Stacey D'Erasmo: Tea

By SHONAGH LINDSAY

This novel traces the adolescence and early adulthood of Isabel, whose mother, Cassie, committed suicide when Isabel was prepubescent.

Isabel describes Cassie obliquely, more by what she isn't or doesn't become than by what she was to her while alive. It seems that her mother was an unfinished person - talents and pursuits scattered, promise early defeated - and it's through this legacy that Tea picks its way as Isabel integrates her mother's death into the choices she makes for her own life.

Quietly informing this novel, set in the 1970s, is a sense of the boundaries that had so recently defined female choice, which, although being swiftly dismantled by the time Isabel is a teenager, leaves a faint question mark over her mother's mental health.

Isabel has options her mother did not, but while her external landscape may appear very different - non-heterosexual, permissive, non-conformist - her internal one is perhaps not so dissimilar.

Her mother's unfinished business has occupied the space in which Isabel plots her own path and, even if this is markedly different to the remainder of her family's eccentric responses (sister obsessed with dogs, father with cleanliness and order) it nevertheless leaves her vulnerable to circumstance.

D'Erasmo creates a memorable portrait of brave youth in Isabel - the sort of bravery that faces the dissolution of a passionate friendship without self-pity, the winter-cold poverty of a New York railroad apartment with creativity and good humour, and the yawning gap between where she wants to be and where she is with only momentary lapses of self-confidence.

She makes you want to revisit your own early adulthood, scary place though it was, to feel again such naive courage and all-consuming sexuality. That Isabel's sexuality is gay does not change this universality, it simply gives it another outline.

However, the sudden removal of her lover's warmth leaves her exposed, still fragile in a newly hatched identity, underlined by the subtle yet powerful presence of her dead mother.

It's a tribute to D'Erasmo's talent that this novel is never bleak, there's an ironic humour behind every character, and somehow we know Isabel is going to make it.

The Women's Press

$29.95