Paddy O’Reilly’s seventh book, Other Houses, covers familiar territory. Imagine – a couple of battlers living on the fringes of metropolitan Melbourne, trying their darndest to make good. Janks is an ex-junkie and factory worker, his partner, Lily, toils away as a domestic cleaner. They live with Jewelee, Lily’s teenage daughter from another relationship, a former “wild thing” who Lily and Janks are hoping to rehabilitate towards upward mobility. The family move to a nicer suburb, put Jewelee in a better school, pull their bootstraps up.
But early in the novel Janks disappears, and Lily’s life descends into disarray as she wonders about his reasons – debt, drugs, abandonment? – at the same time worrying about having to raise her daughter on her own. Told through Janks’ and Lily’s alternating perspectives, we find out about their pasts as they attempt to reassemble the pieces of their lives, and what got them where they are.
Other Houses falls under an umbrella of Australian books that pay close attention to the lives and motivations of the working poor in urban suburbs, such as Loaded, The Pillars, One Hundred Days, Populate and Perish, and The House of Youssef. I group these books together – even though the authors’ styles vary – because they share a preoccupation with addressing what Australian society seems unable to confront and reconcile – that despite social welfare and first-world affordances, there’s a large wealth divide that’s only growing bigger by the day, with many falling between the cracks. These are not narratives about the tired image of the “bogan”, and neither are they about the “Australian dream”. These books say that the dream is a trap, but there is no other option.
O’Reilly has previously written about her time working as a house cleaner, and as we follow Lily and her work wife, Shannon, from house to house, that experience is plain to see. Each job is described with the utmost detail, in scenes that capture the routine curiosities amid the boring business of survival. O’Reilly shows the camaraderie between the two women as they project their aspirations on their clients’ homes, share their bewilderment at the ostentatious luxuries around them, wonder about their private lives. For them, the lives of the rich are simultaneously absurd and wonderful.
A testament to her long career writing fiction, O’Reilly constructs a strong sense of place through sentences that, while never bombastic, often surprise you. Anxiety is “a hot plop-plopping pool”, a thug has a “pudding face”, someone makes “a turtle mouth”, and when Shannon is angry “the skin of her face wrinkles like the skin on custard when you tip the bowl”. When Lily frets about Janks’ disappearance while still trying to preserve a sense of normality in Jewelee’s day-to-day, the tension and fear is palpable: “The sensation keeps you tight, keeps you toey. A little nauseous, all the time.”
Like the aforementioned books, Other Houses never enters “trauma porn” territory. These stories are not meant to be gawked at or evoke hand-wringing guilt (if so, that’s on you). Instead, they strive to capture the humour and small pleasures that come with making do despite hardship and drudgery, while also attending to the grim reality that “you can never get away from the place that first dragged you down”. The novel is a striking representation of how the status quo is constantly built to spill, its rules made with the interests of the middle and upper-classes in mind.
Other Houses is emblematic of what O’Reilly once said in an interview: “We may be doing the best we can with the abilities we have or we may be trying to forge a path in a new world, but we all face the same question – how are we to live?”
The dream of upward mobility is a sullen game of Snakes and Ladders, a failing enterprise for the working poor – it may be “fine” now, but the risk of the downward turn is omnipresent. There is no resolution. We can only try to make sense of living.
Other Houses by Paddy O’Reilly is published by Affirm Press ($32.99)
