Fiction The Fatal Dance

Berndt Selheim; Harpercollins; $33

The title refers to Huntington’s chorea, a currently incurable disease often characterised by tics and twitches, but more generally to the dance of life in which we are all passing performers. Lori opens the novel with an abrupt change of attitude to her increasingly debilitating condition; her sister is in jail and her brother-in-law has been told to look after her, which he does initially and with lack of forethought, by buying her a dog to replace one he killed. Her gentle, anxious, clever son Mada is doing a PHD on Huntington’s and obsessing about whether he should get tested for the genetic disease. The parlous state of Australian universities provides a bitter edge to the novel’s often slapstick humour.