Joey Harb possesses no fighting spirit, despite his surname meaning “war” in Arabic. He’s aimless and apathetic: meandering through his young life in western Sydney as a produce assistant at Woolworths, while being indulged by his grandmother Elaine, dabbling in drugs with his good friend Kyri, and getting on his mother Amal’s nerves. Everyone, he thinks, “feels the need to judge his existence”, but that doesn’t propel him to do anything about it.
Nothing changes when he finds himself among a group of young men arrested for a violent sexual crime. The fact that he sees the possible two-year prison sentence as “doable” suddenly adds a layer of meaning to the novel’s opening sentence, which tells us that he likes his banh mi with extra chilli, “because it numbed his mouth and he liked numbness”.
It’s this passivity that makes the main character of George Haddad’s Losing Face so simultaneously frustrating and endearing. Within a strong and multilayered story, which follows Joey and Elaine in alternating chapters, Haddad presents us with the impact of intergenerational trauma, woven through a sharp appraisal of modern masculinity and its underlying misogyny. Addiction, bitterness, complacency and abandonment underpin the characters’ stories, but it’s the examination of consent that inspires the most thought.
The author’s depiction of rape culture is deftly handled: realistic and confronting, and not simply used as fodder for Joey’s growth as a character. Joey knows something is afoot from the moment the young woman is approached by his peers, but his silence in the face of what is unfolding in a public park is telling. It’s a subtle and profound reminder that it’s not a “yes” if there is no clear “no”; the limited focus on the young woman throughout the eventual trial reflects the broader lack of empathy and justice victims face in the public sphere.
Haddad colours the crime scene with drug use, in a clever reminder of our ability to still recognise and right wrongs even through clouded judgment. The onus is on the reader to see things for what they are: the consequences of an insistent patriarchal culture that doesn’t pause to consider the rights and needs of others in pursuit of its own want; the entitlement that can breed a take-take attitude in men, regardless of their background.
These big-picture themes are enhanced by the little details that vividly place the narrative in Sydney’s west: the top-of-the-line Range Rovers and Mercedes four wheelers in Greenacre, a suburb “trying too hard to play catch-up with other parts of Sydney”; the queue-jumping in the barbershops of Bankstown; the bubble tea craze in Canley Vale; and the Virgin Mary pendants worn as badges of identity around the necks of a particular generation of Lebanese woman.
One such woman is Elaine, Joey’s doting grandmother, who has a secret habit that threatens to undo the life she sacrificed so much for as a new bride, and new migrant, in Australia. Even after decades on Earth and many years as a widow, Elaine still cares about saving face in a community that thrives on gossip; she’s experienced too much otherness to risk more ostracisation. Her efforts to conceal her own indiscretions are compounded by her need to protect her wayward grandson. In many ways she is the novel’s heart, and the family’s moral centre. But it’s her daughter Amal, Joey’s mother, who I wish I had seen more of. As a first-generation born Australian, her story would have intricacies and contradictions worth exploring: she’s spent the last decade raising her boys as a single mother and is at last ready to live for herself, if given the chance.
Losing Face is rich in scope and substance, but it isn’t the quintessential coming of age story. There’s no sense that Joey is any wiser when you turn the final page. In this vein, Haddad has written something of a universal truth for a particular type of Sydney sub-culture, embodied in a character whose mistakes are brought on by a life lived at the intersections of identity, the lack of role models who have navigated the same struggles of in-betweenness, and the familial tensions that are complicated by traditions and debts traced back to the old country.
Haddad’s characters don’t have the luxury of finding themselves or rising above their lot in life. Instead, they’re just trying to get through the here and now. Despite this, and in a move of impeccable storytelling, Haddad offers them hope. For instance, Joey’s only kiss in the story, when “his whole universe folded up real tight for a second before it burst into absolute and unequivocal harmony”, and he’s on the cusp of discovering a whole new world.
This hope is subtle, redemptive, simple, and it makes Losing Face a stunning work: an evocative exploration of what it means to falter and to flail, to rise each day knowing your setbacks are embedded deep within you, and to turn up for the people you love even though they’re as screwed up as you are.
Losing Face by George Haddad is published by UQP ($29.99)
