Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

Falling Into Their Mother's Countries

Falling Woman by Belinda Castles, Sceptre, 2000, $19.95, 216 pp.
NYC by Catherine Ford, Text Publishing, 2000, $27.40, 202 pp.

Reviewed by Allison Craven

Postmodern families and the placeless identities of city-dwellers are themes shared by NYC and Falling Woman. Both are the work of first-time novelists, although Ford is known for her prize-winning short-story collection, Dirt and Other Stories (Penguin 1996), and NYC has been nominated for the Age Book of the Year. These novels transmit 1990s girl-feminist rage that is displaced onto searches for love and meaning; searches apparently descended from parental disunion. Also searching for expression is a postfeminist politics of motherhood, contrived from the perspectives of critical daughters, and involving forms of rescue by father figures.

The plot of NYC resembles a Victorian family mystery in which a visitor from the past unleashes old secrets causing a house-of-cards-collapse of the existing network. There is a teasing little poststructuralist motif of body writing, Astrid's tattoo, first seen in her dream; a critical signpost that blends curiously in the family drama and triggers the denouement.

Falling Woman, in contrast, is stylistically reminiscent of early Helen Garner. The action is narrated in closely plotted televisual dissolves and dependent on a prosaic tension and a labyrinthine system of myth and metaphors of towers, height, flying, vertigo, suspension, landings, falling, which tend to fall flat in such a short novel. It is also a tale of unremitting and sometimes implausible woe, a layered tragedy with a prologue, rather Greek, in which the climactic tragedy of the love story is foretold.

In Falling Woman, Becca leaves England, motherland and her mother and descends to Sydney. She works at Sydney Tower waiting tables (Rapunzel in her tower?), witnesses the suicide of an unknown woman and her daughter from the Tower, takes a holiday, meets a lover who has a brother (princes ascending the tower?) then, as the love stories form, develops an obsession about the suicide. An escape to her father's place in the unerotic suburbs forms a narrative caesura to the eventual tragic outcomes of the original fall.

The titular present participle of the past patriarchal, “fallen woman”, signals that the heroine, Becca, is also plunging down amidst the dramatic metaphor of the loaded title. Barely suggested is the hope of rescue as Becca leaps from Sydney Tower, next working as a cocktail waitress in a strip club in Kings Cross, figured as Sydney's Gorkyesque “lower depths”.

Sydney is the great character of this novel, the city that pales into view against England, Becca's motherland, activating several binary myths: England and Australia, city and coast (Queensland beaches), city and suburbs, mother and father. There are Boys in the city, and Boys on the beach. Jonathan and Adam, dual lovers, are both fall guys to falling Beccy (she is somewhat unshrewdly caught in a “bonking two at once” love triangle). The boys in this postfeminist imaginary are as committed to bonking as to navel gazing and equally prone to duplicity, embodied in their twin-like character.

For all the sexual energy, the pulse of the novel flags in grunge gravitas and trivialising detail around waiting for a phone call; and wanders in chaotic images of motherhood: the suicidal child-killing mother, Kathy, and Becca's own abandoning mother of inexplicable motive. These explorations seem to produce nothing but dystopian reflection on the heroine's own existence especially as she fails in her own resolve not to return to her mother's land.

NYC presents unsympathetic motherhood in ways that owe something to teenage fiction. Indeed, both novels share configurations of present and absent mother figures while “mother” remains a “speciously fixed sign”, as identified in teenager genres by Heather Scutter (Displaced Fictions, Melbourne University Press, 1999). In NYC, an adopted Melbourne daughter, Astrid, ascends to the United States to meet her birth mother, Carol Brickman, a pen pal since childhood. Astrid's adopting mother is seen at home in traumatised reflection on her love for Astrid, while the daughter swerves from the reunion with Carol and the tale becomes a counter-reunion story. Then, in a winding twist, Astrid's paternity becomes more important to her and the mystery of the identity of her father is pursued and revealed, as in a whodunit, in the very last line of the book.

The prosaic tensions are between USA and Melbourne (the Americans have some “you Australians are funny” lines). The visited country is the home/birthplace of mother and heroine and the city of New York is a central character as, for Astrid, NYC represents the overwhelming “combination of mother and city”. The ensuing emotional struggles are believable until Astrid is moved to violence against her mother then becomes fixated on her mysterious father, while Carol Brickman becomes a lonely old hippie again, rejected and essentially childless. As Astrid's secondary journey develops, in which Gary and Astrid pursue her “father”, in a road tale of motel-room kind, the story transmutes into that rare Australian genre, tom-girls and their dads, The Shiralee Does NYC.

The America of NYC is that of Australian urban imagining, cabs, Broadway and the Met, that transforms in Astrid's eyes into a jaded character, a place of the past, of Woodstock and hippies, the milieu of her “natural” parents. Astrid grows not to like it, even though it is her birthplace and she has “NYC” tattooed on her shoulder like a brand-name. Instead, America becomes a disparaged treat, a novelty unmasked, and the place of bad, incompetent parents. Astrid's emotions are confusing as the story advances, and the sense of the meaningless of her own search overwhelms her in a way that Becca never experiences.

Communication with others frustrates both heroines. Perhaps Astrid's initial reunion with Carol may have been less recriminatory if they had first corresponded by email; the dated distance of their letter-writing somehow ages this story or possibly symbolises the awesome distance between adoptees and their birth mothers. Becca's communications, though, all seem doomed in the breathy narrative and unwieldy mythic landscape from which there is no escape, only a dismal womb to which to return - but chosen in preference, apparently, to her father's suburban bungalow. While Astrid's personal goals are fulfilled, for neither heroine is there a truly happy ending to be found in their motherlands.

Allison Craven has a PhD in English from Monash University and teaches gender studies and media studies in Melbourne.

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

Falling Into Their Mother's Countries Falling Woman by Belinda Castles, Sceptre, 2000, $19.95, 216 pp. NYC by Catherine Ford, Text Publishing, 2000, $27.40, 202 pp. Reviewed by Allison Craven Postmodern families and the placeless identities of city-dwellers are themes shared by NYC and Falling Woman. Both are the work of first-time novelists, although Ford is known for her prize-winning short-story collection, Dirt and Other Stories (Penguin 1996), and NYC has been nominated for the Age Book of the Year. These novels transmit 1990s girl-feminist rage that is displaced onto searches for love and meaning; searches apparently descended from parental disunion. Also searching for expression is a postfeminist politics of motherhood, contrived from the perspectives of critical daughters, and involving forms of rescue by father figures. The plot of NYC resembles a Victorian family mystery in which a visitor from the past unleashes old secrets causing a house-of-cards-collapse of the existing network. There is a teasing little poststructuralist motif of body writing, Astrid's tattoo, first seen in her dream; a critical signpost that blends curiously in the family drama and triggers the denouement. Falling Woman, in contrast, is stylistically reminiscent of early Helen Garner. The action is narrated in closely plotted televisual dissolves and dependent on a prosaic tension and a labyrinthine system of myth and metaphors of towers, height, flying, vertigo, suspension, landings, falling, which tend to fall flat in such a short novel. It is also a tale of unremitting and sometimes implausible woe, a layered tragedy with a prologue, rather Greek, in which the climactic tragedy of the love story is foretold. In Falling Woman, Becca leaves England, motherland and her mother and descends to Sydney. She works at Sydney Tower waiting tables (Rapunzel in her tower?), witnesses the suicide of an unknown woman and her daughter from the Tower, takes a holiday, meets a lover who has a brother (princes ascending the tower?) then, as the love stories form, develops an obsession about the suicide. An escape to her father's place in the unerotic suburbs forms a narrative caesura to the eventual tragic outcomes of the original fall. The titular present participle of the past patriarchal, “fallen woman”, signals that the heroine, Becca, is also plunging down amidst the dramatic metaphor of the loaded title. Barely suggested is the hope of rescue as Becca leaps from Sydney Tower, next working as a cocktail waitress in a strip club in Kings Cross, figured as Sydney's Gorkyesque “lower depths”. Sydney is the great character of this novel, the city that pales into view against England, Becca's motherland, activating several binary myths: England and Australia, city and coast (Queensland beaches), city and suburbs, mother and father. There are Boys in the city, and Boys on the beach. Jonathan and Adam, dual lovers, are both fall guys to falling Beccy (she is somewhat unshrewdly caught in a “bonking two at once” love triangle). The boys in this postfeminist imaginary are as committed to bonking as to navel gazing and equally prone to duplicity, embodied in their twin-like character. For all the sexual energy, the pulse of the novel flags in grunge gravitas and trivialising detail around waiting for a phone call; and wanders in chaotic images of motherhood: the suicidal child-killing mother, Kathy, and Becca's own abandoning mother of inexplicable motive. These explorations seem to produce nothing but dystopian reflection on the heroine's own existence especially as she fails in her own resolve not to return to her mother's land. NYC presents unsympathetic motherhood in ways that owe something to teenage fiction. Indeed, both novels share configurations of present and absent mother figures while “mother” remains a “speciously fixed sign”, as identified in teenager genres by Heather Scutter (Displaced Fictions, Melbourne University Press, 1999). In NYC, an adopted Melbourne daughter, Astrid, ascends to the United States to meet her birth mother, Carol Brickman, a pen pal since childhood. Astrid's adopting mother is seen at home in traumatised reflection on her love for Astrid, while the daughter swerves from the reunion with Carol and the tale becomes a counter-reunion story. Then, in a winding twist, Astrid's paternity becomes more important to her and the mystery of the identity of her father is pursued and revealed, as in a whodunit, in the very last line of the book. The prosaic tensions are between USA and Melbourne (the Americans have some “you Australians are funny” lines). The visited country is the home/birthplace of mother and heroine and the city of New York is a central character as, for Astrid, NYC represents the overwhelming “combination of mother and city”. The ensuing emotional struggles are believable until Astrid is moved to violence against her mother then becomes fixated on her mysterious father, while Carol Brickman becomes a lonely old hippie again, rejected and essentially childless. As Astrid's secondary journey develops, in which Gary and Astrid pursue her “father”, in a road tale of motel-room kind, the story transmutes into that rare Australian genre, tom-girls and their dads, The Shiralee Does NYC. The America of NYC is that of Australian urban imagining, cabs, Broadway and the Met, that transforms in Astrid's eyes into a jaded character, a place of the past, of Woodstock and hippies, the milieu of her “natural” parents. Astrid grows not to like it, even though it is her birthplace and she has “NYC” tattooed on her shoulder like a brand-name. Instead, America becomes a disparaged treat, a novelty unmasked, and the place of bad, incompetent parents. Astrid's emotions are confusing as the story advances, and the sense of the meaningless of her own search overwhelms her in a way that Becca never experiences. Communication with others frustrates both heroines. Perhaps Astrid's initial reunion with Carol may have been less recriminatory if they had first corresponded by email; the dated distance of their letter-writing somehow ages this story or possibly symbolises the awesome distance between adoptees and their birth mothers. Becca's communications, though, all seem doomed in the breathy narrative and unwieldy mythic landscape from which there is no escape, only a dismal womb to which to return - but chosen in preference, apparently, to her father's suburban bungalow. While Astrid's personal goals are fulfilled, for neither heroine is there a truly happy ending to be found in their motherlands. Allison Craven has a PhD in English from Monash University and teaches gender studies and media studies in Melbourne.