Like a House on Fire

Cate Kennedy

Like a House on Fire
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Scribe Publications
Country
Australia
Published
26 September 2012
Pages
288
ISBN
9781922070067

Like a House on Fire

Cate Kennedy

Read Helen Garner’s interview with Cate Kennedy about Like a House on Fire here.

From prizewinning short-story writer Cate Kennedy comes a new collection to rival her highly acclaimed Dark Roots.

In Like a House on Fire, Kennedy once again takes ordinary lives and dissects their ironies and injustices and pleasures with her humane eye and wry sense of humour.

In ‘Laminex and Mirrors’, a young woman working as a cleaner in a hospital helps an elderly patient defy doctor’s orders. In ‘Cross Country’, a jilted lover manages to misinterpret her ex’s new life. And in ‘Ashes’, a son accompanies his mother on a journey to scatter his father’s remains, while lifelong resentments simmer in the background.

Cate Kennedy’s poignant short stories find the beauty and tragedy in illness and mortality, life and love.

Review

Few writers understand the short-story form as well as Cate Kennedy, and her latest collection, Like a House on Fire, is a welcome return to the territory of Dark Roots (a book that I still find myself returning to from time to time).

Each piece is a perfect distillation of domesticity – a description that I use not to suggest any kind of smallness, but in fact quite the opposite. Kennedy is a writer who knows exactly how to soothe and stir the aches and pains of contemporary life with singular focus, and Like a House on Fire carries within it everything from a young hospital cleaner yearning for her time in London to a new mother gathering herself and her baby for their first family portrait.

Highlights for me were ‘Seventy-Two Derwents’, a closely spoken, beautifully voiced piece told through the diary of a young girl and the threat that her mother’s new boyfriend presents, as well as ‘Cross-Country’, in which a woman finds herself endlessly trawling the net for clues about her ex-partner’s new life.

The latter is perhaps one of the best examples of the ways in which fiction can tackle the digital – not as something futuristic or awkwardly dated but as a source of real emotional fibre: ‘It’s 2.30 in the morning when I enter the portal, stoop to the keyhole and whisper the name that turns the deadlock. I don’t know why they call it surfing. They should call it drowning.’

Another real pleasure of the collection is without a doubt Kennedy’s cool and glasslike prose. In ‘Cake’ a mother gathers up her young son after their first day apart: ‘Something is tearing inside her, slowly and deliberately, like a perforated seam’, and in ‘Tender’ a woman discovers a small lump under her arm ‘like a pea, buried but resilient, a small sly sphere nesting disguised between layers of flesh and tissue’.

Like a House on Fire is full of these small and careful episodes, worlds that we enter and then are gently removed from.

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