Sinkholes open up all over Melbourne in one of the standout stories in Chris Ames’ funny and absurd debut collection, I Made This Just For You.
Alison, the disaffected narrator of That Is Not A Cat, finds one in her back yard, “small as a beach ball but with a devouring abyss that yawns on forever”. Late one night, she confides in it: “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.” She’s caring for a grandmother with dementia, sleeping with a co-worker, trying to get pregnant by IVF and, when she wants to remind herself that she exists, she drops an item in a digital cart and waits. “Sometimes it takes a minute. But it always comes. Are you still interested, Alison? I never open the emails, but I do save them in a folder titled i’m worth tracking.”
Archy, the computer program she’s developing to help identify objects in pictures, is another kind of sinkhole; Alison and her team have fed it 55 million images of cats. Voracious, mesmerising and insatiable, sinkholes are an apt metaphor for the mediated and precarious experience of the millennial knowledge-workers who populate Ames’ fictions. We could think of the social media platforms into which we pour our data as sinkholes. A sinkhole is great content, and also a vehicle for the anxiety that the ground might just fall from beneath our feet. You might lose your job, your kid might get sick, your parent might die. Or the Earth itself might cave in, leaving you and everyone you love in freefall.
There are 17 stories in I Made This Just For You, each set in a distorted but plausible version of the world we live in. Ames is alert to the melancholy absurdities of contemporary life and the yearning of characters like Alison for connection and intimacy; and he’s particularly attuned to the banality and cruelty of contemporary media culture. Together these stories wrestle with the problem of how to love and care for other people in a world that seems to be collapsing in on itself. Grief, economic precarity, parenthood, gender, climate anxiety and the delirium of living under platform capitalism are recurring themes.
The general impulse of these stories is satirical but, as Ames recently told an interviewer, “writers of satire are having a hard time conjuring a future stupider than the one we currently reside in”. And yet for all that they revel in absurdity, I Made This Just For You cannot resist the sinkhole of affect: Ames’ characters grieve, they desire, they long for tenderness and the ghosts of their dead fathers. They cannot post their way through these feelings. The father of a newborn asks, “How could I love this stranger so much?” Where do we put these feelings, Ames’ characters want to know? What “devouring abyss” can contain them?
In True Love at the Plastisphere, a mayoral candidate thinks he can solve the problems facing the residents of a floating plastic island by throwing them into a volcano. “‘A volcano is what I like to call an everything machine,’ the candidate says, stroking his beard. ‘It solves whatever you put into it, like a black hole, or the internet.’”
In Good Light, a depressed narrator encounters a creature made of a “congealed braid of hair” pulled up from the drain. This clump of hair and grease becomes the narrator’s polite double, an unsummonsed golem who manages to live her life for her quite competently. This leaves the narrator to take refuge in the plughole of her bath, a different kind of sinkhole.
A house populated by men named Chris is sinking into the earth. Islands are sinking into the sea and Ames’ characters are often sinking into lives they don’t understand. A man gets so lonely that he decides “to buy a children’s hospital and name it after myself”.
The best stories in the collection – That Is Not A Cat, I Made This Just For You, True Love at the Plastisphere and The Gesture – are tonally complex, in that they index the bleak absurdity of their characters’ predicaments and also register their tenderness. Not every story is a complete success; a couple veered too close to tweeness for my bitter tastes, and others relied on over-familiar conceits and gimmicks, such as a story that reveals itself via the clues to a crossword puzzle. And yet this unevenness is symptomatic of the playfulness and experimentalism that impels I Made This Just For You, as Ames and his characters search for the right register to represent a bewildering and unreliable world, one in which literal and figurative sinkholes can open up at any moment and suck you in.
I Made this Just for You by Chris Ames is out now through Hardie Grant
