Thursday 4 April 2019

Book review: Exploded View, Carrie Tiffany (2019)

I read the publisher’s material at the front of the novel after finishing it and it said that the man in the novel, who the girl, a teenager, refers to as “father man”, is not her biological father. Reading the book, this fact is not evident but knowing it explains much about the characters and the things they think and do.

What is clear is that the girl hates the man and the reason why becomes clear in some brief words the author includes in the narrative, which is entirely focalised through the protagonist. It contains rich colour to reflect the breadth of the girl’s imagination, but facts that contribute to the creation of a plot are scarce. I won’t spoil the story for people who have not read it and who want to, but the majority of the drama is enabled by the inclusion of a few salient details within the matrix of the girl’s stream of consciousness.

The story is set in the 1970s and the narrative contains numerous popular culture references, notably the TV shows ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ and ‘MASH’. There is an alarming lack of music in the house the girl lives in with her brother, her mother (who reads romances, and writes the titles in a notebook so that she doesn’t borrow the same ones from the library when she goes to replenish her supply), and the “father man” who drinks VB, drives a Holden, and follows the cricket on the radio.

A novel of the individual interior, it is something of a tour-de-force, stretching the boundaries of the form with a savage poetry that is emblematised by the girl saying, during a trip across the country in the man’s car that the whole family is forced to take, during which she is made to sleep on the floor of the backseat of the car, that she is a knife. The way that she describes the world around her, notably on this road trip, but also during scenes that are closer to home, some involving the next-door neighbour, who she calls “fat lady”, has the sharpness of novelty about it, a kind of effortless poetry where the borders between the self and the world are still unclear.

The title comes from the language of automobiles, and is used to describe those graphical representations of the inside of a car engine, or some other working section of a vehicle, that show the different parts and their relations to one another when assembled. The girl has a fascination with cars and the man runs a repair shop behind the family house. The book’s preamble says that the business is unlicensed but, again, this fact is not contained in the narrative. The girl gets up in the middle of the night sometimes and takes cars the man is working on for drives on the highway that runs past the family house. Sometimes she sabotages the cars that he is repairing.

The novel is quite short and is easy to read in a day or so even if you don’t press it. The scope of the venture is quite narrow and if the book has a shortcoming it is a lack of structural complexity. But to compensate for this two-dimensionality in the book’s architecture you find within the confines of the child’s imagination as represented by the expression used in it a whole universe of observations and a fresh catalogue of metaphors and similes. This aspect of it is vibrant and lush even if the motive behind the girl’s sadness is so tawdry.

I felt it deeply, even though, as mentioned, there is little in the way of a story to rely on here for emotional prompts. It all happens in her mind, a place that is fecund and productive. Such sadness, such pathos, hardly needs a name, but it does have one.

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