Amazon.com Review
It takes a bold writer to invoke
The Great Gatsby on page 3 of your first novel. Malcolm Knox does just that. When his protagonists, a group of young marrieds, go out to dinner, they reserve their table under "Mr. Gatsby and group." There's no question which of the diners is the star: that would be Hugh Bowman, "the Mackie Agribusiness heir," who possesses charm, beauty, and such wealth that he never need think about it, except to devise ways of spending it. As seen through the eyes of the narrator, Richard (Nick Carraway to this antipodean Gatsby), Hugh is a fascinating study in entitlement. "It was only deserving," Richard notes, "that he should overshadow me at my own wedding."
The latter statement turns out to be something of a premonition. Richard marries Pup, a financial consultant and frustrated novelist, and Hugh marries the aptly named Helen, a heartbreaking beauty. But though they lead elegant lives in the tonier reaches of Sydney, a secret eats away at the foursome: Hugh has never gotten over a childhood fling with Pup. As the story progresses, Richard reveals how their life together has been a mass of lies.
Summerland is a refreshingly ambitious novel, and a cleverly written one: Knox's people tumble into tragedy as if in slow motion. A little more information about their lives might, however, be appreciated. Richard admonishes, "You might want me to tell you how we decorated our houses, what labels and fabrics we allowed next our skin, where we ate.... Perhaps if we had cut each other up on the moon, or in Eritrea, it would be important for me to bring you some vivid impression. But the material lives of the rich are of little consequence." For the rest of us, though, the world of upper-crust Sydney might as well be the moon; it is the job of the narrator to tell us exactly these things. After all, it was Fitzgerald himself who wrote, "The very rich are different from you and me." --Claire Dederer
From Publishers Weekly
From the first sentence of this debut novel, Australian journalist Knox heavily samples The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford's underread masterpiece. It's a bewildering move: Knox isn't following the current fad of retelling a classic from another character's point of view; he's simply plunking down Ford's 1915 English novel in modern-day Australia, and it doesn't fit. As in The Good Soldier, the "sad story" is told by the dimwitted cuckolded husband (here named Richard), misperceiving the long-term love affair between his wife (here, Pup) and his best friend (here, Hugh Bowman Jr., agribusiness heir). When Hugh's wife (here, Helen) finds out, she sadistically attempts to manage the affair, leading to tragic results. Much of this novel is devoted to the peripatetic social activities of the two rich, beautiful married couples: fortnights at the "dynastic Bowman shack at Australia's Palm Beach," visits to posh restaurants and nasty strip clubs, vacations in London. Wherever they go, they shine ("We had the appearance of those mythical people in brochures. The sky was always clear, the lighting just so. Have I mentioned how tall we were?"). It doesn't make sense that these perfect, privileged four can't have exactly what they want: unlike Ford's characters, they are not hemmed in by religion, fin-de-si?cle convention or Edwardian "sentiment," so their passions seem artificially thwarted. And their self-awareness grates. Knox overplays his hand by having them reserve tables under the name "Mr. Gatsby and group" and casting Pup as the wannabe writer who plagiarizes none other than The Good Soldier (notes Richard: "Perhaps I should read it. It was, apparently, quite a famous book"). Knox's plummy writing is artful, and his command of the plot's tricky structure is impressive, but this overly precious, unconvincing story reads like an academic exercise. (June)
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