fiction
Dorothy Hewett
Suneeta Peres da Costa
Homework
Bloomsbury $23.95pb, 288pp
1 58234 060 9
YOU COULD HEAR THIS NOVEL coming -- rumours of a six-figure advance, simultaneous publication in the US, UK and Australia -- and in The Australian, a full-page feature on the photogenic young author months before the book actually appeared. The swelling sounds of a big hype were unmistakeable. But is Homework good?
In parts Homework is brilliant, and as a whole, it is full of promise. It has intelligence, penetration, and an exuberance which should appeal to an international readership willing to mistake it for an Anglo-Indian novel. At times though, it just seems overwritten, another growing-up-in-the-suburbs story in which the heroine-narrator (Mina Pereira) makes her own drama out of the common facts of childhood -- sibling rivalry, parental discord, holidays with the old folks, the boy next door, school friends and enemies, homework, excursions, sex education classes and so on.
Since elaboration is central to Suneeta Peres da Costa's way of telling a story, you can think of the over-writing as a weakness which springs from the same source as her strength. Homework is, in effect, a series of arabesques based on familiar childhood experiences, enriching and interweaving them through ornate language, the accumulations of memory, and apparently arbitrary associations which build by repetition and variation into significant patterns.
The habit of elaboration is obvious first in the texture of Peres da Costa's prose. 'I'd resolved to relinquish forever my outward delinquency and become the ascetic they wanted, reconstituting old social narratives, saving everybody but myself from the brutal reality of our collective eschatology.' Put simply, Mina decides to go along with her parents. Or this, Mina's response to the despair shown by the mother of the boy next door.
The distinctive, shallow breath of human mourning rose and cast itself on the ceiling like the penumbra of the banyan tree that I would sometimes see cast onto the ceiling of the very Bombay apartment in which my mother's broken childhood had occurred and from which Nana had now faded into the amorphous motifs of my own poor phantasmagoria. In silence we listened to Mrs Soyer crying...
The style is very mannered, but there are, after all, three realities intertwined here, and three settings, Poland, India and Australia -- Mrs Soyer's wartime experiences in a 'concentrating camp'; Mina's mother's own despair, which leads to increasingly crazy behaviour in the course of the novel; and the recent death of Mina's grandmother, one of many deaths, near-deaths, and feared-deaths that cast their pall over the girl's view of life. It may seem ungainly (I'm reminded of Slessor's ambivalent refrain in 'William Street' -- 'You find this ugly, I find it lovely'), but it is a highly serviceable style, one which sets out to express a number of different perspectives simultaneously, and which also offers a direct expression of the author's own mixed social and intellectual origins.
The story itself works by a similar logic of elaboration, which turns on a series of returning motifs -- eyes, hands, eggs, hoops, wells, dogs, camps, cartoons and oil, amongst others. These act as hinges, which allow the story to go forward or backward in time, or to shift between different realities. The 'concentrating camp' for example, Mina understands in her own terms as one of those summer camps in mathematics or science that her father is always trying to get her to enrol in. The conversation with the neighbour about the camp takes place at Easter. Mina's sister Deepa is making an Easter egg for school, emptying out the yolk, and putting in a little cotton wool chick. Mina's mother, who has had her ovaries removed, has an obsession with eggs. Deepa has been reading Donne's 'Batter My Heart' in class for Easter. A classmate asks whether a battered heart is like a battered saveloy. Deepa thinks Donne wrote his best sonnets when he was blind. The boy next door has a glass eye which he takes out and fondles as if it were an egg...