Arguments about who should be writing what aside, it is rare to find a man who is able to write, with great insight, the interiority of women’s lives. In Shirley, Ronnie Scott accomplishes this for several women, although particularly his unnamed narrator. Scott writes her in the first person, a potentially fraught move as it assumes an air of authority that, if done badly, would leave him more exposed to criticisms about assumptions and cliches.
But I have none. Because he has created a woman who feels so familiar it seems that if Scott has not, in fact, been perched outside my window, then he has been paying close attention to the women around him. This quiet curiosity into domesticity is rare and rewards the reader with a deep understanding of the oddities of these particular characters in this precise time and place.
There’s an air of quiet resignation to Scott’s unnamed protagonist, who experiences the pandemic as “a comfortable time for me, alone in the apartment with my laptop and my vegetable boxes, my cooking and the quiet and my personal routines”. When her boyfriend, David (whose name is mentioned more often than any other in the novel), breaks up with her to explore his interest in men, she is reasonably unfazed. It begs the question, what does any of this mean? What does anything at all mean?
Scott, who was shortlisted for a Queensland literary award and the Australian Literature Society gold medal for his first novel The Adversary, has long been interested in human relations. His long essay Salad Days explored the way our cultural obsession with food informs and enhances our relationships, and The Adversary is about the possibilities and consequences of relationships forged through casual hook-ups, dating apps, and in the sprawling entanglements of mid-20s friendships. He writes frequently about intimacy and obligation and the ways that lives can turn on the briefest of encounters.
In Shirley, as The Adversary, the names of the central characters are oddly unspecified but there is a hyper specificity to place; the story gives you a map of itself, namedropping familiar Melbourne restaurants right down to the height of the tables and the intersecting street corners. It’s a kind of specificity that makes you aware of the lack of it in other books that chase universality. Shirley is constructed so completely, down to every brick of inner-city Melbourne, that you can feel its presence viscerally. Finishing the book comes with a sense of loss, that you won’t be able to just wander past the house or pop into our narrator’s apartment for a martini.
That’s not to say that people who unfamiliar with Melbourne won’t understand the novel. Scott writes with the narrative intimacy of someone like Helen Garner, inviting you deeply into a life the way a letter might, or (when you read the book you’ll get this) a cut copy email. Even the book’s title comes not from the name of one of the characters (as you might expect), but the house the narrator grew up in: a hint to the significance this place holds on her sense of who she is and, as it turns out, the events that transpire.
She is raised unconventionally, by one of the Geralds: men hired by her quasi-famous celebrity chef mother to do a variety of tasks. The main Gerald cuts a slightly melancholic figure, acting as a guardian over the young protagonist who, as an adult, treats him with a rude dismissiveness bordering on resentment. He lives upstairs in Shirley, a three-story townhouse, although we are told he has a home in St Kilda that he never seems to return to.
In Shirley’s basement there is a cage, and the mystery behind the cage and the basement and a photo that propels the protagonist and her mother into dubious infamy is tangled deliciously throughout the narrative, before revealing itself in the book’s final pages.
This teasing too seems to be signature Scott, who captures the peculiarities of his characters and amplifies them with a sort of absurd humour, although never going so far as slapstick or surreal. He’s cleverly restrained in all parts of his writing, with years spent as a writing teacher evident in tightly controlled prose and dialogue. The protagonist’s overuse of the name David throughout is one example of this, as it both aligns and alienates her from her ex, and signposts the blinkered way she encounters other, seemingly minor characters.
It is a relief to read a book like Shirley, which acknowledges the strange world we find ourselves in after the pandemic, without dwelling inside of it. Its precision of time and place is a marker of sorts, something that says we are really still here. We are really living.
Shirley by Ronnie Scott is published by Penguin Australia ($32.99)
