No, I don't know what's going on here.

I saw the movie of Less than Zero when I was at university. I don’t remember being terribly impressed, I just remember thinking Andrew McCarthy and James Spader and Robert Downey Jr were hot and given back then I was still a pentecostal happy clappy, movies with hot dudes were one of my few joys. Anyhoo. For some mysterious reason until now I have never got around to reading a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Despite being a voracious reader. I can’t tell you why. Perhaps because the movie wasn’t impressive, perhaps because in the early ’90s I was hanging out with some seriously fucked-up dudes who thought American Psycho was hilarious and who read to me the bits with the rats in. I’ve read McInerney, though only a couple and not Bright Lights, Big City. But Ellis? No. Perhaps because I thought his first name should have two t’s.

That said, Less than Zero was probably the first book I named when Netty and I decided how we’d handle the Revisited section of the Challenge this year. I have, after all, been listening to Netty rant endlessly about how, like, totally awesome Ellis is for many years. And, just to put Netty out of her misery, because I know she’s reading this thinking “For fuck’s sake DID YOU LIKE THE FUCKING BOOK OR NOT???” I’ll say that while Less than Zero isn’t exactly perfect, it’s seriously impressive.  And yes, I’ll be reading more Ellis. Soon.

Incidentally, you can read Netty’s thoughts on Less than Zero, together with Bright Lights, Big City,  here.

Alienation? Tick. Nihilism? Tick. Amorality? Tick. A truly delusional sense of entitlement, as evidenced by the quote at the top of this post? Tick. Ellis gives us a snapshot of a ludicrously affluent group of people and then strips away the trappings of that affluence to show us what lurks beneath. And it’s utterly vacuous and utterly repellent.  There’s little in these people that passes for conscience or anything that might vaguely resemble basic human decency. The narrator, Clay, is held up by some (including Netty) as morally superior to the other characters and he might be, but barely. Sure, Clay might not be able to stomach the snuff movie and he might not want to take advantage of Rip’s little sex slave – but he doesn’t actually do anything about it, either. He just walks away. The body in the laneway might make his hands shake so much that he drops his joint (damn!) but what does he do? Nada. So he might not be quite as alienated, as nihilistic, as delusionally convinced of his “right” to whatever he wants… But he’s not far off. Presumably it was this slight differentiation that the moviemakers picked up on 25 years ago, amplifying it into a character unrecognisable from Ellis’s. Not that I can really say that with any authority, of course, because I haven’t seen the movie since 1988. (It was released in ’87 in the States but didn’t make it to Australian cinemas until March the next year – or so imdb tells me, anyway, and that jells with my recollection.)

Ellis’s style is revelatory. I’m not sure “stream of consciousness” is quite right – James Joyce and Virginia Woolf make my nose bleed (something Clay can relate to, although for different reasons). Ellis’s narration is compulsive, almost addictive – I read Less than Zero very, very quickly. But there’s some impressive skill at work here. The dialogue is mostly dextrous and deceptively flip – like Hemingway’s in The Sun Also Rises, there’s usually a hell of a lot more going on than meets the eye. Although sometimes the “hell of a lot more going on” is a hell of a lot of nothing at all. There’s an exchange towards the end of the book between Clay and a character called Kim, with a dude trying to play LA Woman on the guitar and an anorexic junkie intermittently screaming for no apparent reason (other than being an anorexic junkie) in the background. It’s a small, surreal masterpiece. It is effectively content-free. And it is superb.

One of the book’s aspects that seriously spooked the Hollywood horses was its sexuality. Clay is bisexual, as are a number of the other male characters. In the movie Clay is straight and he is disgusted when he realises his old mate Julian is trolling his ass to pay his drug debts. In the book Clay is not especially impressed that Julian is hustling – but also sits in on one of Julian’s appointments in hopes of drumming up a little extra cash. Noice. What’s interesting, I think, is that there’s an unconscious sexism to this. It’s been generally accepted for years (and science these days is backing this up – have a look at a book called Sex at Dawn, which I read just before Less than Zero) – that female sexuality is far more fluid than male sexuality. And yet in Ellis’s world it’s the men who are bi, it’s the men – including Clay – who lazily take what they want while the women, to some extent, are there to satisfy the male characters when that’s what they want rather than a bloke. I might be reading too much into this and I might even be misreading it – there may be references to female bisexuality, but they didn’t lodge in my brain.

A couple of last, daft observations: the cover of my copy has a picture of a bloke on it that looks like a zombie. To me. Which is perfectly apt, I think.

And that sense of entitlement. Christos Tsiolkas was interviewed while The Slap was screening on TV and made a comment about some of the characters in the book, the ones in their late 30s and early 40s, having a sense of entitlement. That hadn’t occurred to me but it’s fair enough. The characters in his book are roughly the same age as the characters in Less Than Zero – Hector and Aisha and the rest of them, if I remember correctly, would’ve been going to uni in the early to mid ’80s, just like Clay. Completely irrelevant, and completely different books about completely different characters from completely different backgrounds. But still. The sort of worthless little titbit I like to throw out there every now and then.

Hear that? It’s the sound of jaws dropping all over the blogosphere. Or perhaps not …

Anyways, seeing that we post on each month’s books the following month, bear in mind that you might only get 11 months worth of Reading Challenge this year, on account of it being the end of civilisation an’ all, what with the Mayan calendar running out on December 21. Hey, don’t trust me, though. I’m the chick who stockpiled so many cans of tuna pre-Y2K that I was still eating variations of “tuna surprise” well into September the following year. Washed down by about 50 bottles of V8 juice. But I digress.

It’s halfway through January already, so better get the 2012 list up pronto, before I get any threatening messages from Andy. Here we go:

JANUARY: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

FEBRUARY: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

MARCH: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

APRIL: Howl by Allen Ginsberg

MAY: Raining in Mango by Thea Astley (inspired by Dan Fox)

JUNE: M by Peter Robb

JULY: July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (natch)

AUGUST: Collected Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

SEPTEMBER: Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

OCTOBER: The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

NOVEMBER: Beloved by Toni Morrison

DECEMBER: The Lover by Marguerite Duras

Not too shabby, eh?

But wait folks – that’s not all. Due to the astounding (ahem) success of our Revisited section, we are doing another version of it this year – except we are both “revisiting” books, chosen by the other, that neither of us has read before. Cool, huh? In no particular order, Andy is tackling Bret Easton Ellis, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Theroux, Haruki Murakami, Anne Sexton and D.M. Thomas, while yours truly will be making an acquaintance with Tim Winton, John Wyndham, Chris Isherwood, Helen Garner, Gore Vidal and China Mieville. You’ll be hearing from Andy soon on Mr Ellis, and myself next month on, err, one of the six books he has chosen for me. How excitement.

Better get cracking then. That’s a helluva lot of reading to be done before Judgment Day …

12. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

Now, admittedly, this is no Rabbit Run, or Melancholy Whores. It’s not even on a par with Malouf’s deeply disappointing Johnno. It’s simply the literary equivalent of some scruffy teen, hands thrust into pockets, shrugging his shoulders. Nyeh, meh, whateves …

11. I Play The Drums In A Band Called Okay – Toby Litt

Instead of reading about the life and times of a fictional drummer called Clap, I can’t help but think my time would have been better spent reading about the life and times of a real drummer. Keith Moon. John Bonham. Phil Collins. Hold on, how did he get on the list? 

10. Love Poems – Dorothy Porter

This posthumous collection of poems, lyrics and excerpts from verse novels is a good starting point for anyone interested in exploring Porter’s passion with women and words. That it clocks in at No. 10 on this list is only because I liked the nine books above it better.

9. Lovesong – Alex Miller

Miller’s phoenix-rises-from-the-ashes love story of Australian ex-pat John and his Tunisian bride Sabiha, as related by aging writer Ken, is an elegant novel beautifully showcasing the complexity and vulnerability of relationships. Most notably including that of the narrator himself.  

8. The Magic Toyshop – Angela Carter

Carter’s highly original take on the fairytale formula charts the nightmarish journey of newly orphaned teenager Melanie into a new life with her machiavellian uncle and his family, who live in a closeted world teetering on the brink of madness. Definitely one out of the box.

7. The Birthday Party – Harold Pinter

The only thing that could be better than reading English playwright extraordinaire Pinter’s masterful “comedy of menace” – with its memorable characters and unforgettable plot – would be seeing it live on the boards. Ah, one day, perhaps …

6. Neuromancer – William Gibson

Possibly the cyberpunk touchstone, a rollicking roller-coaster of a book that was nothing short of a revelation for me. Gibson tempted me with the plot, kept me there with the writing and, finally, made me wonder if I could, at long last, learn to love sci-fi.

5. The Complete Stories – Flannery O’Connor

American writer O’Connor’s remarkable body of work consists of these multitudes of short stories steeped in the southern gothic tradition. Grim and gritty, bleak and black, powerful and poignant. Definitely one of the 20th-century’s must-read writers.

4. My Name Is Red – Orhan Pamuk

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Pamuk’s 15th-century opus of the Ottoman Empire is part historical fiction, part murder mystery, part love story and all essential read. Magnificently written fiction that puts others in the shade.

3. The Collected Stories – Lorrie Moore

At the time, I wondered out loud if Canadian writer Moore was the “female Carver”, so impressed was I by this thumping doorstopper of a collection, chock-full of brilliant little gems. And while I’m still not convinced that she is, nor am I entirely ruling it out, either.

2. Falling Man – Don DeLillo

Quite simply, the best novel I read last year. DeLillo is an exquisite writer, and this is near-perfect in its composition – poignant and poetic, heartbreaking and heroic. Also an unparalleled addition to the small cache of fiction that has arisen in the wake of 9-11. 

1. The White Album – Joan Didion

So you want to be a journalist? First up, go read this. And then, when you have finally finished weeping into your Wheaties, go back to the drawing board. After all, there’s plenty of other careers out there …

There is no reason whatsoever for this picture to appear in this post.

2011′s books for me fall very roughly into three sets. There’s the ones I’m glad, seriously, really glad to have read. The ones I feel have probably made my world a better place. There are those I really quite enjoyed and kind of vaguely rocked my world in a rockabye baby type manner.  And there are those I enjoyed but whose absence would not have made my year any worse. This is an improvement on previous years, when there has been at least one book which either Netty or I or sometimes both have loathed with psychotic, demented passion.

Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go) and Litt (I Play the Drums et cetera)  did not especially rock my world, while Miller (Lovesong) and Gibson (Neuromancer) are nudging their way in that direction but probably don’t quite make it. Which I guess that Miller and Gibson belong (only just) in the same category as Pamuk (My Name is Red), whose book was rewarding but demanding – demanding to the point, occasionally, that you wondered if the reward was worthwhile. It was, ultimately, but not spectacularly so. Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop was more impressive than all three but doesn’t quite make it to awesomeness level. I grudgingly – very grudgingly – might put Didion (The White Album) in this set, too; while Gibson and Miller just get themselves off my bottom rung, and while Carter makes a desperate grab for the top rung and falls short, Didion just about gets herself there – and then doesn’t. Quite. Maybe.

Which leaves us with O’Connor’s Complete Stories, and Moore’s Collected Stories, and Pinter’s Birthday Party and DeLillo’s Falling Man.

OK, come on. That’s a pretty impressive quartet to end the year with, no?

I could try to pick a favourite from these four. Netty will have her list and it will have a Number 1, don’t you worry about that. O’Connor’s stories may fall short, but only just, and only because there is some early and inferior material included that she would not in a million years have allowed to be published had she been alive to oversee the collection. Take that into account and these four books stand head and shoulder above the rest of our Challenge reading this year.

So anyway. Netty and I have never reviewed the revisited element of the Challenge at the end of the year (have we, Netty? I’m pretty sure we haven’t) and this year I thought fuck that, maybe I will. So here’s my verdict on the six authors from previous years whose work we decided to explore further: Oates - bad choice on my part. She is notoriously productive and some of what she produces is less than impressive. The rest? No complaints whatsoever. Auster’s Illusions perhaps left a bare smidge to be desired but beyond that Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises? Spectacular. Bukowski’s Ham on Rye? Spectacular. Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater? Spectacular spectacular. And Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions? Spectacular fucking spectacular.

Having said that, here’s some of the stuff that was published this year that I read that you should read: The Last Werewolf (Glen Duncan). Embassytown (China Mieville). What the world will look like when all the water leaves us (Laura van den Berg). The Tiger’s Wife (Tea Obreht). The Stranger’s Child (Alan Hollinghurst). The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes). Burning Bright (Ron Rash). Zone One (Colson Whitehead). And I’m guessing a bunch of other stuff as well that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

Reading’s cool, innit. Don’t just think Gee, I should read that one day. Read it. Read it now.

And that, in a nutshell, dear reader, is where Toby Litt’s I Play Drums in a Band Called okay (yes, that’s lower case AND italics) falls down. I don’t know Litt’s background when it comes to music. Is he a musician? Did he ever play in a band? Or is he just a fan? It’s hard to tell on the evidence presented here; the pendulum could easily swing either way. But I couldn’t help thinking, at the conclusion of okay, why anyone would construct a fictional band and write a book about it. I mean, why bother when there’s so much flippin’ fantastic non-fiction out there on just about every band that ever rocked a stage in the modern era?

This is my first encounter with Litt; Andy’s too. I recall at the end of 2010, putting together our 2011 list, that I wanted Chuck Palahniuk on there, while Andy was championing Litt – and this particular book – on the recommendation of a particularly well-read mate of his (hi Chris!). I felt at the time – and still do, especially now that I have since become acquainted with Chuck’s work – that one would cancel out the other. Hence, Litt got the nod, and Palahniuk was put aside for another day (as it turned out, both Andy and I ended up reviewing Chuck’s latest, Damned, separately, in other forums late last year).

But, yeah, maybe okay isn’t the best place to start with Litt. Published in 2008, it’s Litt’s ninth book (there have since been two more) and, interestingly enough, he has been working his way through the alphabet title-wise. Hailed as one of England’s best young writers when he first emerged on the scene in the mid-1990s, in his mid-20s, I can’t help but wonder if we might have been better served reading one of those earlier, critically acclaimed books (typically for me, a copy of Litt’s second novel Beatniks has been languishing, unread, on my shelves for just about as long as it has been out. Might have to dig it out to see if I like it better than okay).

Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t hate okay – not by any stretch of the imagination. I didn’t dislike it, either. It’s just that it’s – well, it’s okay (no pun intended. Honestly). Nothing more. Nothing less. It’s just – okay. Sometimes it comes across more as a series of vignettes containing the same characters, which might have something to do with the fact that eight of these 26 chapters (Litt calls them “episodes”) appeared in various anthologies and magazines as early as six years prior to the publication of okay. And possibly this explains why, occasionally, these chapters appear to work better as standalone pieces. As he kept returning to these characters time and again, it was probably only logical that Litt would decide to turn their stories into a full-length LP or two, rather than keep the output to just a few, choice singles. But then again, as in real life, very few bands know when they need to stop, as opposed to keeping on plugging away, doing those same old songs night after night.

There’s a very melancholy air that pervades this book, as you might expect from a fortysomething man looking back at his life with the band of which he has been part since he was a teenager. okay, we learn, is a “mid-level” indie quartet from Canada, comprising the narrator Clap (drums), Syph (vocals), Mono (bass) and Crab (guitar), with an output of a dozen albums recorded over a 25-year career (an “incomplete” discography is helpfully provided at the back of the book). Clap retells the band’s history – the usual array of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll anecdotes – in a vaguely chronological order. The band breaks up, then makes up; there’s plenty of destruction and disintegration, disease and death. Sometimes it rings true, sometimes it seems forced; a lot of times it is just clichéd. And it is not helped by a tad too much wistful meandering along the way.

I mean, maybe if you’d never read even one of those aforementioned multitudes of rock bios; if you’d never loved and lived for the songs, and the bands. Me, I’ve spent pretty much my entire life immersed – and mired – in music; perhaps that is why I’m all just a bit “meh” about a fictional book about a fictional rock band. After all, if you can’t hear the music in your head as you’re reading the words, it’s all a bit of a moot point, innit?

So, in the same spirit, if this was a music review I’d be giving okay (the book and the band) two and a half stars (Andy said three; I initially agreed, but have decided to downgrade on further reflection). But I am going to give its author the benefit of the doubt. So, then, where is that copy of Beatniks? Oh, here it is, squeezed into a shelf next to Bob Dylan’s Chronicles and Jerry Hopkins/Danny Sugerman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive (I absolutely swear I did not make that up. It really, truly was! As I said before, fact is always stranger than fiction … )

Toby Litt is exactly the sort of writer this blog is all about – highly regarded, with quite a lot of stuff out there, none of which Netty or I have gotten around to reading just yet. Until now.

I play the drums in a band called okay is a fictitious rock memoir, ranging from a band’s teenage beginnings through to middle-aged almost-kinda-vaguely contentment. Along the way, of course, there’s booze and chicks and trucklods of drugs, flirtations with dubious spirituality, tours, splits, reunions, romance, burnout, everything you’d expect from a middle-aged muso looking back on his frenzied existence.

Except it’s not – not quite, anyway.

The narrator is Clap. One of the smirk-worthy elements of the story is the band members’ names, all slang terms for STIs – there’s also Syph, Crab and Mono. Early in their history the band falls into two camps – Clap and Mono are (marginally) more grounded, while Crab is stupendously alcoholic and Syph, the lead singer, is mired in sex and totally drug-fucked and absolutely fucking loving it.

I play the drums is entertaining and amusing, but it didn’t exactly wow me out completely. Despite Peter Hook’s slightly cringe-making comments on the first page of my edition I’m not sure that it’s an entirely genuine reflection of rock band excess – I’d have expected it to be several degrees more extreme than this. On one level I can understand why Litt decided to narrate his story from Clap’s perspective – he has his weaknesses, his tastes for corruption; but he’s also slightly more level-headed than Syph and Crab. Still, I’d have preferred a lot more of the drug and alcohol abuse, the casual fucking, the deranged delusions of philosphical grandeur, and a little less of Clap’s domestic bliss. Clap settles down, you see. Gets married. Has kids. Becomes concerned about the impact of band life and touring on his home life. Now this happens for plenty of musos, I’m sure. I’m just not sure I want to read about it. One of the most enjoyable chapters is Golden, where Syph has some sort of drug-induced revelation about the future of humanity and the double album the band is going to release to send his message out the the world. The message involves an unbelievably offensive (and rather hilarious) element of racism, and the double album includes songs with titles like  Star Child (Brilliant Love) and Rain of Hopeful Promise on Children of the Stars. It’s a great chapter. I could’ve done with more of this weirdness. A fictitious rock memoir from the likes of Syph or Crab – sure, it’d be completely insane. But geez it’d be fun.

The chapters where Litt goes for “poignant” and “moving”, as some of the reviewers suggest, didn’t quite ring true for me. I’m not really sure why – he writes really, really well, but these sections weren’t convincing. Perhaps that’s just not what I was looking for in this book.

I play the drums in a band called okay was good enough to leave me wanting to read some more of Litt’s work. But I’d have to say I’m slightly disappointed, and not nearly as impressed as I’d hoped to be.

So while Andy tackled The Book Of Illusions, I plumped for Man In The Dark, which came out in 2008 (Auster, who is 64, has since published a further two novels to take his tally to 16, along with three collections of poetry, five screenplays and another half dozen collated essays and memoirs). It had been sitting on my bookshelf untouched for a year or so, just waiting to be called into action – and this being the ridiculously busy month of December, I also appreciated that it clocks in at a mere 180 pages of big-ish type.

Of course it didn’t disappoint, and of course it immediately made me want to lock myself away for the next couple of months reading my way through the rest of Auster’s novels. In my best-of-2009 blog, I described New York Trilogy as a “mindfuck”. There certainly is a warped inventiveness in Auster’s storytelling that I have not encountered to such a high level in any other author’s output – or at least not that readily springs to mind.

To wit: check this out as a concept. It is 2007. A man by the name of Owen Brick wakes up in a four-metre-wide cylindrical hole in the ground. He is dressed in a soldier’s uniform, even though he is a magician by trade who had never spent any time in the forces. He spends a night in the hole, and is woken the next morning by a man who identifies himself as Sergeant Serge Tobak. He tells Brick he has been chosen to assassinate the man responsible for the post-2000 election civil war that has been raging in the United States for the past six years. In this alternate reality, the Twin Towers did not fall, and America did not go to war with Iraq. Instead, after the Supreme Court decision that formalised the outcome of the 2000 election, major riots led to the Electoral College being abolished and secession by the eastern states, leading to attacks by the Federals and the deaths of more than 100,000 in the ensuing war. And here is the rub: the war started, and continues, because the man in question invented the concept, runs the war in his own head and has to be taken out in order for the war to cease. Maybe.

Brilliant, isn’t it? Would you have dreamed that up? Nope, me neither.

But wait – there’s more. The book opens just after midnight, in the bedroom of 72-year-old retired book critic August Brill. Brill, recently widowed and recovering from a car accident that crushed his legs and nearly took his life, shares his home with his daughter Miriam and grand-daughter Katya. The women also have their problems – Miriam’s marriage ended five years ago, while Katya’s boyfriend Titus was recently murdered in the Iraq war. Battling insomnia night after night, Brill tells himself stories in the vain hope that he will fall asleep. Brick – and Brick’s story – is Brill’s latest invention.

The two strands run concurrently – Brill and his family; and Brick, in and out of his two worlds – pre and post-waking up in the hole. And the overarching theme for both characters is war: Brick is thrust into a literal war, while Brill – and his grand-daughter – are at war inside their own heads. Auster weaves the two stories – three, really, as Brick’s is double-pronged – seamlessly and effortlessly; indeed, masterfully. If there is anyone out there who does it better, I want to know about them – stat.

Auster is not considered particularly political in his writing, but there is a heavy undertone throughout the Brick passages. It is easy – perhaps too easy – to see this as his response to being a New Yorker in a post-9-11 world. Meanwhile, Auster attacks the politics of the personal in the Brill passages. The surreal, unbelievable and almost absurd tempo of Brick’s world/s is contrasted with the unfolding, touching story of Brill and his family, as recounted by Brill to Katya. No spoilers from me here, but by the end of the novel, in a short, shocking denouement, it becomes apparent exactly what demons Brill – and also Katya – are elusively trying to chase away in their never-ending long, dark night of the soul.

So if you are not yet acquainted with Mr Auster, may I suggest you get a hurry on. If you like your fiction innovative and challenging – nay, mind-bending – he’s definitely your go-to guy, As for me, I’m off to Amazon to order his back catalogue. Then I’m off to the holiday roster to book the month or so off I’m gonna need to get through it. A month or so spent in the mind  – and the words – of this man? Hell yeah. Bring it.

Trouble was, when we went to look for Porter’s collected poems, we drew a blank. How ridiculous that one of Australia’s best-known contemporary poets does not have all her work collected in the one volume! But what Porter does have is this – Love Poems, released last year, and her ninth collection of poetry, the last two published posthumously (she also has five verse novels, two young adult books, two libretti – with composer Jonathan Mills – and a posthumous collection of literary criticism in print). 

Love Poems is a bit of a misnomer, however. There are also selections from three of Porter’s verse novels – Akhenaten (1991), The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and Wild Surmise (2002) – as well as song lyrics (taken from the 2005 album Before Time Could Change Us, by the Paul Grabowsky/Katie Noonen Quintet). The majority of the poems are organised into five chapters, eschewing chronological order but offering a good representation of Porter’s canon, spanning the length of her published work from 1975 to 2009. Porter’s long-time partner, writer Andrea Goldsmith, penned the succinct preface, noting that the poet “had a particular fascination for the unpredictable dangers that threaten when one gives into an all-consuming passion”.

Pardon me here for retreading ground that Andy has already traversed in his blog. I can’t remember ever having read a book – and certainly not an ANRC book – as quickly as I did Love Poems. I picked it up, bored, just to have a bit of a flick-through, while I was waiting for my iPod to sync one Saturday afternoon and then – almost in less time than it took for said iPod to do its thing – I had read the whole volume, cover to cover. Two hundred-odd pages, devoured. Just like that. And yes, that’s the thing about poetry collections, short-story collections as well – they are not really designed to be demolished in one hit. They are meant to be savoured, slowly, over time (well, perhaps in an ideal world, but certainly not when you’re on Planet Turn-This-Sucker-Round-Within-Four-Weeks-Max-On-Top-Of-Everything-Else-You’re-Reading-Or-More-Likely-Trying-To-Read).

It’s a fine line when writing poetry – between the oh-so-clever and the not-challenging-enough – and yes, at first glance Porter falls into the latter camp. But poetry, maybe more so than any other written medium, is a craft wrought with discipline; every word being honed to the nth degree. So with Porter’s poems – and I’m talking about her poems, not the verse-novel extracts, and certainly not the lyrics – what appears initially too simplistic reveals itself to be skilfully crafted on subsequent readings.

Andy gave you Comets I. Here is exhibit B:

Or Else

“No sensible woman eats poppies

or else

she’ll dance

she’ll fall over

she’ll wake up

with a woman in her arms.”

Simple? Yes. Skilful? No doubt. It takes, what, 10 seconds to read? Yes, but I can’t help but wonder how long it took Porter to write.

What I really found really impressive, though, were the extracts from the verse novels. Akhenaten, the Egyptian king, loved his god Aten, his desert city Akhet-Aten, his wife Nefertiti and – in Porter’s imagining – his younger brother Smenkhkare. The Monkey’s Mask charts the affair between detective Jill Fitzpatrick and poetry teacher Diana Maitland. And in Wild Surmise, astrobiologist Alex reignites an old coupling with American astrophysicist Phoebe, leaving her marriage to university lecturer Daniel floundering in its wake.

In Porter’s hands, these stories lose none of their clout presented as verse than they would in a conventional narrative structure. These excerpts are palpable in their eroticism, fervent in their keening obsessiveness, and yes – to paraphrase Goldsmith – all-consuming in their passion. Porter unapologetically wears her sapphic bent on her sleeve, but love in all its myriad forms is a universal concept; her work should never be categorised by, or dismissed for, its sexual orientation. I am a straight woman, Andy is a gay man – and we took pretty much the same things out of Porter’s poetry (although admittedly I can’t really say that the line “you’re a wet socket/of white sea” made me want to throw up in my own mouth. Chuck Palahniuk’s Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm, on the other hand …)

In four years of ANRC, Porter’s is the third collection of poetry we have tackled, along with American poets Miller Williams (July 2009) and Thom Gunn (June 2010). All three have had their distinctive merits. Too often, I suspect, reading poetry is something we abandon as soon as we can – post-school, mostly. But we are poorer of spirit for doing so. Poetry definitely has its place beyond an English lit curriculum. And this definitely won’t be the last time you’ll be reading a poetry dissection on this blog.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get me one or two of Porter’s verse novels. And maybe a copy of The Monkey’s Mask on DVD. After all, just because you don’t want to jump in the pool, it doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally dip your toes in the water.

The same could be said for this volume of love poetry. Impressive, but not explosively so.

Some poets – Thom Gunn springs to mind, especially in his early phase – are difficult. Possibly deliberately difficult, certainly noticeably so. Porter isn’t that kind of poet. She lurks at the other end of the spectrum, her words deceptively simple, easy in fact almost too easy to read, poems you feel you’ve devoured in a few seconds, sometimes a minute or two. Easy peasy.

Thom Gunn’s difficult poems don’t always unlock when you read them again. And even if you feel you’re making some headway into what’s going on often what you get doesn’t seem just reward for the effort you’ve invested. I’m talking about Gunn’s earlier stuff here, obviously; his later poetry is often much more accessible on first reading, and richly rewards revisitation.

Porter’s poems can seem slight. OK, so you went for a drive along the beach with some chick – oh yeah, you’re a lesbian, yeah we got that bit – and you smoked some cigarettes and then you did something in the back of the car or maybe you didn’t maybe you just had a quick snog on the doorstep of this flat she lives in or that maybe you live in or possibly someone else  anyway it’s got a great view of Sydney Harbour although that beach we were driving along before that beach was in Manly.

None of Porter’s poems contains all of these elements,  although I think you’ll find all of them if you read all of this volume. Still, you read a poem about two people in a car and you get to the end and it’s just a poem about a couple of people in a car. Rewind, re-read, and it’s still a poem about two people in a car – but there’s a delicious surreptitiousness to the imagery she employs, there’s almost a deception going on sometimes. Re-read her poetry and realise that what look like throwaway lines are carefully constructed and richly imagined. Almost invisibly poetic.

Some people will tell you – tell me – that’s what poetry is supposed to be, you fucking moron. And deliciously surreptitious sounds like something Matt Preston would say on fucking MasterChef. Dickhead. They’re probably right. It’s just that a lot of poetry isn’t remotely like that at all. Porter’s is, though.

An example – probably not the best, but a favourite from early in the collection and very short, so easily reproduced:

COMETS I

There’s a white-blue nerve burning

across my night sky

I wish it hurt to watch

because then

I might stop.

Not impressed? Read it again.

Still not impressed? Read it again.

Porter has some interesting obsessions. Birds. Minoan mythology (one of her books was called Crete). Astronomy. Oh, and flange, obviously. Her poetry is littered – though not heavily – with references to lesbian sex. It’s not often explicit, although lines three and four of the first poem in this collection – “you’re a wet socket/of white sea” made me upchuck in my mouth if only very slightly. Problematically for me, being a) gay, and therefore pathologically obsessed with sex; but also b) gay, and therefore not terribly interested in ladies’ bits, sometimes I read these poems and possibly placed an interpretation upon them that was not intended. As in, perhaps I’m  completely deluded, and references to white seas and wet sockets actually mean …

OK, let’s not go there.

This collection has a few weaknesses. For the most part the song lyrics don’t work. Netty wants to hear them in context, with Paul Grabowski’s music. Fine. Buy the CD. They shouldn’t be in a collection of poetry. I’m not sure that extracts from her lyric novels should be here either, although some of the poetry on display is blisteringly good. Akenhaten, in which she imagines a pharoah’s sexual obsession with his younger brother, is particularly impressive. And no, I don’t want to root my brothers. Either of them. Ever. Did you get that? EVER. Hopefully they won’t be too offended by that. There is good stuff in extracts from The Monkey’s Mask and Wild Surmise (the last two words of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, incidentally … Coincidence?) but if I am going to read a collection of Porter’s poetry I would prefer to read it as she intended it to be read.

Her songs should be available to listen to, and it is. Her verse novels should be available to read in their entirety, and they are. And her stand-alone poetry needs to be compiled as a collection. Presumably this is happening now and will be available in the next year or two. If it’s not happening it should be. She is significant enough an Aussie writer to be receive that honour.

And this collection, impressive as it is for the most part, does not quite do her the justice she deserves.

I was completely won over by Auster’s New York Trilogy, and I seem to remember that Netty quite liked it too. I can’t remember if I had to fight to get it on the Revisited List (or whatever we’re calling this bit) this year, but he was a monty for me. Any writer who can not only overcome my distaste for post-modernism and metafiction, but win me over so utterly, deserves a second look.

With The Book of Illusions, Auster does it again. Possibly even more convincingly.

Before we begin… This post may contain spoilers. Or it may not. I haven’t really decided yet. That’s helpful, isn’t it?

David Zimmer, an academic, has lost his wife and two children in a plane crash. He’s effectively become a moribund drunk. Late one night his alcohol-bleared TV surfing leads him to a documentary about silent film stars. One of them, one he’d never heard of before, lodges in his mind and his imagination. Hector Mann made a small number of short comedies at the end of the silent era – and then disappeared. Zimmer becomes obsessed, tracks down and watches all of the existing Mann comedies, takes copious notes, collates his research, writes a book … and then one day a letter arrives …

I’ll dispense with the quibbles I had with the book first. There are a couple of weird, awkward moments early in the book that I think Auster tries to use to convey Zimmer’s blighted state of mind. One involves some drunken unpleasantness at a party, the other a minor car accident. Neither seem terribly necessary and neither works terribly well. But this might be because a) I don’t go to parties much; b) I don’t drive; and c) like Zimmer I’m a solitary drunk, and for me the embarrassments you inflict upon yourself drunk, in your own company, are often far more devastating than those others witness. Or maybe I’m making that bit up. Anyway, those couple of episodes are well written but not particularly well executed – but then they didn’t form vital elements of the narrative.

Arguably more important is the central slab of the book in which Zimmer is given the story of Mann’s life after he disappeared (no, he wasn’t dead, but that’s not really a spoiler because you get that bit from the blurb on the back cover). This is brilliantly written – I’m told Auster has written some not terribly awesome words, although I am yet to encounter them – but this is almost a weakness. The writing is superb but it sometimes doesn’t really feel like something Zimmer is being told – by someone, incidentally, who hadn’t experienced it herself but who is conveying details she herself has been told. So we are getting this account of Mann’s life third-hand from Zimmer – and yet it zings off the page with a vibrancy and an intimacy that belies its emotional and temporal distance. So a little unbelievable, perhaps. And yet beautiful to read. And utterly compulsive. And, unlike the party scene and the accident, so well executed that the reader is prepared to gloss over its unlikely details.

Like the New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions is a mystery, although it’s as different to those three stories as they were to each other. For the most part here the mystery is solved – although given that everything Zimmer is told is essentially hearsay there’s a wee leap of faith involved in that assumption. There are mysteries for the first third of the book, which then seem to be cleared up, for the most part; but then towards the end other mysteries arise and these, again, are only unravelled through a third party. Zimmer has a few things to hang his hat on – a fleeting meeting with an ancient man he is convinced is Hector Mann; a viewing of a film, one of many Mann is supposed to have made after he disappeared from Hollywood in the 2os. But really he only has the word of others to rely on. I don’t know that this is what Auster means by calling his novel The Book of Illusions – is the novel itself a collections of illusions? Perhaps. Certainly the conclusion, for my money (OK I’ve decided not to be toooooo much of a spoiler) is quite delusional – which puts me at odds with many of the critics. Auster brings his story “safely to earth with a very human simplicity”, says one critic on the back cover. Um. OK then. “The reader comes away from the dark ending of The Book of Illusions with a sense of hope,” says another. Really? A sense of humour, hopefully, and a dark one at that, but I don’t know about a sense of hope. “An emotional puzzle of one man’s broken heart that the author mends, page by ingenious page.” Well perhaps, arguably, if by “mends” you mean brings him to the point where he has to fantasise about the circumstances he has found himself in to survive. But perhaps that is one of Auster’s postmodernisty, metafictivy, existentialisty, nihilisticy points – that we all delude ourselves to get from one day to the next. Which is bollocks, IMHO, but if that is his point then by fuck he’s made it spectacularly. If not terribly convincingly. For me, at least.

The Book of Illusions is a book about cinema. Film. About images. About stories. About making films, and making stories. Telling stories. Making the stories you’re telling seem like the truth. Deluding people. Deluding yourself. Creating illusions. There are weaknesses but they are minor. This is seriously impressive fiction.

As with Roth and Bukowski, I am left wanting to read more of Auster. Right now. I have other things to do, unfortunately, other things to read, other things to write (hopefully). But I’ve already managed to get another Bukowski under my belt this year, in addition to Ham on Rye (and I can also, thanks to a certain Scotsman, heartily recommend Factotum). Roth will get a guernsey soon enough. And so will Auster.