Review from The Australian, April 17-18, 2004. By Cath Kenneally

'I look back on things and I realize that I spent years not wanting to admit how shallow men can be. That people can declare love, that churches can be formed, that fathers can leave their flesh and blood, for nothing more than this - a good pair of tits.'

Thus Sophie Cunningham's character, Catherine Monaghan, sums up as succinctly as she's able all the angst of her addiction-to-love history, as episodically recounted to traveling companion Ruby in India and Sri Lanka.

And really, that's as good a summary as Ruby's impressive recall of a chunk of All's Well That End's Well in her final verdict: 'it was the ambition in your love that plagued you.'

As Catherine begins the story, she hedges: people are bored, she thinks, with thirty something single women and their love lives. Later, she repeats the caveat: 'I look back at this and I can see it is not that exciting. But the point of my story is this how quietly you can lost years.' Duly warned, we meet Michael, sexy older man, soon to be the object of Catherine's obsessive desire: Australian-born, Los Angeles-resident academic, author of a PhD on epistolary novels, special subject Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons.

Michael's clear enunciation of his take on love and power - 'People destroy each other. That is what they do' - falls on ears deafened by the rush of blood to Catherine's head occasioned by their frequent, frantic sex.

Each episode is linked, in Catherine's mental grid, with accompanying big 'H' historical moments (she was born on the day of Kennedy's assassination). This first time with Michael, followed by a meeting with brother Finn in New York, it's Waco. The second time, in Sydney, is the 1994 bushfires and so on. 'I built a relationship, block by block, from words and weather, the phases of the moon, pieces of movies and media soundbites.'

The coda to the Michael years is ice storms in northeast America - 'beautiful at first, dangerous at last, by the end there was only water.' So we progress, via end-of-the-affair meditations, through stroke-by-stroke accounts of Catherine and Michael's sexual collisions over several years, to memories of childhood and absconding fathers, back to present-tense Indian-Sri Lankan moments, on to gap-filling sketches from the lost years, waiting for Michael.

There's Fitzroy, with loving, concerned housemates Raff and Marion, Catherine sharing the joyful period of their pregnancy, her job writing travel ads, then Sydney, sharing a flat and a mild affair with Tony - all this normalcy sliced through and undercut by a fantasy life, first by fax, and them by email, erotic, pornographic, dangerous.

At first I resisted this book - too much information, not enough information - until I recognized how craftily structured it is. A fugue movement takes you regularly back to sore points, resisted as too obvious by the narrator herself. ('With real boyfriends you do things. You hang out after you have sex,' protests Marion, cautiously exploring the subject of Catherine's teenage friend's father and his wandering hands. 'Jesus, Marion, it's so fucking '90s the way everyone excavates some minor event and turns themselves into victims.')

Finn, met at repeated low-key intervals, is a touchstone of optimism. The exotic interludes, a temple visit here, a lake boating tour there, a frustrating bad-hotel day, are highly colored backdrops to the deepening intimacy between Catherine and Ruby. Paeans to places Catherine would like to call home are poignantly juxtaposed with travelogues of deracination, bedroom scenes and night-wanderings in cities spoiled by bad chemistry.

Occasionally, Catherine's musings, and some of her dialogue with Ruby, become a little overblown or repetitive but Cunningham scene shifts often enough for that not to matter much and the emotional core of the novel is solid - from remembered travel trivia, gobbets of the undigested affair, shards of family history, philosophical musings, extra-vivid sense impressions from Catherine's present journey.

In her first novel, Cunningham, (a former editor and publisher who writes about television for The Age) composes a multihued epistolary artifact whose architecture is canny and subtle. In a deceptively piecemeal fashion, this novel wrestles with the key anxieties of a generation: love and sex, gender and power, 'the fantasy that we live in a global village and distance makes no difference.'

There is a real pathos in the self-awareness that sharpens Catherine's abjection and in Cunningham's ironic deployment of literary conventions to structure what is ultimately messy and unfinished. Pop culture is nicely interwoven with the large tragedies of a bloody decade.

Geography is a new map of the heart from an author equipped with the latest global positioning system.

Posted by Sophie at 10:53 AM