propped against the wall like exasperated ladders.