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WORK TITLE: The Australian
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1982
WEBSITE: http://emmasmithstevens.com/
CITY: Hudson Valley
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://emmasmithstevens.com/bio/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2016064836
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2016064836
HEADING: Smith-Stevens, Emma, 1982-
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400 1_ |a Stevens, Emma Smith-
670 __ |a The Australian, 2017: |b CIP t.p. (Emma Smith-Stevens) data view (“Birth date: 5/10/1982; Emma Smith-Stevens’ writing has appeared in Subtropics, Conjunctions, Day One, Wigleaf, Joyland, and many other publications. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and has taught fiction workshops, literature, and composition at the University of Florida and Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL. Originally from New York City, she lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband”)
PERSONAL
Born May 10, 1982; married.
EDUCATION:Bard College, B.A.; University of Florida, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and educator. Teacher of fiction workshops, literature, and composition, University of Florida, and Santa Fe College, Gainesville, FL, and Bard College Prison Initiative. Also worked as server at pancake house in Delray Beach, FL, gift-wrapper in Boca Raton, BL, personal assistant in Los Angeles, CA, and as scriptwriter for virtual patients used by nursing students.
WRITINGS
Also author of Greyhounds (short story collection). Contributor to anthologies, including Roxane Gay, editor, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2018; and Elee Kraljii Gardiner, editor, Against Death, Anvil Press. Contributor to periodicals, including BOMB Magazine, Conjunctions, Day One, Hobart, Joyland, Literary Hub, Lucky Peach, Subtropics, and Wigleaf.
SIDELIGHTS
Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of The Australian, a novel based a real character she encountered in New York City when she was a drug-addicted teenager. “The protagonist of my novel The Australian, who is only ever referred to as `the Australian,’ was inspired by a man I knew for one day—mid-30s, savagely handsome, verbose, and Australian, of course—when I was nineteen,” Smith-Stevens stated in an interview appearing in the blog Largehearted Boy. “He talked, delivering a hyper-monologue—the details of his life like projectiles that, to this day, remain lodged in my mind. He’d put himself through university in Melbourne by dressing as Superman and posing for tourist photos…. At twenty-three he’d moved to New York to work on Wall Street as a day trader and was now a venture capitalist. ” Smith-Stevens left the Australian’s apartment that afternoon and never saw the man again, but he left a strong impression on her. After reading the self-help book he gave her, she sought help for her addiction. “After that encounter he became a memory,” the author declared in Fiction Advocate, “which years later became a brief character sketch, which was subsequently forgotten, and then found and read and built upon until it was a long Microsoft Word document, which was then edited and edited and copyedited—and now it’s a novel! So, I owe that fellow—big time.” “In retrospect and from a certain angle,” Smith-Stevens concluded in Largehearted Boy, “that man—the real Australian, as I think of him now—saved my life.”
The character in the novel The Australian is a man caught between the expectations he has had for his life and the realities of his situation. “Estranged from his mother in Melbourne and suffering from the absence of the adventurer father he never met,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “the Australian has always been unsure of himself.” “On the streets of Melbourne, the Australian parades around dressed as Superman, paying his way through university by posing for photos,” Smith-Stevens explained in an excerpt from the novel appearing in BOMB Magazine. “He is smart—smart enough to know when effort is absolutely required and when he can fake it—and he is handsome, with chiseled abdominal muscles underneath the chiseled abdominal muscles of his costume. He smiles widely, his teeth luminous, his canines threatening. All his life, he has been indiscriminate with his enthusiasm, invincible within the hedonistic splendor of the present moment, like some kind of inverted Buddha.” “After graduation, the Australian moves to New York to work on Wall Street,” Smith-Stevens continued. “After six months of trying to reckon with his haughty overseer, he quits the brokerage firm and goes to work for himself. He takes the money he has recently inherited from his estranged father … and triples it within eight months through some risky and uncalculated investments. The Australian knows he has struck upon the kind of luck that can turn on you in a heartbeat.” “Smith-Stevens proves that the picaresque will never die, not as long as there are characters like her titular, never-named fellow,” said Bethanne Patrick in Literary Hub. “It’s a bit like reading a loose biography of Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords, if Jemaine were Australian instead of from New Zealand and an aimless git instead of a musician git, but the tone is the same: Droll, quick, and occasionally cruel.”
After making a small fortune in investments, the Australian enters into a marriage with an American woman opens a club that enjoys a brief success, and becomes a father. When he learns that his mother is suffering from a fatal disease, however, he feels compelled to see her again. “As the Australian returns to his homeland seeking hope, redemption, and happiness,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “readers are treated to a captivating … journey.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2017, review of The Australian.
Publishers Weekly, May 1, 2017, review of The Australian.
ONLINE
BOMB Magazine, https://bombmagazine.org/ (May 5, 2017), “From The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens.”
Emma Smith-Stevens Website, http://emmasmithstevens.com (February 21, 2018), author profile.
Fiction Advocate, http://fictionadvocate.com/ (May 16, 2017), author interview.
Largehearted Boy, http://www.largeheartedboy.com/ (May 24, 2017), author interview; review of The Australian.
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (June 12, 2017), Bethanne Patrick, “5 Books You May Have Missed This May.”
Debut novel The Australian (Dzanc Books) out now!
Emma Smith-Stevens
Welcome
The Australian
Writing
Bio
News
Contact
So I Know You're Real
Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of a novel, The Australian (Dzanc Books). She grew up in New York City and has worked as a server at a pancake house in Delray Beach, Florida, a gift-wrapper in Boca Raton, a personal assistant in Los Angeles, a scriptwriter for virtual patients used by nursing students, and an instructor at the University of Florida, Santa Fe College, and the Bard College Prison Initiative.
Smith-Stevens' writing has appeared in many print and online publications including BOMB Magazine, Literary Hub, Subtropics, Conjunctions, Joyland, Hobart, and Lucky Peach, and has essays forthcoming in the anthologies Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture (Ed. Roxane Gay, Harper Perennial) and Against Death (Ed. Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Anvil Press). Her short story "An August in the Early 2000's," published in Wigleaf, received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses. Her work has twice been selected for inclusion in Wigleaf 's Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions, and she is currently a nominee for a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship. She holds a B.A. in literature from Bard College and an M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Florida. She recently completed a story collection entitled Greyhounds and is currently writing a memoir.
Print Marked Items
Smith-Stevens, Emma: THE AUSTRALIAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Smith-Stevens, Emma THE AUSTRALIAN Dzanc (Adult Fiction) $26.95 5, 16 ISBN: 978-1-941088-74-6
An Australian man struggles to find himself.Titled after its unnamed hero, Smith-Stevens' first novel follows
a directionless young Australian man in New York and Down Under. From his life as a recent college
graduate working on Wall Street to his romance with the woman he later marries to his embrace of parkour
to his years as an unemployed house-husband tending to his son and living off his unhappy wife's largesse,
Smith-Stevens' protagonist shuffles through life as an isolated and passive observer. But his alienation has
deeper roots. Estranged from his mother in Melbourne and suffering from the absence of the adventurer
father he never met, the Australian has always been unsure of himself and his place in the world (as the
reader comes to see through flashbacks). So when he finds out that his mother is sick, he returns to his
boyhood home to tend to her in her final days, hoping to reconnect with not just homeland, but with himself.
While Smith-Stevens' evocation of alienation is often profound and her prose is always beautiful, the novel
seems to lack a sense of purpose. When the Australian remembers a childhood assignment to meditate on
the concept of duende--a notoriously hard-to-translate Spanish word that the novel defines as "the spirit of
evocation, soul, and creative expression"-- it seems ironic, because it is the exact quality, namely the sense
of a soul, that Smith-Stevens' frequently listless novel lacks. Throughout the entirety of the book, the
Australian simply is, and while his motivations or interior life are always clear, he never really becomes
more than the cipher that his name suggests. A protagonist--and a novel--without any real sense of purpose.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Smith-Stevens, Emma: THE AUSTRALIAN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105312/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=086c37fd.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105312
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The Australian
Emma Smith-Stevens. Dzanc (PGW, dist.), $26.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-941088-74-6
In her mesmerizing debut, Smith-Stevens reveals the inner life of a man who describes himself as “the patron saint of trying.” The first view of the titular character (who is never given a proper name) is in his Australian homeland, where he’s a young adult parading around as Superman—living in the skin of a superhero, lapping up tourist attention. After college graduation, he’s off to America, landing in Wall Street. The trajectory of his life bounces from one happenstance to the next—venture capitalism, dabbling with cocaine, meeting his future wife in a bar, making and losing a fortune, becoming obsessed with parkour, fathering a child, and becoming a reality TV star. Ever the seeker, he is shaped by a past with no father and a smothering mother. The author imbues the Australian’s constant search for himself with humor and depth while she delves into relationships of all stripes—between parents and children, between spouses, even among polyamorous partners—as well as the vagaries of fame, balancing the main character’s self-indulgence with his genuine need to connect with the people in his life. As the Australian returns to his homeland seeking hope, redemption, and happiness, readers are treated to a captivating and memorable journey. (May)
Reviewed on: 05/01/2017
Release date: 05/01/2017
The Australian
5 Books You May Have Missed This May
From Wandering Australians to Interspecies Intrigue
June 12, 2017 By Bethanne Patrick
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Readers (you’re out there, aren’t you?), I just returned from this year’s Book Expo, where I was on a panel about “Finding Hidden Gems.” I think what I contributed made sense, but I was too busy listening to my fellow panelists to be sure, and that’s fine. My takeaway from the panel is that the phrase “hidden gems” means different things to different critics. One writer might be searching for a book on a certain subject, another for a book so unique no one has previously written about its subject. We might have different criteria for what constitutes a hidden gem; what we all agreed on is that books that are hidden gems make reviewing the more mundane titles worthwhile.
May’s new titles included big big books, like a new Paula Hawkins, a new Dennis Lehane, and a new J. Courtney Sullivan, along with some terrific midlist entries like Susan Rieger’s The Heirs, Richard Russo’s story collection Trajectory, and Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan. However, I was busy combing the stacks for the books that constitute hidden gems to me: Books that haven’t found their way onto the Best of Summer lists, books by women and by people of color and by writers from other countries, books that I hope will surprise and delight you with their perspectives and literary worth.
how to be human
Paula Cocozza, How to Be Human
How to Be Human is Paula Cocozza’s debut. A writer for The Guardian, Cocozza says in her bio that she has “a garden full of foxes,” a cheeky nod to her novel’s vulpine London, a city in which such gardens are common. Protagonist Mary has a fox in her own garden, a baby next door, and difficulty fixing her own identity in a world that doesn’t need her skills or want her child-free status. She may be going mad, but soon Mary is transfixed by the fox, even in love with him—a downward spiral that has echoes of Pond by Claire Bennett in the narrator’s self-absorbed world. “His rudeness riled her. . .” thinks Mary. “He was trespassing brazenly.” But the fox and Mary both know that he isn’t, know that humans and foxes are interdependent, even as the humans suspect the fox may have had something to do with the next-door baby being plopped onto Mary’s back steps. A chilling story about what happens when our supposedly civilized world overlaps with that of supposed beasts.
vitalis danon
Vitalis Danon, Ninette of Sin Street (trans. Jane Kuntz)
Yes, Ninette of Sin Street by Vitalis Danon was first published in 1938—but you haven’t read it yet, have you? Stanford University Press has re-issued this classic of Franco-Tunisian-Jewish literature with letters, notes, and an editors’ introduction to introduce Danon’s novel of colonial realism to a new millennium. The eponymous Ninette is a prostitute who wants her son to have all the education and chances she did not. As it opens, Ninette is speaking, in her trademark blunt style, to the director of the Jewish school she hopes will accept her son. “My son’s name, you ask? I just said it, didn’t I? Israel. Israel what? How am I supposed to know? You’re cleverer than me: What do you call a kid who’s missing a father?” Co-edited by UCLA professors Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Danon’s plainspoken, canny heroine comes to life not only as a classic example of rags-to-riches, but also as a universal example of colonial hardship.
use of fame
Cornelia Nixon, The Use of Fame
Cornelia Nixon’s The Use of Fame was released by Counterpoint on May 1, and perhaps over the summer more readers—and reviewers—will find their way to this gorgeous examination of marriage and its discontents. Nixon, to my mind, deserves extra kudos for managing to make a marriage between two creatives (literature professor Abigail McCormick and poet Ray Stark) the stuff of imaginative, and not insufferable, fiction. Abby (60) and Ray (52) have been married for 25 years and currently live on opposite coasts—Ray is at Brown, Abby at Berkeley. There is financial and medical instability, sexual and emotional infidelity, and much more, showing that the terrain of commitment can be just as difficult to negotiate as any other. More important—what defines commitment? What defines long-lasting love? Ray and Abby don’t have a traditional relationship, but they also don’t want to give each other up or deny their history, and in this respect Nixon has written something if not precisely modern, at least refreshing in its honesty.
Jia Pingwa, The Lantern Bearer
Jia Pingwa is the winner of Mao Dun Literature Prize, Pu Songling Literature Short Story Prize, French Prix Femina ètranger and more than ten other prizes. Perhaps with The Lantern Bearer readers in the United States will be won over by this Chinese novelist whose previous books include Ruined City, Turbulence, and Happy Dreams. In a small community called Cherry Town deep in Shanxi’s Qinling Mountains a young woman named Daideng is appointed the director of the office of social management. “Daideng” means “lantern bearer,” connoting “firefly,” and she lives up to her name as she attempts to illuminate her community’s problems. Pingwa has set many of his stories in barren Shanxi, a region whose natural resources were plundered over centuries by various dynasties intent on the area’s once-plentiful hardwoods and wildlife. The novelist understands that arid geography can still have the detailed mundanity of human existence that all great literature holds.
Emma Smith-Stevens, The Australian
The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens proves that the picaresque will never die, not as long as there are characters like her titular, never-named fellow. It’s a bit like reading a loose biography of Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords, if Jemaine were Australian instead of from New Zealand and an aimless git instead of a musician git, but the tone is the same: Droll, quick, and occasionally cruel. Some reviews have said the novel is as aimless as its protagonist, but those miss the true dilemma at the heart of being The Australian—never feeling completely at home, as traveling from one continent to another (and sometimes another, and another) seems to increase distance from home and self in equal proportion. When The Australian returns to visit his ill mother, he hopes to reach the peace that eludes him elsewhere. Will he, or won’t he? Readers won’t care, because Smith-Stevens keeps the irony coming even in the tenderest moments (after The Australian decides to become a devoted parent, for example, he witnesses a father pulling out a potty in the middle of a supermarket). We wouldn’t want it any other way.
Largehearted Boy is a literature and music website that explores that spot in the Venn diagram where the two arts overlap.
May 24, 2017
Book Notes - Emma Smith-Stevens "The Australian"
The Australian
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Christensen, Lauren Groff, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Jesmyn Ward, Heidi Julavits, Hari Kunzru, and many others.
Emma Smith-Stevens' brilliant novel The Australian is one of the funniest (and smartest) debuts I have read in years.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"In her mesmerizing debut, Smith-Stevens reveals the inner life of a man who describes himself as 'the patron saint of trying.'"
In her own words, here is Emma Smith-Stevens' Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel The Australian:
The protagonist of my novel The Australian, who is only ever referred to as "the Australian," was inspired by a man I knew for one day—mid-30s, savagely handsome, verbose, and Australian, of course—when I was nineteen. I met him in a coffee shop in the West Village and wound up hanging out at his place on Mercer Street.
His loft was sleek and sparsely furnished: all stainless steel and black leather. We snorted some very pure Colombian cocaine, I removed a tape from my Walkman and popped it into his massive sound system, and we talked. Well, mostly he talked, delivering a hyper-monologue—the details of his life like projectiles that, to this day, remain lodged in my mind. He'd put himself through university in Melbourne by dressing as Superman and posing for tourist photos. He was a voracious reader of self-help books, which filled two large bookshelves. At twenty-three he'd moved to New York to work on Wall Street as a day trader and was now a venture capitalist. (My parents were artists, I grew up in TriBeCa, my education had been "progressive," and the business-world was foreign and abstract. In combination with his accent and my ignorance of what the phrase "venture capitalist" meant, his occupation made him very exotic.) And his refrigerator—I noticed—contained nothing but six bottles of champagne.
At some point he abruptly stopped talking and kissed me. We were sitting on the edge of his low-to-the-floor palate bed with a glossy black headboard. I enjoyed the feeling of his lips, the scent of his aftershave. "Tell me about you," he said, lacing his fingers through mine. "Oh, I wish I could!" I said, dropping his hand. "I'm super late! My best friend's birthday party is starting in two minutes!" Some more making out would've been great. However, I wasn't interested in exposing that I ‘d just dropped out of college due to mental illness and drug addiction, that my life was all dysfunction and terror, and I could think of nothing else that defined me. So I left. But before I did, the man gave me a small, square book entitled Conversations With God. "Keep an open mind," he said, as the elevator doors closed.
Back in my bedroom at my parent's home, I did a fat line off a CD jewel case and read the book cover to cover. A lifelong atheist, by the book's end I was a believer in an all-knowing, all-powerful, and unconditionally loving creator—one who had a grand scheme for me and had instilled in me infinite potential. All I had to do was ask and He would lift me out of the mire, into the light of grace. Yes, I had a drug habit that might've killed me any day, and unchecked bipolar disorder had me aflame: reckless, sleepless, swinging wildly between euphoria and paranoia and suicidal depression. My teeth were filled with painful cavities, my hair was knotted and greasy, and bones jutted sharply. The endless torrent of my crises had alienated all my friends. I could no longer manage the basic functions of living. But God can save me, I thought. God wants me to change. All I have to do is ask.
And so I did—ask for help, that is. From God and then—because I believed I was divinely inspired to do so—my mother. Twenty-four hours later I was in detox, after which I was shipped down to a long-term rehab in South Florida. Although Conversations With God no longer defines my spiritual beliefs, I remain free of drug addiction. Finding stability with mental illness took much longer, and is a far less clear-cut a milestone than washing a bottle of Xanax down a drain; but that burden did, eventually and largely because I remained drug-free, lighten. And so, in retrospect and from a certain angle, that man—the real Australian, as I think of him now—saved my life.
Since my novel, The Australian, has a manic energy, just like the real Australian—and like me, back when I'd met him—so did most of the music I listened to while writing it. I made a playlist of about 150 tracks that helped my prose match the timbre of my protagonist's personality and book's mood. The songs had to be familiar. Music that was new to me, strayed far from the conventions of its genre, or rendered an attention-grabbing narrative, was too distracting. While writing, my brain needed to keep company with each song without consciously engaging them.
During our teenage years, most of us seek and find ourselves in music. The bands that obsess us then will resonate with us forever. Above all my novel-writing playlist (from which the following eighteen songs were plucked) included songs that comprised the soundtrack of Australian's youth, and which continue reverberate in his adulthood—and in mine, as well.
Duran Duran :: "Electric Barbarella"
This song was composed as a tribute to the cult classic film Barbarella (1968), which takes place some thousands of years in the future. An evil scientist named Durand Durand is threatening to end life on Earth with some kind of death-ray technology (analogous to a nuclear holocaust), and to stop him the U.S. government deploys its ultimate weapon: Barbarella, an astronaut (my mind wants to call her an "astronautrix") whose sexual prowess is so powerful that she can use it to conquer any man. The two guys who would soon become Duran Duran frequented a nightclub named Barbarella after the film character, so I guess also in homage—to the movie, the nightclub, or both—the band adopted the name of Barbarella's villain. I don't know why they dropped the "d" at the end of each "Durand." I guess it does sound cooler.
I'm pretty sure "Electric Barbarella" (1997) was Duran Duran's last hit. What's weird is that instead of the futuristic and emotionally flat, yes, but definitely human "Barbarella" that Jane Fonda played so memorably, the "Barbarella" in the song is a straight-up, commercially produced, electric sex doll: "I knew when I first saw you on the showroom floor, you were made for me." And later: "I plug you in, dim the lights, electric Barbarella." If you want to be super generous, you could read it as a song from the point of view of a male Dom singing to a submissive woman with whom he is in a BDSM relationship (listen, think about it), but I suspect that would be overthinking things. The lyrics seem quite literal—if the robotic woman stuff a metaphor, it's never broken—and it leaves me less than confident that the Duran Duran blokes have ever actually seen the film.
I find all of this pretty interesting, but "Electric Barbarella" relates to my novel purely by happenstance: when I brazenly (or rudely—that would be fair enough) popped a tape without asking into the real Australian's stereo, swirled up the volume dial, and started dancing, this song is what played.
Men At Work :: "Down Under"
For me to include this song on this pubic list is an act of bravery for which I ought to receive an outpouring of commendation. Yes, indeed: I listened to this song, sometimes on repeat, during the first few months of writing the novel. There is an American conception of "the Australian," I think, which is essentially a stereotype: the happy-go-lucky, extroverted, good-looking, charming white guy from "Down Under." This notion of "the Australian" is depicted and celebrated in Men at Work's goofy song, and it also serves as the starting point from which my novel's protagonist develops. When we first meet him, "the Australian" (his proper name is never given), he is described thusly: "He smiles widely, his teeth luminous, his canines threatening. All his life, he has been indiscriminate with his enthusiasm, invincible within the hedonistic splendor of the present moment, like some kind of inverted Buddha."
However, everything after the first paragraph works to transcend and deepen readers' understanding of "the Australian" to this Australian, this man, this particular, wonderful, fucked up, loving, infuriating human being—someone with whom gradually (as in any relationship) readers come to feel a close connection and know intimately. I made the choice never to name the Australian understanding that it would raise two questions. First: what does it mean, in the mind of the reader, to be an Australian man? And second: why isn't the protagonist granted a name? I wrote the novel with those questions always in mind—and with the intention that the answers woven into the narrative would enrich the novel (and the experience of reading it) sufficiently to justify that choice.
Culture Club :: "Karma Chameleon"
The beat, the lyrics, the gold-silver rays of Boy George's heavenly voice—everything about this song comes together so perfectly, and it somehow encapsulates everything that my novel aspires to be. The playfulness is in sync with the Australian before his life becomes complicated—yet just as the lyrics add layers of complexity to "Karma Chameleon," there is disturbance lurking in the background of the novel's page one.
The Cure :: "The Walk"
This song captures how the Australian feels on coke, which he falls in love with for a time. It's also one of my favorite songs, and I've heard it enough times that I hardly notice when Robert Smith inexplicably exclaims, "I saw you look like a Japanese baby!" (a lyric that raises many questions, if you think about it), which is to say—I have listened to this song a lot.
Pet Shop Boys :: "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)"
At the very beginning of The Australian, the Australian is paying his way through his final year of university by dressing up as Superman and posing for tourist photos. It is noted that, at this time in Australia, "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" is a massive hit. The beginning of the chorus, which is included in the book, goes: "I've got the brains, you've got the looks, let's make lots of money." The narration continues: "In his mind, the Australian is both of the people in the song. He is smart—smart enough to know when effort is absolutely required and when he can fake it—and he is handsome, with chiseled abdominal muscles underneath the chiseled abdominal muscles of his costume. He smiles widely, his teeth luminous, his canines threatening." Hearing "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)," over and over, ignites the Australian's first major ambition: to become rich working on Wall Street. His pursuit of this goal is what propels his adult life—and the novel's plot—into motion.
The Vaselines :: "You Think You're a Man"
This is a really fun, upbeat song, with verses sung alternately by The Vaselines' front woman, Frances McKee, and front man, Eugene Kelly, who take turns gleefully berating a man for his sexual ineptitude—a characterization seemingly based on first-hand experience. "Man-boy!" they taunt. "You think you're a man but you're only a boy! You think you're a man but you're only a toy! Man-boy! Man-boy!" There's an interlude during which McKee and Kelly groan and moan, presumably granting each other the erotic ecstasy that the "man-boy" never could.
The humiliation this song's muse presumably endures evokes the Australian's shame vis-à-vis Elijah, his coke dealer: "Sometimes the Australian asks Elijah to fuck him. Elijah always laughs like it's a joke, and the Australian laughs along with him, although he wants to cry really badly." More generally, the injuriousness of the song's happy malice is predicated on the overwhelming pressure that most men, including the Australian, feel to be a "real man" (an impossible and illusory goal)—and the self-loathing and panic that result from their perpetual, inevitable failure to do so.
INXS :: "Don't Change"
Here, there is indignation and pride and beauty and savage resolve in the melody—that voice of Michael Hutchence! It's a song of the self-made man ("Don't change the Earth, don't change a thing, for me!") whom the Australian imagines he will become when he first moves to New York City to work as a day-trader—a man who needs nothing and no one, whose life-force is enough to hold up the sky.
Blondie :: "Atomic"
Fiona is a compulsive liar (of small, hopeful lies—"pretty fandangle"), an accessory stylist for a major pop star, and eventually the Australian's wife—and she is awesome. I really hope readers get that. Debbie Harry is the definition of awesome. So yeah, this one is all about Fiona for me—her power, resilience, optimism, and the understated but unstoppable drive she has to find happiness, meaning, and goodness in life.
Berlin :: "The Metro"
This song captures something of the Australian's relationship to New York City, which can be a cold place, unforgiving and alienating: "The Australian has always thought of New York City as an achingly lonely place, the length of Manhattan like an arm extending toward something forever out of reach, the boroughs a collection of nets catching stray souls drifting out to sea."
The lyrics, beat, and melody of "The Metro" are repetitive and monotonous, which gives me the sensation that the room is closing in on me, which is how the Australian feels a lot. When faced with responsibility—becoming a husband and then a father, grappling with unemployment, and so on—everything seems unfair, like the world is conspiring against him: a very claustrophobic perspective, the claustrophobia of narcissism (and we are all narcissistic to some degree).
Morrissey :: "I Have Forgiven Jesus"
To be clear: I am a mega fan of The Smiths and Morrissey's solo career. That said, this song is absolutely hilarious. Peak Morrissey melodrama, self-pity, anger. The lyrics recount all the ways Jesus has screwed Morrissey (a specific abuse for each day of the week!), and he yet the singer generously condescends to grant Jesus forgiveness. The song's title, "I Have Forgiven Jesus," is presumably intended as a provocative inversion of the most basic prayer: "Jesus, please forgive my sins." The whole song is very earnest in its grievances (this description can be applied to Morrissey's entire oeuvre, really) and just beyond with the angst. Still, it's about very real and sad things whose significance and power I do not mean to belittle, like being filled of love without have anyone to share it with, the risks of being vulnerable and open in an oft uncaring and brutal world… It's just that Morrissey's presentation of this stuff, and especially his certainty that he in particular has been singled out, takes the song deliciously too far.
Similarly, when the Australian is first faced real adversity—discord fractures his marriage and a serious illness befalls his mother—he's a lot like the Morrissey we see in "I Have Forgiven Jesus." And, hey—I am not above self-pity! I, too, have felt like I was being tortured by an all-powerful, consciously malicious force in the universe, or that life itself was configured to thwart my happiness. Morrissey, the Australian, and (occasionally) I agree: we are unfortunates to whom an endless parade of awful shit just happens, none of it foreseeable or preventable or at all related to our own doings. We three peons are damned—damned!—to a life (Freudian slip: I just wrote "a laugh") of pain.
Cyndi Lauper :: "When You Were Mine"
I love Cyndi Lauper, in part because there's a fabulous whininess to her voice—like this super cool bratty sound and attitude. The Australian, at some points in the novel, is pining, when really he has no right. He fucked up. So that's the loose connection: romantic loss, grieving that loss, wanting the person back. But above all this song was just fun and energizing to have playing in the background.
Rockwell :: "Somebody's Watching Me"
Hopefully it's not too much of a spoiler to say that, through a curious series of events, the Australian becomes—well, "famous" isn't quite the right word: "There seems to be no appropriate descriptor for his current status in society," the narration notes. "He cannot be a celebrity because he has done nothing to earn the public's celebration. Nor has he done anything sufficiently terrible to warrant notoriety—and anyway, in his present condition, whether people love or hate him is a superfluous detail. The word "star" occurs to him as perhaps a cheaper designation than "celebrity," and one that could be pinned to an unworthy individual such as himself—but because he is not stalked by paparazzi and does not deliberately cultivate a fanbase, the label doesn't quite fit. Is he even a public figure? He thinks not. He doesn't live publicly, he lives privately—it is just that he happens to get filmed while doing so. The Australian accepts that there is no word, though perhaps time will invent one, for his social predicament—one akin to having some unseemly, attention-grabbing thing tacked onto his presence, like an unusually located facial piercing or a curious odor."
In any case, when the Australian becomes broadly know by the public (whatever you want to call that), he senses constantly that he is under scrutiny and surveillance and—like Rockwell (watch the music video!)—it freaks him out.
Depeche Mode :: "Never Let Me Down Again"
Expansive, joyful, and melancholic, this song captures the feeling of connection between two men (I imagine) who have bonded and are driving in a car (on a road trip—again, I imagine). But there's also a sad history, undefined but conveyed by the plea in the chorus: "Never let me down again." I imagine that, if the Australian had ever met his father—a larger-than-life, rock climbing, B.A.S.E. jumping, shark-taunting extreme sports enthusiast, sun-leathered and rugged, emblematic of a model of masculinity that the Australian aspires to but can never achieve—he would feel all that this song portrays: euphoria, sharing with his father the exhilaration of speeding in a car, but afraid that it won't last, that his father will go away, back to his life of solo adventuring—and that the Australian will, again, be let down.
Kate Bush :: "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)"
Here's another one that I included mostly because it's a personal favorite. It's got enough oddness and movement to inspire the same in my writing, but also enough familiarity leave my focus intact.
In retrospect, it reminds me of the Australian at one of his lowest points, in which he is facing homelessness: "His hands and feet have lost all sensation. Unequipped for the elements, he has neither the street smarts nor the will to survive in the outdoors. He imagines himself dead on the sidewalk, curled with his head resting at a queer angle upon his knapsack, face coated in ice crystals that sparkle in the morning light. What could people say about him, other than that he died for nothing?" But in the novel, it is not God he calls on for help. It is a goddess of sorts.
Talking Heads :: "The Book I Read"
I listened to this while editing The Australian. It's one of my favorite Talking Heads songs. Not best known for love songs, I'd consider this not only the band's best love song, but also one of the greats of that genre in American music. The idea of reading a book and seeing it in someone's eyes is queer and wonderful. The book is the primary object of affection in the lyrics, and then the falling-in-love-with-a-human takes place when that book (maybe it's essence, or maybe they've both read the book) is somehow contained in the gaze of the person: "The book I read was in your eyes."
The song also gave a voice to my own thrill at almost being done with writing a book: "Oh… I'm living in the future! I feel wonderful! I'm flipping over backwards! I'm so ambitious! I'm looking back! I'm running a race and you're the book I read so…" I mean, yeah—I was pretty high on the feeling of The Australian nearing completion. It was awesome.
Emma Smith-Stevens and The Australian links:
the author's website
Publishers Weekly review
Fiction Advocate interview with the author
From The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens
Brooklyn Public Library Presents
LitFilm: A Film Festival About Writers
May 5, 2017
First Proof
Literature
Keep Away from Things That Can Catch Fire by Stephanie Chou
Stephanie Chou Bomb 1
148852354 05032017 Emma Smith Stevens
On the streets of Melbourne, the Australian parades around dressed as Superman, paying his way through university by posing for photos, conscious of the bulge of his cock. Novelty, sex object, comic relief—it is all good. Radios across his nation have been playing a song that goes, “I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money.” In his mind, the Australian is both of the people in the song. He is smart—smart enough to know when effort is absolutely required and when he can fake it—and he is handsome, with chiseled abdominal muscles underneath the chiseled abdominal muscles of his costume. He smiles widely, his teeth luminous, his canines threatening. All his life, he has been indiscriminate with his enthusiasm, invincible within the hedonistic splendor of the present moment, like some kind of inverted Buddha.
This is not to say that the Australian’s life has been without adversity. He never had a father, and while his mother means well, her ceaseless affection is like an ill-fitting homemade sweater, all itch and chafe. But these misfortunes are deep in the background, monotonous as a refrigerator’s electric hum. They take conscious effort for the Australian to discern—and why bother? His head is filled with sunlight, cricket, mischief, girls. Then, one sunny Friday morning during his last month of schooling, he suddenly acquires for the first time a distinct ambition. As he wraps his right arm around a group of Irish tourists, and as they cram themselves into his sweat-stained armpit, and as he flexes his left bicep, round and stiff as an apple, the Australian thinks: I will be a rich man.
After graduation, the Australian moves to New York to work on Wall Street, but right off the bat, he can’t stand his boss. She reminds him of the heartless provocateur who took tickets at the public pool in the seaside town where he spent his childhood summers, who flaunted her tremendous breasts and treated the Australian with what he perceived to be hostile indifference. Day after day, he is unable to focus on the neon river of information that flows from his computer screen—Dow Jones, NASDAQ, symbols, numbers. His attention drifts to the window. Pigeons congregate on a rooftop across the street, and the Australian ponders what diseases they carry, the subtleties of their social order, and how exactly they achieve sexual intercourse. For his inattentiveness and what his boss describes as “failure to demonstrate a sense of urgency,” he is reprimanded regularly.
After six months of trying to reckon with his haughty overseer, he quits the brokerage firm and goes to work for himself. He takes the money he has recently inherited from his estranged father, who perished in a rather foreseeable hang-gliding accident, and triples it within eight months through some risky and uncalculated investments. The Australian knows he has struck upon the kind of luck that can turn on you in a heartbeat, that he must take his winnings and move on to some other pursuit.
On a summer afternoon while he is musing over possibilities, the Australian happens upon a coffee shop called Esperanto. A sign in the window reads:
Welcome * Bonveno
Esperanto is the universal language of peace and
understanding. Invented in 1887 by the physician Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhoff, Esperanto is free from any national, political, or religious affiliation.
“Esperanto” means “one that hopes.”
It was Zamenhoff’s hope that Esperanto would one day be the mother tongue of all humankind.
Peace * Paco
He thinks of his friends and mother back in Melbourne, and he is submerged in an achy, sloppy feeling. The words homesick, solo, and lost flit through his brain. He wonders whether this feeling is common among expats, and then whether an Australian in New York City can be considered an expat—a word that invokes rough-hewn men in their fifties and sixties playing card games over tequila at tropical beachfront bars. Can a guy in his twenties living in one of the world’s great cities, an international hub, be classified among such men? The Australian is disappointed to admit to himself that he is, likely, simply an immigrant.
Reading Esperanto’s sign a second time, the idea of a universal mother tongue excites him. “One that hopes” is a description the Australian finds befitting of himself. Perhaps he will learn Esperanto one day. Entering the café, he feels like a citizen of the world.
While sitting in an armchair drinking an iced coffee, he meets a young girl. She is a plump high school student in a tiny red T-shirt and pale blue jeans with ripped knees. She bites her nails in between sips of hot chocolate, a curious choice considering the monstrous heat. The Australian listens to her talk for a long time about how everyone she knows has sold out. When finally she winds down in a way that reminds him of a particular toy from his childhood, he tells her he is a venture capitalist. She follows him home, does some coke with him, spreads her legs.
“What’s a venture capitalist?” she asks afterward, sprawled with her limp limbs heavy over his.
He thinks for a moment, distracted by the pain of his knee hyper-extending under the weight of her ample thigh, and then says simply: “It takes money to make money.”
The girl seems satisfied with that answer.
Henceforth, the Australian tells everyone that he is a venture capitalist.
The Australian swiftly enters the period of his life during which, on Fridays, a dealer named Elijah comes to his apartment with a metal briefcase and sells him an eight ball of coke. It is so pure it makes the Australian’s entire face go numb within ten seconds of snorting just one line. Sometimes the Australian asks Elijah to fuck him. Elijah always laughs like it’s a joke, and the Australian laughs along with him, although he wants to cry really badly. Usually, after each of these interactions, the Australian goes out and picks up a woman. Eventually one of the women sticks with him—Fiona, a designer of hair accessories and belts. The Australian first meets her during happy hour at an Irish pub dotted with gin-blossomed old men, where he plans to drink the edge off both another pitiful interaction with Elijah and the Colombian cocaine they snorted together. On his walk to the bar, he silently berates himself for having a homosexual attraction and then admonishes himself for feeling ashamed of a desire that he believes should be totally fine. At least, were such a desire to strike another man, he would not stand in judgment. Can a fellow be sharply averse to thinking of himself as gay, yet not be a homophobe? He cannot reach any conclusion. Entering the bar with his head hung, he silently swears that he will quit the whole thing—Elijah’s visits and the cocaine—and it occurs to him that perhaps it is simply Elijah’s association with the narcotic’s euphoric effects that kindles the attraction, as opposed to some deep-seated proclivity. This possibility brightens his mood a bit.
The Australian raises his head and sees a woman seated upon a barstool. Like a fairy on a flower petal, he thinks. She has strategically messy short auburn hair, and the pale skin of her face and arms is lightly freckled. She is not with anyone, nor is she speaking to the bartender, yet she is smiling a little. As the Australian approaches her, he is sharply aware that he can’t remember when he was last hugged.
“What are you drinking?” he asks.
“A shandy,” she says. “Grapefruit juice and beer. It’s really good.”
“Grapefruit juice? I’ll give it a go. Do you mind?” The Australian points to the barstool beside her.
She shakes her head, and he sits and orders a shandy for himself. Fiona asks where the Australian is from, and they tumble into a conversation about his relocation to New York two years ago.
“Has it been hard to adjust?” asks Fiona.
“It’s tough to meet people,” he says, unsure whether he is enacting loneliness as a ploy to reel her in, or whether companionship is something he really wants.
Fiona talks about leaving the Chicago suburb where she grew up to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology on a full scholarship, six years ago now. “My family was dead set against me leaving,” she says. “They wanted me to be a townie, go to community college for phlebotomy.”
“What’s—”
“A person who draws blood. A professional vampire, basically.”
The Australian thinks of his mother, who always hoped he would be an artist, teacher, or musician—professions she thought would put him in service to humanity. When he announced his plan to work on Wall Street, proclaiming that he would make “buckets of money,” his mother sobbed. Later she raged, which he had never seen her do before, using phrases like “capitalist hogs,” “plague on your spirit,” and “razor-fanged piranhas.” The Australian loves his mother and feels guilty for leaving her alone in Melbourne; but more than that, he is glad to be outside the reach of her adoration, which always made him feel pressured—to please her, to stand by her as she cycled through various jobs and men, and to love her in the particular way she understands, which requires a closeness that now seems to him borderline incestuous. His mother slides back into the darkest region of his psyche, where all of the things over which he believes himself to be powerless reside.
Fiona tells him that her first couple years in the city were rough, but she eventually adjusted.
“How?” asks the Australian, embarrassed by the urgency of his tone.
“It just took time.” Fiona shrugs. “At first I was terrified, but eventually that turned to excitement, still with some nervousness, though, and then one day—literally, I just woke up one morning, and I was happy here. Even my body felt strong, like in those stories about mothers who suddenly have the strength to lift a car or fallen tree or whatever massive thing threatens their babies’ lives—not that I have a baby.”
The Australian nods, although he doesn’t quite follow.
“Well, I guess I was my own baby,” Fiona continues. “I came out from under my fear, and my guilt for leaving my family, and holy shit—I was living in New York City, I was studying fashion design at one of the best schools in the world, I’d made some awesome friends, and I hadn’t even realized it. Not really. I wondered if I was going crazy or if I was finally waking up, and so I thought, ‘Give me a sign.’ It was like a prayer, except I’m an atheist. I remember the moment exactly. I was in the living room of my old apartment, cutting my former roommate’s hair, and I thought, ‘Give me something. Show me this is really happening.’ And I looked out the window and there was a triple rainbow in the sky.”
Fiona initially claims to like being spanked, which turns out to be a lie. She lies about a lot of things. Not typical things like age and hair color, but strange things like what time she woke up or whether or not she likes papaya. The triple-rainbow story, she confesses, was a fabrication, too—”But a good one!” she says, and the Australian must admit it is true. She has interesting friends and lives in a relatively spacious, rent-controlled apartment. She is not just surviving the city, she is flourishing in it. The Australian keeps her around because he feels elevated by her presence. Also, she is very affirming. “I wish you could see yourself like I do,” she says. “You really are incredible.”
Five months after they begin dating, Fiona suggests she and the Australian move in together. “You’re here, like, six nights a week,” she says while making goat cheese and tomato omelets in her kitchen.
The Australian feels certain he only spends two or three nights at her apartment each week, tops. He thinks more carefully and realizes, with some apprehension, that she is correct. “Living together—that’s a big deal,” he says. “I’ve got to think about it.”
Sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, he shuts his eyes. He has never lived with a girlfriend before. He feels at ease in Fiona’s home, more comfortable than he feels in his own. He wonders whether this is because Fiona’s apartment is charming and cheap while his is barren and expensive. Yes, he concludes, but there is more to it. She never criticizes him or tries to change him. She views him as good-hearted, intelligent, and adult, which sometimes makes him anxious, but mostly just feels nice. Being with her has forced him to bulldoze his way into venture capitalism, lest she discover he deceived her about his job at their first meeting. He has networked, forged a few connections, partnered with some guys to get a couple startups off the ground—one that makes virtual patients for nursing students to practice interviewing, another that manufactures cars that run on algae. He has yet to make any real money, but he figures it’s only a matter of time.
More importantly, the Australian realizes that he loves being loved, particularly the way Fiona loves him: simply, tenderly. He would be a fool to say no to a woman whom—yes, he is sure—he loves back. He loves her laugh, her buzzing energy, her lies. Also, the sex is fantastic. The Australian had exciting sex with a couple women during university, plus a few top-notch flings in New York, but he was never able to sustain interest for longer than a month or two until now. For this, Fiona deserves credit. He opens his eyes. There is an omelet steaming on the kitchen island in front of him.
“I want to live here with you,” he says. “That sounds perfect.”
The Australian’s foray into venture capitalism is brief. Despite what seemed like a promising start, he has a difficult time getting investors of any real means to partner with him. It is a misfortune he can’t make any sense of, although he doesn’t really try, because he is not one to dwell in mystery. Instead, he puts his efforts into an idea that comes to him as if by magic one evening as he is smoothing the calluses on his heels with a pumice stone. Along with a business acquaintance from his Wall Street days—a middle-aged woman with hair straightened by a highly toxic Brazilian method, who is constantly trying to get other women to straighten their own hair by the same method—the Australian opens a club. The club is called Day Club. Complete with darkness, booze, and unce-unce techno, it is open from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon.
At first, the hottest party kids in the city come, twenty-somethings with trust funds and pronounced cheekbones and ecstasy holes in their brains. When the time comes to renew his immigration visa, the Australian does so without incident. He is making good money, has employees, pays taxes. A lush red carpet to a Green Card seems to be rolling out in front of him. However, the club soon hits a downturn and becomes all high school kids, greasy-haired ravers pressing their bony bodies against the velvet ropes, waving fake IDs at the bouncer. Within a year and a half of opening, Day Club is raided by the city, loses its liquor license, and goes out of business. New York City has no more ideas for him, and he is twenty-eight, and he doesn’t want to go back to Australia.
“Why would you go back?” asks Fiona, when the Australian voices his worries.
They are sitting together on the living room couch, watching a thunderstorm roll over the city. Fiona has just been hired as an accessory stylist for a major pop star, whose former stylist was axed for making her look “middle-aged”—never mind that the pop star is forty-six.
“I can take care of us for a while.” She kisses his cheek and neck, rests her head against his chest.
The Australian’s heart begins thumping irregularly. He wonders if he is experiencing a life-threatening cardiac event, and then he realizes that he is about to ask Fiona to marry him. Some drive is pushing him toward proposing, a need even greater than his desire to remain in the United States. It must be love. What else could it be, this invisible force squeezing his ribcage?
The Australian takes her hands and rests his forehead against hers.
“Fiona,” he says. “I have to ask you something. This isn’t just a citizenship thing. When I’m with you, I feel like I’m going to make it, even though my plans have fallen to shit. You make me want to—well, try. I’ve stopped eating processed foods. I shut off the tap while I’m brushing my teeth. I gave up my seat on the train the other day—not to an old lady, either. To some bloke, just because he looked kind of tired. I really want to be the guy you deserve.”
Fiona pulls her face away from his. She looks him in the eye.
“I want to ask you,” he says, trailing off, emotion obstructing his windpipe. He swallows hard.
“Yes,” Fiona says. “I know you love me, and you know I love you. Let’s do it.” She smiles, running her fingers through the Australian’s thick, golden hair. “Let’s get married.”
As husband to Fiona, the Australian quickly gains a firm command of the nature of her dishonesty. He comes to realize that all of it is hope, simple as that. Hope for the ordinary and the slightly extraordinary, but never the extravagant. It embarrasses and infuriates him that her lies are simple and modest. He finds it alarming that some version of himself is housed in a mind so enchanted by the idea of a Checker cab sighting that it would manifest that enchantment in the form of a fib. Having lassoed his wife’s greatest idiosyncrasy, the Australian gets down to the business of breaking it. She says: “I saw the prettiest thing today, an albino pigeon, but it still had those iridescent wings.” He says: “Lie.” She begins a story: “When I was a kid, I had this lunchbox—” and he cuts her off with: “Lie.” Although this tactic deters her only slightly, the Australian vaguely senses that he is perpetrating something truly grotesque, and he is ashamed, which is not a feeling he is accustomed to. He begins to consider that he might have a deeper attachment to Fiona than he previously imagined possible.
Other strange things start to happen. Fiona’s salary not only pays their rent but allows them to have a housekeeper, yet the Australian, who is unemployed, finds himself scrubbing and cleaning. He secretly fantasizes about enrolling in some kind of course, not a vocational one, but one that would provide him with a quiet means of self-expression. He wants to make something with his hands, be it a still life painting or a magazine rack or a savory soufflé. As the first year of marriage comes to a close, he begins to miss Fiona while she’s gone from the apartment, off working on photo shoots and music video sets. The pop star is a notorious wreck and frequently depends on Fiona for support in times of crisis. She calls at all hours, hysterical on account of her boyfriend’s addiction to Ginkgo biloba supplements, panicked over her incapability to trust herself around chocolate, distraught over the fast-approaching end of the Mayan calendar. The Australian has met her a handful of times and is certain she can’t stand him, though Fiona says that is ridiculous. “Who wouldn’t like you?” she says, laughing, but he cannot be dissuaded. Every time Fiona tends to her employer, the Australian feels sad and lonely and as though he’s being robbed.
One night, when Fiona finally returns to bed after a two-hour phone call, he asks her to tell him a lie.
“You want me to lie now?” she asks.
“Yes,” he pleads. “Just make something up for me.”
“No.” She sits up against her pillow. “It’s your turn. Tell me a lie, something really outrageous.”
“Okay,” says the Australian. “I used to be a superhero.”
It has been two years since the Day Club fiasco, and although the Australian makes money investing here and there, he has yet to find a new full-time job. He doesn’t speculate on why his Wall Street ambitions faded or why Day Club fell through. Failure has integrated itself into the fabric of his being. Self-loathing is an intoxicating elixir—one to which, little by little, he has become habituated. By and large, he lives off Fiona’s generous salary and the stipend she receives as part of the pop star’s entourage. Fiona has decided to buy the apartment in which she and the Australian live, a two-bedroom in Chelsea with high ceilings and good light, but his anxiety about his own unemployment only mounts. Though the mortgage is in Fiona’s name, he ought to contribute toward the payments, and he is embarrassed by his inability to do so.
Not to mention that he will be eligible to apply for a Green Card in about a year. The Australian fears his joblessness will be a hindrance.
“We’re in a good position,” Fiona assures him. “And you have some big opportunities coming up.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes,” says Fiona. “Of course you do.” She is inviting him into one of her lies. “You have a lot brewing right now—like the interview for the position at the big, airy office with floor-to-ceiling windows and bowls of fresh fruit and mixed nuts, and a billiard table, too, where everyone will see how incredible you are.”
“Right.” The Australian forces a smile. “Of course.”
“You’ll see. It’ll happen.”
The truth is that on the occasions when the Australian has applied for a position and been granted an interview, he has botched it almost willfully, unable to stomach the idea of working under a boss. His days are spent doing intermediate-difficulty word puzzles in hotel lobbies, or wistfully watching construction workers on the job, or trying to learn Cantonese from an audio cassette, or wandering the streets.
One afternoon the Australian stumbles into a bookstore where an author is giving a reading. The author has a faded tattoo of a lizard on her bicep and is from Berkeley, California, and she has written a memoir from the perspective of her vagina. The Australian is transfixed. He stays for the whole performance, listening and watching from the back of the room, hiding behind a books-on-tape display at the edge of the children’s section. He marvels at how, while every woman has a vagina, this particular woman has decided that hers deserved not only a voice, but a publisher, too, and maybe even a publicist. It is precisely the kind of boldness and ingenuity that the Australian respects. She barks out her vagina’s litany of complaints, recounting its moments of triumph in a gurgling, throaty vibrato. Her vagina has adventures. It takes risks. The Australian is struck by the humbling realization that it might be more of a man than he presently is, this milksop he has become—drooling on his pillow, aimlessly wandering, pining for his wife—and he’s got to buck up.
The Australian really likes Jim Foreman, whom he located in the back of The New York Post, because Jim is not a therapist, he would like to be very clear about that—he is a life coach. Jim is not a shoulder to cry on, and if the Australian is looking for soft tits to rub his face into, he is barking up the wrong tree. According to Jim, the Australian’s problems derive from the fact he grew up fatherless, and the solution is to forge that connection and thereby discover his wolf spirit, but it is up to the Australian to figure out what that means for him. After his third session with Jim, the Australian is walking back to his apartment when he sees a window washer hanging from the side of an office building, and he is reminded of the only image of his father he has ever seen. It is a tattered, bleached-out photograph his mother had taken in the Gibson Desert during their weeklong fling, in which the Australian’s father is abseiling down the side of one of the Kata Tjuta rock formations. The Australian remembers vividly how the fabric surrounding his father’s groin was bunched into a formidable convexity by a leather harness, and how the tanned muscles of his bare calves looked like braided beef jerky.
He asks himself when he last faced his own mortality, but all he can come up with is the night a few months back when he choked on a bit of yellowtail sashimi. The incident occurred at a gala he had reluctantly attended with Fiona, at which the pop star had sung a cappella for the benefit of children with a certain dermatological condition. Although the description of the condition, which had been delivered with both levity and compassion by a well-known sitcom actor, had left the Australian rather nauseated, he had forged ahead to the buffet, only to get food down the wrong pipe. During those eternal seconds of complete tracheal obstruction, he really and truly feared for his life. The Australian is achingly aware that this incident is hardly comparable to mastering the steep, hot slopes of the Kata Tjutas, or free diving, or shark taunting, or BASE jumping, or any of the other things he’s always imagined his father doing. He looks up again at the building, squinting against the sunlight, and as the window washer reaches far to his right, and the bench he is balancing on teeters just a little, the Australian finds his wolf spirit.
Emma Smith-Stevens is the author of The Australian (Dzanc Books, May 2017), and the short story collection Greyhounds (Dzanc Books, 2018). Her work has appeared in Subtropics, Wigleaf, Conjunctions, Joyland, and many other publications, and her essay ”The Sun” will be included in the anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture (Eds. Roxane Gay and Ashley C. Ford) forthcoming from Harper Perennial. She lives in New York and teaches with the Bard Prison Initiative.
May 16, 2017
HITTING SHELVES #45: The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens
The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens comes out today! It’s a hilarious debut novel about a smiling, suntanned, backpack-wearing Australian (you know the type) and his search for meaning. We asked the author one question.
Fiction Advocate: Emma! How are you celebrating the publication of The Australian?
Emma Smith-Stevens: On the publication date of my novel The Australian (today!), I’m doing a reading at Unnamable Books in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn at 7pm. Some really incredible writers—Rachel Khong, Aaron Thier, and Nick Flynn—will be reading as well. It’s open to the public and I invite you, too: the more the merrier! Bring friends! Evil twins! Friends with benefits! Lovers—secret or otherwise! Frienemies! Doppelgängers! Those with whom you have relationships that you would describe as “complicated!” Bring ‘em all!
I will raise a glass to the man on whom the titular Australian was based: the “real Australian.” He was a stranger I met at a coffee shop when I was 19 and with whom I spent a single afternoon—doing cocaine, listening to him rant, and talking self-help books. After that encounter he became a memory, which years later became a brief character sketch, which was subsequently forgotten, and then found and read and built upon until it was a long Microsoft Word document, which was then edited and edited and copyedited—and now it’s a novel! So, I owe that fellow—big time.
I have recently learned three things:
I love rainbow sherbert.
It can also be spelled “sherbet,” and in fact that is the more commonly used variant, which I think is unfortunate because it sounds gross… “Sher-bet.” Ugh. “Sherbert” sounds more like the surname of a kindhearted old person you have fond memories of from your youth—a third grade teacher or a friend’s grandmother or a local librarian or something. Much nicer.
If you put a scoop of sherbert (or sherbet, if you must) atop a scoop of vanilla ice cream, you have a creamsicle-type situation and it’s delicious—especially in a sugar cone.
These, I prefer to indulge in alone. In celebration of having published my first book, I will.
Additionally, I’ll high five my two dogs, one of whom I can count on to reciprocate. I will send copies of the book along with thank you notes to a handful of people who were integral in The Australian coming to be. Some of those people literally saved my life: my parents, who supported me in every conceivable way through years of life-threatening mental illness; my psychiatrist, who correctly diagnosed me with bipolar disorder at age 17; and my therapist, who aided me years later in accepting my condition and adhering to treatment. I’ll read my book once, cover to cover—in its final, bound form—which some superstition has prevented me from doing. I will briefly think of the girl from junior high school who bullied me until I dropped out, and consider sending a signed copy of The Australian to her at the Soul Cycle where she works—“Take Your Journey! Change Your Body! Find Your Soul!”—and choose not to because I am so above that. I will begin edits on my second book, a story collection entitled Greyhounds. With all the pre-publication stuff for The Australian, I have been stuck vis-à-vis this memoir I’m writing. Now, hopefully, I’ll soar. Finally—and quite frankly—I intend to get it on with my husband.
Emma Smith-Stevens holds an MFA from the University of Florida and currently teaches fiction writing with the Bard Prison Initiative. She lives in New York.