Diana Reid’s Seeing Other People follows her brilliantly discomforting novel of campus rape culture,Love and Virtue.

Diana Reid’s Seeing Other People follows her brilliantly discomforting novel of campus rape culture,Love and Virtue.Credit:Wolter Peeters

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.”

Seeing Other People by Diana Reid.

Seeing Other People by Diana Reid.

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.

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When Reid shows us Charlie’s bookshelves,these are the kinds of novels we find:tales of bad boyfriends,obliterative sex and the redemptive power of self-care (chaste little morality plays trussed-up as transgression). In Seeing Other People,Reid dares to celebrate pleasure:the heady agony of infatuation;the solace of intimacy;creative rapture and queer joy.

Reid may be unsparing,but she is not unkind. There is a deep seam of affection – of affinity – running through the pages ofSeeing Other People. The woman both sisters adore,Helen,is a theatre director and a ruthless scrutineer – of herself as much as others. “It revealed her own values,” Reid writes,“what she saw as right and good – and invited someone else to say:Yes,I see things the same way.” It’s a fitting description of Reid’s fiction:satire as self-portrait,and as self-implication.

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But it’s the rare times that Reid lets her editorial guard down that give this love story its heart – not all the grand emoting:a father and daughter hiding their fears in small talk;a mother weeping silently as her toddler rages;friends laughing in the glow of a golden afternoon.

The last act ofSeeing Other People is so determined to be kind and sisterly – so painfully well-intentioned – that it audibly clunks (“Seriously,” Charlie tells Eleanor,“I have to start finding validation internally”). And as all the loose ends are snipped,and the wounds healed,Reid’s second book begins to feel like a counter-spell to her first,a literary antidote:whereLove and Virtue was dark and messy,Seeing Other People is neat and sunlit. Was the remedy for her,or was it for us?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a talented young woman,in possession of a smart and popular novel,must be compared to Sally Rooney. There’s certainly a push to position Reid as Australia’s answer to that Irish wunderkind.

“Reid is the talent to whom every smart young novelist who follows her will be compared,” reads her book jacket puffery. Watching how Rooney has been co-opted and scrutinised,it feels less like praise,and more like a curse. Reid is still working out the kind of novelist she wants to be. May we have the good sense to leave her to it.

Seeing Other People byDiana Reid is published byUltimo Press,$32.99.

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