If any part of Australia can lay claim to being the country’s literary nexus, it is western Sydney. The wide wing of suburbia is both home to and the subject of granular attention for an ever-growing list of acclaimed writers: Yumna Kassab, Peter Polites, Luke Carman, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Felicity Castagna – to name just a few. Each of them reflects a culturally diverse landscape in which social class and suburban identity are forever intersecting, animating the lives of those often neglected in the margins of Australia’s projected self-image.
A key figure in this discourse is Max Easton, whose latest novel – Now, Autonomy – is the third instalment of his multi-decade series that chronicles working-class struggle and its subcultural undercurrents in Sydney’s west. Beginning with the Miles Franklin-longlisted The Magpie Wing in 2021, and followed by Paradise Estate in 2023, this ambitious, compelling quasi-trilogy – each title can be read and appreciated on its own – depicts people navigating Australia’s class hierarchies, hyper-gentrification, rental housing pressures and ever-diminishing spaces for community and collective activism.
We continue as Easton started, thrown into an ecosystem of progressively minded, albeit flawed, friends trying to sustain a meaningful existence. The shrewd Helen Coleman, who started as a teenager in The Magpie Wing, is now in her late 30s. Among her friends these days is her reclusive flatmate Pat, a middle-aged sound guy who can’t seem to shake the past; her off-kilter former housemate Sunny, whose restlessness for radical change is as irksome as it is imperative; Sunny’s partner, Sio, the only one of them with a somewhat put-together life; and Helen’s partner, Maria, who is caring yet increasingly despondent amid the holding pattern of their relationship.
Everyone is varyingly disillusioned and struggling to reorient themselves while fending off financial insecurity, creative inertia and interpersonal disaffection. Helen senses an “erosion in the world”: Israel’s genocide in Gaza continues unabated despite global protest, the economic gulfs of the 21st century are becoming yawning chasms and the commodification of artistic expression is even infecting the DIY scenes that sprang up in opposition to it. Collectively, there is a psychic strain: everyone cares for each other but is also exhausted by the emotional labour; everyone is quick to speculate about other people’s problems yet uninterested in addressing their own.
When not numbed before this “great defeat”, the gang seek to reorient themselves around a sense of agency and purpose. Reclamation of autonomy – personal and collective – is the novel’s focal point, as is the tension in doing so meaningfully. When everyone haphazardly tries to set up a new music venue called The Quarterly, it’s unclear how much it’s really to save “Sydney from itself” or themselves from the void. When that ambition is cut short and as fragments of Pat’s activist history are unearthed, a more radical project emerges. But what is really motivating each person? And is being part of an insignificant attempt at change itself still significant?
Now, Autonomy may sound like a jaded novel – but though it holds a mirror to cynicism, it is far from cynical itself. Indeed, it is a deeply compassionate work, more interested in diagnosing the causes of apathy than deriding it. As Easton has said, a driving motivation for him has been to address his fellow millennials who “bemoan the city and cultural milieu we’ve been handed without realising we’re not providing much more to those who come after us”. His writing is acerbic and sardonically funny while reflecting this, and is palpably alive to the strains of contemporary life while striving to give a voice to the means of resistance.
In a similar vein to what Emmett Stinson pointed out in The Magpie Wing, there are occasions in Now, Autonomy when Easton overtly expounds a point, as if intent on eschewing subtext. For example, when Pat is describing a certain condemned building to Sunny: “Everything is rotting in there. I dunno, I guess everything’s rotting now. The only things doing well are the things that feed on rot. Real estate. Banks. Internet.” Message received. Whether intentional or not, amid what is otherwise a novel of richly rendered place and nuanced characters, these moments at best flatten things and at worst dislodge you from the narrative.
But as a whole, Easton’s newest addition to his remarkable tapestry of western Sydney is tantalisingly alive. It is an ode to people who reach towards change – even in ways conceited or delusional – as they struggle to get by in a world increasingly resistant to accommodating them. You fall effortlessly into their lives and find yourself in them. For that Now, Autonomy should be applauded.
Now, Autonomy by Max Easton is out now (Giramondo, A$32.95)
