DAYLIGHT

Three Australians look back on lives of dissatisfaction in Tarwin’s fragmentary debut novel.

An aging, unnamed magistrate has come to Sydney on holiday with his wife. Restless and plagued by memories, he ventures to a suburb to visit his brother Richard, whom he hasn’t seen in four years. Richard is still grieving the death of his son, who drowned in Greece under circumstances that Richard has never understood. The reunion doesn’t get off to a very friendly start: “—Sure I can’t tempt you with a drink? —Water, the magistrate said pointedly. —Really. I preferred you when you were a drunk… —I preferred you when you had a son.” The novel tracks both men as they grapple with their ghosts, and it also tells the story of Maria Yael Kaplan, a Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor. Years ago, Richard had an affair with Maria’s daughter, and then offered his son to be the old woman’s helper. As the novel plays with each character’s memories, Tarwin explores the nature of the loss, remorse, and frustration that comes with age. The novel unfolds in short chapters, written in a discursive, sometimes-dense modernist prose: “Stand in the absence of motion. All that is left is to gather your disappointments scattered beneath the widening twilight; watching as they are weaved into the dusk’s story.” It’s not a book that seeks to accommodate readers; several major characters are nameless, and it achieves its ends via accumulation and repetition, rather than traditional narrative structure. Maria is the most accessible character, in part, because her story is told via several interviews with a single, mysterious figure. Her connection to the brothers is loose, though, and the dispute at the center of the magistrate’s relationship with Richard is never fully clarified—one of several unknowns that the novel resists resolving. How much enjoyment the reader gets out of it all will likely depend on their fondness for the work of such authors as Virginia Woolf and her disciples.

A lyrical but unyielding work about getting older.