Bruised beauty

It takes nerve to create three self-absorbed characters, set them in dingy inner-urban Sydney over one summer, give them booze, cigarettes and tattoos, and locate the drama in a share house without resorting to a He Died with a Falafel in His Hand fiasco of bad manners. But with this scenario Emily Maguire, in her surreptitiously brilliant third novel, has instead created a riveting emotional composition which plays out with the basso of a tragic opera, the discipline of a stage play and the authenticity of real life. The book sucks us into its melodramas and subtleties; we enter both a plausible and dynamic depiction of contemporary dysfunction, and a carefully crafted parable on the gifts and hazards of caring for one another.

In her work on contemporary feminism, Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity (2008), Maguire made a call for women to respect each other’s choices. In Smoke in the Room, she gives us a female character who is difficult to like, at least in the beginning. Katie is the landlady’s granddaughter. When we meet her, she is a skittish, immature creature of impulse – baffling impulse – and aimless self-absorption. She drinks too much, collects tabloid magazines and mulishly resists her grandmother’s advice to get a job. Indeed, she seems an unlikeable and shallow young adult with not much in her head except boredom and the urge to provoke.