NAW Reading Challenge: An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman
To celebrate our inaugural New Australian Writing (NAW) Award shortlist, we’re running a NAW Reading Challenge.
This week our participants have read An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman. Here are their responses to the novel. (Ed. note: may contain spoilers!)
Our favourite response for this week (not to mention the winner of our $100 gift voucher) is…
Sam says:
An Elegant Young Man is the result of a single writer attempting to clash together two oppositional forces: the ‘high’ literary and the ‘low’ real life. Carman is as sharp as a knife: he’s widely read and incisive with his intellectualism, and he is also a person who has grown up around knife and sword-wielding thug-types and as such has learned that, in many cases, the only way to beat them is to join them and work from within. Carman won’t ‘other’ these people, because they are no different to him or us; they are just people. Nothing is more boring than the othering of characters who apparently threaten our ‘way of life’ – or even our very lives. 100 times out of 100 I would prefer as a reader/watcher/person to be allowed inside the sanctum, whatever that sanctum may be, and this is something that Carman allows in this book. He doesn’t stand outside the fence alongside us as we all point fingers at the zoo of people who make up the beautifully ugly world of Western Sydney. He throws us over the fence into the pen, jumps on in after us, and then we’re face-to-face with what we thought were animals, only to discover that the truth is something much else: they were never animals at all, or probably more likely, we’re as much as animals as they are.
An Elegant Young Man was originally titled ‘How To Be Gay’ (and Carman pushed as much as he could for this title before it was eventually nixed), which came from an interaction he had with a male friend after Carman told him he was writing a book. His friend replied, in half-jest, something along the lines of, “A book? What kind of gay cunt writes a book? Writing is for fags. What are you gonna call it, How To Be Gay?”
If literature isn’t written that includes characters like this, dialogue like this, scenes like this, sub-cultures like this, then all we will have is books that ignore whole sections of the community, and as such these books are in some way false. Ultimately, what hope can we have that sexist, violent, racist, narrow-minded people will ever change – even perhaps through the power of engaging with literature – if said literature doesn’t engage with them first?
And, here are some more of our favourites…
Jill says:
Reading An Elegant Young Man is like having your face pushed, not entirely unwillingly, into a laundry basket of sweaty gym clothes. Not designer gear either.
This speedy, uneven, intimate foray into life in the western suburbs of Sydney at all times feels authentic and interesting. It has the feel of a film; Carman is very skilled at creating visuals and pulling the reader into the drama that is unfolding, whether it’s the violence of a methed-up boyfriend, a You lookin at me kebab shop confrontation or a spooky graveyard at night. At first it reminded me of Tom Cho’s writing but Carman soon finds his own voice and style. Not elegant – but visceral.
Alice says:
Luke Carman sails to Elegance
(With Apologies to William Butler Yeats)
Luke’s is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, girls in the landscape
- Those dying generations - at their drug,
The asphalt streets, the violence-ridden scenes,
Fob, Lebbo, junkie, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and hurts.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Carmen’s words of unageing intellect.
A bookish teen is but a paltry thing,
Precocious twaddle up on stilts, unless
Soul clap its hands and laugh, and louder sing
For every drama in its daily life,
Nor is there writing school but studying
Monuments of its own (literary) inheritance;
And therefore Luke has written these stories and come
To the holy city of West Suburbium.
O boxers standing in Trent’s holy ring
As in the mottled sunlight of a street,
Come from Granville, baptised by fire,
Newtown the poet-master of my soul.
Tom is fantasy, Niki full of desire,
And fastened to an ice-filled vision
She knows not what he is; but gathers Luke
Cheerfully into ‘the things that people say’.
Luke is out of nature, his words do never take
Their bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Urban landscapes make
Of industry, smog and sun-drenched staggering,
To keep a drowsy Readings reader ‘wake;
By setting scenes of pain-absurdity to tell,
Of piss-pot mums and delinquent sons
Of what is past, or passing, not to come.
