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"The dial is glued to
the
Top
40.
Spangly
guitars
and
flim-flammy
drums
and
sweetened
strings.
Glam
rock
and
slick
pop
and
teenybop
and
schlocky
ballads.
Theme
songs
to
television
shows
and
disaster
movies.
Singers
with
Cassidy
hair
and
Osmond
teeth,
wide
smiles
and
skinny
hips.
Songs
and
silver
ladies
and
s-s-s-single
beds.
Blue
jeans
and
ball
room
blitzes.
Mandy,
Jenny,
Alice
and
Betty.
I’m
not
in
love,
but
I
think
I
love
you,
summer
love
is
like
no
other
love,
and
we
may
never
love
like
this
again.
"
Reviewed by Annie Clarkson Nineteen Seventysomething is a collection of 15 connected short stories, each narrated by the same character Charlie, who grows from boy into teenager in an Australian suburb. The stories are on the shorter side of fiction, packed with seventies memorabilia, and at just less than 190 pages, this book gives us fleeting glimpses of a childhood and adolescence that feels distinctly autobiographical. Of course, it says on the back cover that this is fiction, but I would bet my old pink space hopper that Barry Divola draws from his own life and memories. The stories are infused with an almost nostalgic version of the seventies, with its wonderful trawl through the top 40, cartoons, bicycles and toys, and a list of the many girls Charlie has a crush on. An accumulative picture is created of a boy who, for all his brief disappointments, awkwardness, and clashes with odd characters in the town, has quite an ordinary life. There are no real betrayals, or traumas. This is growing up, with all the gawkiness, humour, sadness, and peer pressure that your average teenage boy might experience. Difficult subjects such as bullying, illness, grief for instance, are approached subtly, and not examined closely. Cruelty is exposed between kids at school, in a story such as Cicada Boy. Someone's mum "walked into a lot of things" in Progressive Dinner. But the overall balance in the collection is towards the lighter funny moments, the rites of passage such as smoking a first joint, going out with a girl with three nipples, and the banter between characters. Cartwheel Bill is an example of a story that at the heart of it should be desperately sad. It's about a 50 year old man with learning difficulties, the archetypal "village idiot" who does cartwheels for the kids, and shouts g'day at every passing car. For all the pathos contained within the story, there is probably more humour - the quips Charlie's dad makes about other people, the dynamics within the community, and the laughable hypocrisy of the church. There is focus on the oddballs in the community – those who are on the edges, who don't quite fit in. But they are written from the viewpoint of a boy who is not on the outside. He's not a loner or a weirdo, or the boy who is bullied or the one with terrible acne. He's the boy who's in a band, who does get girls (eventually) and has cool friends. As the old lady he visits every Saturday points out in Patience, "I hope you realise how good you've got it". Perhaps, this is the only drawback of the book. That the complexity of the adult world is hidden away or only half understood. There are hints of domestic violence and the regrets of an older person, but we are limited by the first person view of a teenager, and so the reader is left to read between the lines. Sometimes this feels a little frustrating. A collection of short fiction usually contains a diversity of voices and insights that help us to understand the world in a broader or more in depth way. However, any reader who remembers the seventies will struggle not to smile frequently when reading this book, as there are many references to films, music and popular culture. We are reminded how we felt the first time we saw the film Jaws and how it felt to be a teenager with its mix of desperation to impress, peer pressure, and gawkiness. The collection captures first sexual awareness with all the anticipation, humour and awfulness of being thirteen. There are quirky character descriptions, and the writer captures a very authentic journey from child to young adult, with all its pitfalls and triumphs, which thankfully can be read with the distance of no longer being in that place. Nineteen Seventysomething is well written and enjoyable. We might be stuck inside the mind of a boy/adolescent, but, the writing is charged with humour and will certainly provoke a few old songs and memories in those old enough to remember, and create a rich cultural landscape for those who are too young. |
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Barry Divola writes for magazines and newspapers including Rolling Stone, the (sydney) magazine, Who, and The Sydney Morning Herald. He is the author of three non-fiction books, and co-author of three children's books. He has won the Banjo Patterson Award for short fiction three times. Read
an interview
with Barry Divola |