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FICTION
Prettier if She Smiled More
Toni Jordan
Hachette, $32.99
When Toni Jordan’s post-lockdown novel Dinner With the Schnabels was published halfway through last year, a sequel was already being promised, and has now appeared with such promptitude that it might already have been written back then.
In Dinner With the Schnabels, the focus is on a character called Simon Larsen, whose business as an architect has collapsed after the global pandemic panic. Simon, who is relegated to a minor role in Prettier if She Smiled More, is married to one Tansy Schnabel, the second of the sparkling matriarch Gloria’s three children. Tansy’s younger brother, Nick, is a feckless but endearing former sports star; her older sister Kylie, in the way of many first-borns, is an anxious and exacting control freak.
Toni Jordan is a kind of Australian Marian Keyes.Credit: Jason South
In Prettier if She Smiled More, the cast is the same, but the spotlight has shifted to Kylie, who’s now 43. The central event of Dinner With the Schnabels was a memorial service for the ex-husband and absent father David, long absconded and now newly dead; Gloria has been a single parent since Kylie was 12. Unsurprisingly, Kylie is the one who’d be “prettier if she smiled more”, and as this novel begins, she is about to have what the family dubs the Week of the Three Disasters.
The first of the disasters is that the pharmacy at which Kylie works, a business she has long since aspired to buy from her boss once he retires, is sold out from under her to a big pharmacy chain that may or may not deign to give her own job back once she has re-applied for it.
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The second disaster is the enforced departure of her boyfriend, Colin, a sad tale the moral of which is that you should never synchronise your Fitbit with your partner’s. The third disaster occurs when the 70-ish Gloria, sporting “three-inch heels and a sequin swing coat”, falls off a barstool and breaks her ankle, whereupon Kylie sees no alternative but to move back into the family home to take care of her mother.
A fourth disaster seems to be looming, too: Kylie’s hitherto clockwork-regular period is three or four days late, but her attention is distracted by the looming crisis at work and the difficulties of looking after her mother: “’That tea is so pale it could be in the cast of Neighbours,” said Gloria. “Please don’t tell me you put the milk in first.”
Fortunately, Gloria bonds with a Pomeranian called Caesar that Kylie has been manipulated into looking after while its owners are on holidays: “Gloria chose one bottle and shook it, then she extracted the brush, removing the excess polish against one edge, and painted the longest of Caesar’s nails a neon pink.”
There is something warm and redemptive about these lively tales of the Schnabel family, and they are also very funny. Jordan has been compared to various other writers including Liane Moriarty, but if we must make comparisons, then this one is a no-brainer: Jordan is a kind of Australian Marian Keyes, combining overdrive pace and throwaway humour with a razor intelligence and a deft, illuminating touch on darker subjects and themes.
The humour comes from the characterisation, the frequent one-liners, the wit of the dialogue and the almost painfully recognisable and familiar nature of the nuclear family and its interpersonal dynamics. The darkness comes from a frank recognition of the things that can make human life insupportable, looking at everything from the way a difficult childhood can shape the course of an individual adult life to the endless repercussions, financial and otherwise of a global emergency.
Kylie reflects on this when she discovers that the dry-cleaning business next door to her own workplace has closed down. “It had been a tough few years for drycleaners, Kylie knew. No one needed spotless suits to eat Pizza Shapes out of the box balanced on your stomach while lying on the couch streaming cash-strapped Koreans playing children’s games to the death.”
Again like Keyes, Jordan sets her characters and plot in the place where family life meets national culture. The Schnabels – European-sounding name and all – are as Australian as Keyes’ families are Irish, and instantly recognisable as such. Reading these family stories is rather like watching a remake of The Castle, brought up to date and set in the time of COVID: a sharp-eyed, engaging, endearing and ultimately optimistic story about things that could easily tip over into tragedy but are firmly redeemed.
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