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Reaching Toward 'the Center'
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13074 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1995 |
1,786 Words |
| Author
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Robert L. Ross
Robert L. Ross is professor of Australian studies at the
University of Texas, Austin, and editor of Antipodes, The
Journal of Australian Literature. |
CODA
Thea Astley
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994
188 pp., $19.95
Could Coda be described, even dismissed, as a minimalist work with a maximum amount of meanness embedded in the narrative? Called by one critic "a marvel of compression," Thea Astley's new novel distills a not very pleasant lifetime into vivid fragments. The prose dazzles. The well-turned phrase pleases, the elliptical expression startles, the witticism jars, the landscape (or "soulscape" as it is called at one point) erupts.
But what of the subject, old age and its accompanying afflictions: "I'm losing my nouns, she admitted"; "incontinence of brain and bladder"; "confused and soggy and snivelling"; and so on. Critics have hailed the book as a brilliant satire on old age. But is this an area appropriate for satire? Did Astley, who has talent to spare, go too far this time, fritter away this ability on a tasteless exercise, hit an unlucky note in her thirteenth novel?
Coda tells Kathleen's story. It begins in a dismal shopping mall on a hot day in a nondescript Australian town, where this dotty old woman is drinking coffee and reconstructing her life and thinking of "recriminations pulling across the grievances of decades." Widowed for years, she wonders when her marriage had begun "its descent into the chafe of ordinariness." Her two grown children offer little comfort: daughter Shamrock, appropriately nicknamed Sham, the pretentious wife of a crooked politician; son Brian, ironically called Brain, a confirmed failure who
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