Voices of young and old
Australian novel is a story of grief, with a focus on age, where the villains are middle-class adults
Onscreen restatement of characters’ names is one of the most frequent stylistic devices of MTV’s series The Hills (2006-10). Throughout episodes and seasons, the same few characters are perpetually introduced: Kristin, Audrina, Heidi, Lo, Spencer. Their relationships, played out over hundreds of episodes, are continually presented as new, almost as though these 20-somethings never know each other. Lost & Found, Australian author Brooke Davis’s debut novel, uses this same device of constant reintroduction. Each of the novel’s sections, some a mere page long, is headed by one of the main three characters’ names: Millie Bird, Karl the Touch Typist and Agatha Pantha. As these names suggest, Davis does not write about living it up in Los Angeles, though she shares The Hills’ focus on sometimes claustrophobic, “always now” relationships. This type of impatient novelty defines one side of popular culture, encapsulating both recent American series and new mass-market novels.
Lost & Found focuses on Millie, a 7-yearold girl who wears red gumboots to match her hair. Millie’s father dies at the start of the story and her grieving mother abandons her in a local store’s big ladies’ underwear department. Undaunted, bright and curious Millie sets off to find her mother, whom she thinks must have left unintentionally.
Millie is soon accompanied on what turns into a Western Australian road trip by Karl, 87, on the run from his nursing home, and Agatha, 82, a widow. The trio outsmarts the few people who try to stop them on the bus and train and finally make it to the place where Millie’s mother might be found.
The novel’s unnamed narrator and its three main characters speak constantly with a kind of flourish. Millie, for example, announces cheerfully that she collects Dead Things (such as a swatted fly) and that we’re all going to die, while Agatha shouts colourful phrases at peo- ple in the street, forever incensed. As for Karl, he wanted to pull down a woman’s skirt, to sit on the hood of a moving car, to wear shorts, to eat with his mouth open. He wanted to write love letters to women, tons of them. He wanted to see some lesbians. He wanted to swear loudly . . . He wanted to hit something. Really, very, hard. And he thought, “When did I stop doing things and start remembering them instead?”
Though old, Karl desires youth, action, even the kind of immaturity which is indulged by others.
The young and the old are regarded with sympathy in the novel — its villains are the few middle-class adults. Every figure of authority, for example (a store manager, a policeman) is dismissed as narcissistic or ignorant. The novel’s underlying philosophy can be painfully simplistic, though Davis could well be a fierce libertarian, happiest when nobody tells anybody what to do.
Somewhat oddly, Lost & Found is full of sex. In one of Agatha’s reflections, she thinks of her dead husband’s penis more than twenty times in two pages. Hitchhiking, Karl has to leave the young couple’s car he is in as they have furious sex on the steering wheel. Even Millie strikes up a youthful, if physically innocent romance with a young boy on a train. In fact, sex is one of Davis’ main themes. It is seen as attractive when desired, but repellent when achieved (a thought going back at least as far as Shakespeare’s “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action,” from his Sonnet 129).
Is Lost & Found any good? At best, it has a charming immaturity and stylistic freshness; at worst, a quick rejection of middle-class adulthood. It has a certain joy about it, though returning repeatedly to the questions of death and abandonment (“lost”) vs. sexual attraction and understanding (“found”). Also, its emphasis on the “now” often works, though it must be said that Davis can give one a lingering nostalgia for stories which take their time, stopping once in a while, or even regressing to visions of a rich past. That kind of storytelling seems harder to find these days. Andre van Loon writes about new literary fiction. He lives in London.