Wild Abandon by Emily Britto / A clever and complex read about the abandonment of order

 

Both Emily Bitto’s novels are about the abandonment of order. 

Wild Abandon: a clever and complex read about the abandonment of order

The 25 best Australian books of 2021

By Kerryn Goldsworthy
October 8, 2021 — 4.00pm

FICTION: Wild Abandon, Emily Bitto, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

Emily Bitto’s debut novel, which won the Stella Prize in 2015, was called The Strays. This new book, her second, is called Wild Abandon, an equally suggestive but more intense and violent version of the same idea. They are both books about the abandonment of order, wherein an innocent character from an ordinary family is first attracted and then infected by perceived glamour that turns out, once experienced, to be both a driver and a product of disorder and dysfunction.

The main character, Will, has been dumped by his Melbourne girlfriend Laura, his first love, and he deals with the unhappiness of this by running away to the US in search of both escape and experience. So the tale of Will is both a flight and a quest as well as a coming-of-age story. He ends up working as an assistant to an unstable Vietnam veteran called Wayne Gage who runs a private zoo, and this part of the novel is based on an extravagantly tragic and bizarre true-life series of events that happened in Ohio in 2011.

Despite his youth and his essentially sweet nature, Will is a climber, as he acknowledges himself. He despises his small-town parents and their little lives; he thinks of himself as “a pleb and country boy”, as “a product not of provincial Melbourne but of his bog-provincial home town … his own climbing had merely raised his head to chin level above that pervasive element, his upbringing.” He persists in believing that his parents’ lack of sophistication is the reason Laura dumped him, even after she tells him something very different, and this sharpens his resentment of them.

CREDIT:

The title ostensibly refers to Will’s conscious decision that he will hurl himself into whatever experience comes his way: at one point he wonders “what zones of danger his vow of wild abandon might be leading him into”. In the first section of the book, those zones are marked by expensive New York City partying, by random casual sex and persistent over-consumption of drink and drugs.

In flight from the consequences of this, he catches up with his old home-town acquaintance Tamsyn, now married and living in some small Ohio town. But feeling himself in danger of getting stuck there, he contemplates moving on: “Yes, tomorrow he would push off again into the current.”

And whether it’s consciously used or not, the word “current” in this context will snag the attention of any reader who remembers the ending of that classic tale of the American Dream with its critique of conspicuous consumption and excessive wealth, The Great Gatsby: “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Consumption of all kinds, taken to sometimes sickening excess, is a recurrent theme in this novel. Late capitalism rules, and consumerism, spectacle and materiality are everywhere, as with the “personal stylist” Will meets at a New York party. At one point, he wonders whether he is a “mere touristic dandy, mass-produced surveyor of the mass-produced sites laid out for his predictable ocular and fiscal consumption”.

The lions, tigers, bears and wolves of Wayne’s Wild Kingdom are a more disturbing symptom of the human compulsion to acquire and hoard, and there is plenty of unregulated ingestion as well: drugs of unknown origin, alcohol in excess, the disturbing contents of chicken nuggets, and a queasy-making hamburger: “Will tried not to think about what portion of bone and hide and eyeball he was now ingesting.” The novel takes this preoccupation to its logical conclusion, in a moment that is shocking yet somehow not surprising.

Bitto’s own word for her style in this book is “baroque”, which is no exaggeration, and the effect of this occasionally over-elaborate style is to help readers keep their emotional distance from Will; almost all the story is told through his eyes, but not in his voice. Another bit of clever technique has the same effect: there are some brief, abrupt interruptions where the narrative point of view shifts to other characters and we see Will through their eyes, often at a very different angle from the way he sees himself.

Wild Abandon is clever, complex, troubling, and full of rich food for thought.

THE SIDNEY MORNING HERALD