Affirm Press

March 2010

The nineteen seventies were, according to Barry Divola’s narrator Charlie, every shade of brown with the constant soundtrack of cicadas. And there’s nothing particularly glamourous in this collection of short stories. It’s all teenage boy awkwardness and girls with three nipples, high school rock bands and Sunday night youth group. It’s delightfully ordinary.

Each short story is a chapter of Charlie’s adolescence, and while Charlie himself is a little too ‘nice guy’ to really relate to, it’s the people in his life that seem to dictate his experiences, including all the girls he falls in love with. It almost seems as if Charlie is merely the vessel through which the reader gets to travel back to yester-decade.

Now, you may find this hard to believe, but I have never been a teenage boy. So it’s always, always that little bit comforting to read stories where the girl seems to have control over the romantic situation. (A real fiction in my life so far) It’s only through books like these I can begin to formulate ideas of the kinds of thoughts that permeate a boy’s brain. Maybe I should’ve read this when I was a confused teenager. May have even shed a bit of light on the confusing male perspective of relationships.

But I digress. It’s really the music references that really drive home that 70’s mood that permeates throughout. Charlie and his friends lie around in their bedrooms listening to The Best of Bread on vinyl; after much deliberation, Charlie handpicks Harvest by Neil Young as the soundtrack to losing his virginity. And later, his crush on Angie Perrotta intensifies when he learns that she learned to touch type by practising on song lyrics by Elton John, Carol King and Cat Stevens. And whether or not you grew up listening to Cat Stevens or Neil Diamond or America, it’s not an outrageous theme: We all have albums and songs and artists that have shaped our childhood.

In “Small White Triangle”, Charlie sits at youth group daydreaming about his future as a hair metal rock god, and contemplates Rock Star Jesus, the ultimate makeover. In “Nixon”, Charlie’s ignorance of American politics combined with his ability to regurgitate other people’s opinions, cuts him off from second base with touch-typing extraordinaire Angie, who is also opinionated and idealistic. But it’s the final story, “Patience” that is the sweetest culmination of the previous stories. It’s the only story where we get to see Charlie’s impact on someone else’s life, rather than vice versa. Patience is the name of the elderly woman whose place Charlie cleans on Saturdays. She calls him Einstein, he tells her about his current girlfriend. They become better freinds than any of the boys from school. Patience makes an oxymoron out of her name, and is subsequently not a little feisty. She gives him a cat. While many of the short stories in this collection teeter over oddball and drily funny, the last story is just plain sad, in a final, conclusionatory way.

It’s the second book in Affirm Press’s Long Story Shorts series (following Under Stones by Bob Franklin) And if you’re in Sydney, both books are being launched at Gleebooks next Wednesday (17th March).