Radiance in suburbia

Shena Mackay has had a difficult and unconventional career, and it has taken a long time for most readers to register what a powerful and original novelist she is. Several things have counted, unfairly, against her; her subjects are not just domestic, but often suburban, which she presents with a disconcerting rapture. She does not write long books, nor polemical ones; it is hard to say what any given novel by her is ‘about’, although various fiercely held convictions may, from time to time, be discerned. They are primarily about human beings living their lives, rendered with increasing mastery and a hard-won truth; and there is nothing harder in the world to defend than that. In her prime, she reminds me sometimes of a very different novelist, Elizabeth Taylor; both have a rare gift of making their characters interesting whether their acts and situations are objectively so or not. She can make you watch a girl walking up a country road with nothing much at the end of it; and that takes some skill.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty for the conventionally minded critic is that her career has followed an unusual path. She was a child prodigy among novelists, and her very early novels, written in her teens, such as Music Upstairs and Toddler on the Run – my favourite of all her titles – are flip, brilliant miniatures out of the school of Brigid Brophy. They are wonderfully funny and effortless, but tiny and short-breathed; and then she fell suddenly silent. When she started to publish again, some years later, her style had broadened and deepened, and become much less easy to classify. The glorious, glamorous Redhill Rococo and A Bowl of Cherries were like nothing else being written at the time; their mood must have been hard to catch, and they were often either misread as satires or dismissed by metropolitan readers as naive books about suburban people.