Down under
Breakdowns -- mechanical, corporeal, communication -- figure prominently in Cate Kennedy’s story collection, “Dark Roots” (Black Cat: 194 pp., $13 paper). This is a universe where lovers, spouses, co-workers can’t get through to each other. Will stops them. Language stops them. Intensive-care units stop them.
But while Kennedy’s tales chronicle exhaustion of the mental, physical and emotional sort, the Australian writer also shows how we allow chaos into our lives because we sense the benefits will outweigh the downsides. Says a man says of his wife: “I would rather have her filling in the blank spots, even complaining, even shouting, than silent.”
In “The Correct Name of Things,” a woman named Ellen works in a Chinese restaurant below a brothel. One of the brothel workers, a girl of 17, is paid by men to shower for them. “All night as I pack and add up and ask if people want forks or chopsticks,” says Ellen, “I am thinking of her, drying herself and getting back into the shower, over and over. Dreamily, I stare at Joey’s hands guiding the cleaver, that repeated, precise bending of the finger, shaving so close to catastrophe and blood.” Sometimes, silence can be more important than language in these precisely rendered capsules of life.
This is one-step-in-front-of-the-other writing. A woman on the cusp of middle age wonders why her teenager would feel a need for youthful rebellion. “Rachel is cooking cauliflower cheese when her daughter tells her she has joined a band and they will be practising in the rumpus room starting next Saturday. . . . Rachel . . . musing like a bewildered spectator, wonders if the problem is television.”
These are mere observers in a drama of their own making, unwilling -- no, unable -- to act. They can be acted upon only by larger-than-life forces that turn out to be, indeed, life. In Kennedy’s world, it’s not all dark. Really. Just the roots.
-- Orli Low