Venice

(by Nick Earls)

I can’t remember where/when/why I bought this novella but my best guess is that it was when I was on vacation in New Zealand in 2017 (Earls is Australian). This is actually the second in a series of five linked novellas, but it works as a standalone (though I do want to go back and read the first one now). (I have a tendency to acquire books and then not read them for ages, but I like serendipity, and I feel like I generally pick up a book at the right moment. But anyway.)

Despite the title, this is set in Brisbane: the book’s narrator, Ryan, is unemployed and providing childcare for his nephew Harrison because his sister Natalie (who’s an artist) and her husband Phil (who’s a dentist) are busy with their jobs. (We learn partway through the book that Natalie might be a contender for having her work in the Venice Biennale, hence the title.) This is a slice-of-life kind of book, albeit with some events that are more typical of most people’s daily lives than others: Ryan makes pasta for Harrison for dinner and a casserole or salmon for the grown-ups; Ryan goes to the store to get some ice cream; Ryan picks up Harrison from daycare; Ryan takes Harrison with him to go pick up some horse heads because Natalie wants to use the skulls in the piece she’s currently working on.

Ryan clearly has thoughts about Natalie and Phil and the way they parent their kid, but he avoids conflict with them: they’re helping him out by letting him live with them (and slipping him some extra cash), after all. The interactions between Ryan and Harrison (who’s four years old and never far from his LeapPad tablet) are excellent: funny and tender. And I like the glimpses we get of Natalie’s art, and Ryan’s take on it. At one point there’s this: “Natalie tells us it’s been a day about angles, and some angles are more intimate than others”; she makes sculptural groups of creatures with titles like “Family #5.” But her experience of family is somewhat abstracted (at least in Ryan’s view of it): “her thoughts about family, or the notion of it, are like the thoughts of astronauts looking back at a blue-white Earth.” But in the end, as Ryan puts it: “Perhaps any idea about family—the felt idea, the lived-in idea—has the capacity to be greater than the sum of its parts.” Which could be said about this novella, too.