Julian Novitz: My Real Life and Other Stories

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

If you chopped this book up into its component parts and published it at six-month intervals over eight years, it would work really well.

"Ah," readers would murmur, "another taste of drop-dead nihilist cool from that strong new Gen-X voice, Julian Novitz. Why doesn't he publish more often?"

Alas: Novitz has given us these 16 stories all in one go. I enjoyed the first one very much, and the second was fine. The third began to seem a little too much of a good thing, the fourth failed to offer anything new, and by number 16 I'd made it all the way down the emotional scale to contemptuous dislike.

But back to story one, in which we meet Phil, a drifting post-student Cantabrian cursed with an unplaceable accent. Anywhere in the world, people assume he's from somewhere else.

Phil's friends are clueless. His job is hopeless. His life is meaningless. And he needs a new flatmate. The end.

That's how it reads to me now. When I first read this story, I was struck by the wit, the irony, the sense of heightened reality: these are characters I've met many times, only in real life they don't get such good dialogue.

Phil and his friends are barely offstage before they turn up again, and again, and again. There's a great deal of skill in the way Novitz does this: a narrator in one story will be a walk-on in the next, the father of one story's main character will himself be at the centre of another.

Giving us a range of perspectives on the same events and personalities allows Novitz to create a kaleidoscope effect, showing off his ability to write in different voices while at the same time letting us see how different things look depending on who's looking at them.

Except that in this particular kaleidoscope, every piece of glass is muddy grey. Novitz gives his stories such a narrow emotional range that their final effect is chokingly claustrophobic: you're trapped in a world where the same faces keep recurring, and behind every pair of eyes is a sense that life is futile and empty.

Late in the book, one character tells a friend she's getting married. Her friend responds: "Since when did we become the commitment generation? What happened to all the chaos and the uncertainty and the casual sex we were supposed to be having? I was just starting to enjoy it and then it was over. Everything's over ..."

Especially my days as a willing reader of glib twenty-something angst.

* Vintage, $26.95