Praise

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Bestselling Vogel Award-winning novel about sex, drugs and alcohol - and about being young in Australia.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Winner of the 1992 Vogel Award for best Australian first novel, this tale of 20-something disassociation compares favorably to American fiction of the same genre. As the story begins, narrator Gordon Buchanan quits his job as a beer-stacker at a drive-through bottle shop in Brisbane. He and his live-in girlfriend Cynthia LaMonde, a waitress, inhabit a world of casual sex, plentiful drugs and partying till dawn--pastimes that don't really give Gordon much pleasure, plagued as he is by a sense of being unfulfilled. Love affairs gone bad and fantasies undercut by reality are the norm for a generation that stops doing something the moment it becomes work, that wants to win without competing because making an effort would render victory meaningless. McGahan writes about this alienated milieu with dark honesty in the spare prose style that has become de rigueur for tales of post-adolescent discontent. His novel escapes the flatness of some of its American cousins because the narrator has no pretensions, very little money and an apparent inability to get any pleasure or release from sex. A good first novel with an honest ending. ( May ) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

This is a disturbing first novel from Australia, published there by Allen & Unwin. It is a novel about disaffected youth in contemporary Brisbane. The novel opens with the main character, Gordon, meeting Cynthia, and progresses through their four months together of steady sex, drugs, and alcohol. Gordon lives off the dole and among a circle of people who have not "passed into that netherworld of full-time career." In these four months Cynthia has an abortion and surgery for genital warts. Gordon is asthmatic and chain-smokes. They are physical and emotional wrecks. Cynthia loves Gordon and rails against his lack of love for her. Her willingness to rail is the only thing Gordon is able to believe in. Sex, explicitly described, is an addiction like their others. And when he refuses her sex, she leaves, though the leaving nearly kills them both. Everything depresses Gordon, despite his discovery of sexual competence; it becomes his comical refrain. McGahan's writing is plain to the point of plodding and is very effective for portraying his world of lassitude and despair. ~--Terry Farrish

Kirkus Book Review

Nothing life-affirming here--this prize-winning Australian first novel, straightforward and effective, immerses us in the drugs, sex, and general ennui of slackers Down Under. Young Gordon, having just quit his latest undemanding liquor- store job, has no ambitions beyond getting on the dole when he receives a call from--and starts an affair with--recently laid-off co-worker Cynthia. Though attractive to women (because, he says, having ``no particular life or commitments of my own, I was never going to threaten the life or commitments of anyone else''), he's unenthusiastic about sex; Cynthia, emotionally crippled in her own way, lives for it, impersonal or otherwise. Each also physically handicapped--he by life-threatening asthma, she by a skin-disease so acute that even gentle contact causes bleeding--they spend the next few months together, consuming drugs, having sex, coping with pregnancy, abortion, and venereal warts. Meanwhile, Gordon displays remarkable integrity avoiding commitment (``I preferred sausages, or pasta, or Chinese. Things you didn't have to chew''), splitting with Cynthia when love blooms--an integrity paralleled in long, frank, graphic depictions of distinctly untitillating sex: scenes that, despite their excess, are the opposite of exploitative. With Cynthia gone, Gordon commences an unsatisfying liaison with an old flame; lands in the hospital; and, told by the doctors to quit smoking or die, chooses the latter. A bestseller in Australia, but without the superficial glamour of a Less Than Zero (to which its US publishers would like it compared). Unlikely to achieve the same success here, but, still, a bold novel, distinct voice, and impressive debut.