In the near decade I’ve been a book critic, I’ve received my share of fanmail, hate mail – even the occasional rape or death threat (greetings, Cormac McCarthy mega-bros). It’s the price of the job, and I pay it. But I’ve noticed a pattern. When I criticise the work of a young woman, I’m feted – often grotesquely so. When I criticise the work of an Aussie man, I’ve made a gross moral error. The writer is a good bloke. Hard-working. Generous. Redoubtable. The implication: all criticism is off-limits, literary or otherwise. Which brings me to Trent Dalton.
Gravity Let Me Go is the first Dalton novel I’ve read. The year his smash hit Boy Swallows Universe was published, I’d just moved to Cairo and had other things on my mind. By the time I returned to Australia, the response to his fiction was so fervently oppositional – adoration v derision – that it felt like being asked to pick a footy team. The allegiances were more interesting to me than the novels: the packed auditoriums; the cultural critiques. What we talk about when we talk about Trent Dalton.
What finally lured me into the Dalton-verse was the bait of true crime, a subject I once chased as a criminologist. I’m fascinated by the genre’s slippery self-righteousness: how it imperils as many cases as it revives; how the bodies of dead women are repackaged as content, and vigilantism recast as virtue. It’s fertile ground for fiction (see Fiona McFarlane’s Highway 13, or Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You), and Dalton’s new novel promised a hefty contribution. Yet in the weeks I’ve lugged it around, I’ve been warned against saying what I think – long before I’d formed any opinion at all. I’ve been urged to shield myself, to save myself, with the armour of faint praise. Such is the protective racket of good blokery.
Why do good blokes get a free pass? Dalton’s book is instructive. Our hero is Noah Cork, a freelance reporter deep in “mid-life carnage” and far from the man he hoped to be. He pays a mortgage to his in-laws on a house he can’t afford to fix, and churns out true-crime hackwork for a local Brisbane paper – or he did, before he pissed off the Queensland police.
But Noah has a career-saving story to tell, and to sell; a scoop that might just buy him a second bathroom. Six months ago, after an anonymous tip arrived in his suburban letterbox, he found a body, signed a book deal and ignored his family to write it (fresh grief sells faster). Now the book – “217 pages of tabloid true-clime slime”, in Noah’s own estimation – is flying off the shelves, but his life is disintegrating. Noah’s father is dying, his youngest daughter is refusing school and his wife, Rita, has taken an inexplicable vow of silence. Hallucinatory skeletons are popping up everywhere – in his bedroom, at his book events – and he’s hobbled by a pain in his nuts that feels like a metaphor: “All my bad decisions and all my guilt and all my shame and all my insatiable ambition, physicalised and localised into a ball of knuckle-biting pain in my right testicle.”
Noah’s family aren’t the only ones paying the price. The case remains unsolved, possibly because publishing all the gory details mid-investigation is less than helpful. He has violated the victim’s privacy, and may have sabotaged her family’s chance at justice. Still, he won’t – he can’t – let the story go.
Careless with the living, cavalier with the dead, mercenary with the truth: Noah Cork is a feckless prick – “a contagion with a keyboard” – and he knows it. Gravity Let Me Go is his inner voice, a vicious loop of self-pity and self-flagellation (“You sad and empty vessel … Your heart is a cursed stone”). There’s nothing you can say about him that Dalton won’t have him say first. But Noah will get the answers, get the girl and learn the big life lessons. And we know it. His torment is performance, not risk. A pantomime. “I’m no good,” Noah hollers at us. “Oh, yes you are!” we (are meant to) holler back.
How do we know? Because Noah loves his kids and wordless wife (even as he alienates them). He loves his hard-to-love dad (even as he leaves him to a lonely death). He loves his suburb (even as he dares a killer to strike it). He loves being an old-school, pavement-pounding journo fighting for justice (even as he wreaks procedural havoc on the justice system). He loves his long-dead mum and his “little red Yaris”. His scrotum might be ornery, but his heart is in the right place.
Of course, the ultimate, unshakeable proof that Noah Cork is a good bloke is that a good woman loves him back – or used to. Once upon a time, a young Rita Munro looked him in the eyes and said, “I love you so fuckin’ much, Noah Cork.” And she meant it. Her love is a miracle, and Dalton might mean that literally: the magical-realist glitter he scatters through Gravity Let Me Go suggests Rita is actually heaven-sent. Silent and saintly, she is this novel’s true mystery, with her inscrutable ladybrain. “Could any man possibly ever know what’s really going on inside the mind of the woman he loves?” Noah asks himself. His father’s advice: don’t bother trying (“How would a being as feeble as you comprehend a thing of such profound wonder as your Rita?”) All Noah can do – all any man can do – is hold on.
Dalton’s fourth novel is a wife-guy manifesto, an uxorious fable. It’s bleakly retrograde: women as redeemers; men as awestruck limpets; love as an unyielding grip. A world of pedestals and learned helplessness; penitence and benediction. The women in Noah’s life can barely get a word in: they’re mute, dead or mad (in both senses of the word). His sister is watching their father die; the victim’s daughter is unhinged; and Noah’s own girls wisecrack like ocker gumshoes (“Bravo Daddio, looks like you made yourself a monster”). Everyone in this novel – from BookTok-ers to the friendly neighbourhood witch – speaks like a Raymond Chandler detective who has been drafted into an Aussie lamb ad (“Must be one helluva book if you’re willing to risk a gonad for it,” a urologist quips). But Noah is the most hardboiled of them all: “A good story is like a good Sunday roast: you smell it first … ” he tells us. “You smell it first and then you feel it in your problematic balls.”
The result reads like Liane Moriarty meets Dad and Dave, or an episode of CSI: Love Stories. And while Dalton flirts with big questions about the justice system and who it serves, he ultimately evades and deflects. Why land a punch when you can land a punchline? Or, even better, a dad joke (there’s a rolling gag about a cop whose loose-bowelled dog craps on command, and endless descriptions of Noah’s beleaguered ballsack: “a medieval coin bag sewn from the skin of a forest witch”; “a soft marinated olive”; “a bloated and toxic pufferfish”).
Gravity Let Me Go feels like an earnest book. A hand-on-heart book. We’re told that it’s the author’s most personal story yet. But emotional performance is not the same as emotional depth. Dalton’s high-yield gamble is that we can’t tell the difference. Noah certainly can’t. And so his self-castigation passes for atonement; his sentimentality passes for courage; his terror at losing his family passes for loving them well. And his ethical queasiness passes for journalistic integrity.
Each chapter begins with an excerpt from an invented journalism textbook. They read like scraps of a fairytale; missives from a lost and mythical time (“The storms will pass and there, like a light shining through the blackest cloud, will be truth”). And that’s the deep frustration here. Gravity Let Me Go arrives at a moment when it might have mattered: when the first grotty book deal for the Erin Patterson case was announced within an hour of the verdict. There’s a perfectly rollicking story here, if you want to get your rollicks off. But Dalton has two Walkley awards to his name. The reporter-turned-novelist could have said something of substance. Instead, he gives us testicular torsion, bullmastiff shit, a mute wife and a good bloke.
Gravity Let Me Go by Trent Dalton is out now through 4th Estate
