Hovering House Calls

by Rhett Davis

Hovering House Calls by Evelyn Hoge Pendley

Genres: Australia, Fiction, Science Fiction, Contemporary

Paperback

First published February 23, 2022

Reviews

[Inga · Rating 4 out of 5]

original, beautiful and mind-bending

[Craig and Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you Hachette for sending us a copy to read and review.
Ok I’m lost for words so this won’t take much of your time.
It was in parts cleverly written, it was futuristic and it was very far fetched.
I picked up on tones of conspiracy theories and a clear message to highlight the peril of land being stolen.
It consisted of many parts that employed many types of script displays.
Most including the tables gave me head tension.
They did however break up the book and I suppose reflect the chaos that was going on in the fictional suburb.
I am not a gamer and won’t pretend to understand the appeal or dismiss those that do.
But it was an element of this book and the latter half was like the reader stepped inside the console and we were in the game.
I applaud the author for delivering a unique and conceptually challenging read.
I am generally quite keen to indulge in all sorts of genres and styles but I became lost in this.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Bunch of us think the world’s overloaded with information.’

Alice returns to Australia after sixteen years. A reluctant return to Fraser, a city she hardly recognises, but Alice has no other options. She stands outside her family’s house, a 1950s brick veneer, and knocks. Lydia opens the door to her sister. Upstairs, Lydia’s sixteen-year-old son George lives in his own world most of the time. George creates digital objects for video gamers and chooses not to speak.

‘The edges of the city expand and contract. Colours change. It’s hard to distinguish what is real and what isn’t.’

The sisters occupy a common physical space but psychologically they irritate each other. Alice left when Lydia was pregnant with George, and this is the first time she has returned. Lydia knows that there is something wrong with Alice, while Alice wants Lydia to engage more with the world. Lydia retreats into games, into comfortable controllable (mostly) artificial realities while George works on a virtual world and tries to find his own space.

But the appearance of Alice draws unwanted attention. And on top of the agitation and uncertainty experienced by people, the city of Fraser is changing. Streets disappear, houses move, people are discombobulated, tensions rise. Conspiracy theories abound, amplified by confusion and internet accessibility.

‘The world was impossible to comprehend. People were impossible to understand.’

Brilliant. A shape-shifting city, messages through art, virtual worlds which are more constant than the real world. A story (or stories) about the environment, about people, connections, change and place, unfolding over five parts.

Jennifer Cameron- Smith

[Jaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is so much going on in this Victorian Premier Literary Award winning novel on a content, structural and formal level. Davis is interrogating notions of home, permanence, cultural cringe and artistic legacies. He uses the full arsenal of formal invention at his disposal to do so. I loved how disorienting this book could feel without it ever losing me as a reader. The twists and turns of the narrative are met with physical lurches within the inhabited city. Sometimes formal play comes at the cost of deep engagement and that was true for me here, especially at the end. So I enjoyed many of the clever formal aspects at a remove when I would have preferred to be held close to the narrative and this story of sisters and cities and how we are not on the stable ground we think we are (and that ground is stolen land).

[Gavan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outrageously brilliant. The more I read it the more I loved it. Very hard to describe, but the shape-shifting of the city of Fraser is amazingly well written with a perfect balance of detail and magic - it left me sufficiently clear yet vague & a little discombobulated like the city residents. I'm sure there are allegories galore in this gem of a novel. Lots to think about in terms of art commercialisation, Melbourne's love of sports, environmental issues, first nations treatment, family, online gaming obsessions, property development, etc. All tied into a neat & enthralling narrative about a woman coming home to her sister after her world falls apart. Wow - what a book.

[grace griffin · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was kind of hard to get through, i love the concept and i did enjoy the story but it’s not something you can read as an audiobook and idk it just too much brain power. very very cool concept tho

[Lisa]

Winner of the 2020 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, Hovering is the most entertaining book I've read for a while, but it's macabre and disorientating too.

Fun... because of the deadpan delivery of the absurdity of modern (non)communication but macabre and disorientating because it contests the complacent security of life in our cities.

Hovering made me think of the plaintive refrains about wanting certainty during pandemic lockdowns.  What was it, I used to wonder, that made them not understand that certainty is no more possible in a pandemic than it is in a natural disaster or a war?  Rhett Davis shows us that the planet itself rebels against mistreatment and denial of history, and that people have no choice but to learn to adjust and adapt.  He does this in a city recognisable as Melbourne but — in an echo of the unnecessary and disorientating renaming of Narrm by John Batman* —he has renamed the city as Fraser...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/05/05/h...

[Griflet · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pg. 22

Don't know wtf is happening and don't care enough to work it out.
As usual with Oz lit, need the friggen 'PhD Novel' warning stamp in red across the cover asap.
Literary fiction doesn't need to be like this ffs. So over the Australian literary scene. Still feeling the antipodean cringe after all these years, it's just a different kinda cringe now. Stop blowing smoke up each other's bums. I swear nothing is guaranteed to make me crankier than an Australian Phd Novel. Huge sighs.
Yeah y'all loved it. Happy for y'all.
It's a Yeah Nah from me.

[Luke McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous!

[Kathryn O'Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Unusual and experimental in structure. The surreal movement of the city was wonderful.

[Pegaunimoose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had high hopes for this but overall not a fan. I could see what it was trying to do and it didn’t quite get there. Good idea and clumsy execution. Even though it was Australian it didn’t feel super Australian. Maybe because it was set in Melbourne and Melbournites are wanky

[Lucy Birch · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why a we pretending that the bare minimum of metafiction is original? Faux primary sources in novels has been done a million times

Author struggles to mimic the online world, written how someones dad might understand the internet. Far better examples of on online culture exist in literature, just read 'no one is talking about this'

Character development was toneless and two dimensional

Prose was nonexistent, author struggled to comprehensively describe very important scenery ie, How is the family getting on top of the grain silo????

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

BRAVO. One of my fave books of 2022.

Alice is 39, and has turned up unannounced on the doorstep of her sister Lydia's house. She had left her single, pregnant sister 16 years ago for Europe and never returned, until now.

Lydia is mid-thirties and sole parent to a 16 year old. She works in an office, retreats into an immersive online digital world each night and has never left her home city.

George is 16, he makes enough money from creating digital objects he sells to video gamers that he could afford his own apartment, if he wanted.

Their parents (and George's grandparents) have been travelling the world for the last 16 years on an extended retirement trip. Mostly in the artificial islands of the Pacific created by global corporations when the real ones disappeared below the sea.

Alice, Lydia and George have their own story arcs which play out and intersect in the near future in the City of Fraser which is where Geelong is now. Except it's the capital city of Victoria. And it changes overnight. All cities change, but not quite like this one, with houses, streets and man-made features shifting, randomly, from place to place.

It's a story about our impact on and connection to place. It's about change, what we get used to and what we don't. It's about connection and lack of connection.

Ultimately it is about what changes and what doesn't.

Defying a specific genre this is alt history, speculative fiction and experimental fiction rolled into one. It has structural shades of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad and yet is nothing like them.

Text is displayed in a number of forms including columns, text messages and computer code (as well as large swathes of 'normal' format). Each text form is perfectly suited to the scene and delivers meaning without all the exposition that would otherwise be required. As a result I think the book will be polarising in the reader reviews. It's not for those who prefer plot-driven straightforward reads.

Written as part of his PhD in Creative Writing this is the debut novel from accomplished short story writer, Rhett Davis. The unpublished manuscript won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award in 2020. For additional background into Rhett's thinking his thesis paper is available online. It shows he has really thought about the themes.

If it hasn't already, this should be entered in the Booker and the Miles Franklin. I'd vote for it.

[nina.reads.books · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hovering is the debut novel of Rhett Davis and it is quite unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s hard to describe the premise but essentially Alice returns to her childhood home after becoming involved in an art world scandal. She comes back to see her sister Lydia and her nephew George for the first time in sixteen years. Her home is the same but the town seems different somehow. Lydia is sad and distant and George refuses to speak and lives his live enmeshed in a virtual word he designs. The story shows how these three distant people can come together as a family. It speaks to what it means to be home and also makes a comment on living on land that was not ours to begin with.
In many ways the book echoes the experimental structure of Lanny but for me it was without the beautiful poetic language, forest imagery and joy that Lanny provides. In Hovering the structural experimentation is heavy handed. I did like that it was daring to be different but the purposeful confusion became a bit too much by the end. I also found the explanations of art laborious but perhaps that was just me!

The voices that George hears in his head, the increasing “metropolitan disturbances”, the text written in code, the chorus of comments on the Internet are all ambitiously written but perhaps for me too much of a cacophony of sound to really take in.

I’d be very interested to hear others thoughts as Hovering is definitely something very unique in amongst the sea of new releases from Australian authors.

Note: I read this book 3 years but apparently never posted my review!

[Jesse Cuthbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

“George and his peers figured that this was how it was, how it had always been and would always be. Fraser would be an uncertain city, and to live there would be to live with its uncertainty.”

This book is, if nothing else, solidly weird. But it’s that weirdness which kept me enraptured in this - often - mind boggling story. Set in the fictional city of Fraser (seemingly the size of Melbourne but seemingly in the location of Geelong), ‘Hovering’ follows George, Lydia and Alice as they come to accept their secrets and struggles.

The premise of this story is Fraser is a city that rearranges itself. It’s constantly shifting and changing, serving as a physical manifestation of our relationship to our homes and how while they remain the same, they inevitably change. It’s use of magical realism makes this book masterful for me.

A story about our relationship to cities and our parasocial relationship with this, ‘Hovering’ is a stunning piece of Australian literary fiction that deserves all the praise it receives.

[Jessica Maree · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://jessjustreads.com

Rhett Davis’ debut novel Hovering is an ambitious and imaginative novel straddling the border between literary and magical realism. It feels like one of those literary novels that is so clever in its imagery and symbolism, you can’t quite capture it all in one sitting.

Rhett’s novel feels unique in its form — with short chapters resembling a staccato stylistic technique, Rhett experiments with form throughout the novel. From HTML code to chat room or forum conversations, interview transcripts, text messages and spreadsheets detailing movements and dialogue, Hovering does make you feel like you’re moving through some sort of surreal tale.

“Some on the forums recommended exercise, so if he felt an attack coming, he tried to go for a run. When he ran, the noise of his blood drowned out the noise of what he thought might be the universe.”

Anyone who has lived away from home, or spent some time living away from where they were raised, will recognise some of the feelings and emotions brought to life in this story — the strange complexity of returning home and feeling like it’s different to what you remembered.

Written in what feels like a staccato voice — short scenes and chapters — we gain glimpses of the main characters like puzzle pieces. Two sisters with damaged history, and a teenage boy who won’t speak. A town that feels disrupted and fractured, like it’s shifted in recent years. It throws the reader into a sense of (intended) unease.

“The next day, the front door of Fay and Luis Montana’s house had been moved several metres to the left. It now opened on their bedroom. Fay stood at the door in a Malinda Banksia Festival 20—t-shirt, looking out at the street in some confusion.”

Themes in the novel include climate change, climate collapse, art and identity, artistic morality and legacy. Hovering explores urban development and how a city can adapt or reconfigure over time, soon becoming something you don’t even recognise.

Admittedly, the novel feels really slow-paced, but I sense that’s intentional. The short scenes counteract this and help keep the story moving without making the reader feel like events are happening too slowly.

“Alice had left Fraser in a rage. She was angry at her sister, at her parents, at her friends, at the city itself. They were all so backwards. They wanted nothing but comfort and gourmet burgers and new screens. They lived off the proceeds of a land that wasn’t theirs and permitted it by acknowledging if before public events and occasionally raising the Indigenous flag.”

Taut and original, Hovering is recommended for readers of literary fiction. Readership skews 30+

Thank you to the publisher for mailing me a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hovering is a book that is fundamentally about connection and change. Set in the fictional city of Fraser (a combination of the real life cities of Melbourne and Geelong), it tells the story of an estranged family trying to reconnect at a time of great flux.

There is a lot of symbolism and allegory in the book that works on a number of levels. The changing nature of the city reflects the changing relationships of the characters, and the fluidity of everyday life in the modern world. One of the characters is an artist and the descriptions of her (and other artworks) clearly allude to events in Australia’s (and the world’s) history and to the events in the book.

It’s hard to talk about this book without at least mentioning the form that it’s presented. Most of the book is in standard prose format, however there are sections of the book that experiment with this form. There are emails, social media streams and comment sections. On a couple of occasions events are displayed in a table to represent the simultaneous actions of the characters, and one notable passage is presented as a log file from a phone.

This isn’t as daunting or distracting as it may sound. We live in an online world, and the way we experience world events now IS as much through the lens of comments and social media as it is in any standard form. Having this reflected so accurately in the book gives it a sense of verisimilitude. As the book goes on these elements don’t feel like they interrupt but act like a device to drive the story forward.

In summary, I found the book highly entertaining and readable. At all times I was compelled to keep reading - I always wanted to know what happens next, with the characters, with the story and with the city of Fraser.

I look forward to reading more from the author.

[Amelia O'Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hovering feels uncomfortable most of the time because it says a lot about Australia in a slightly absurd but totally believable way.

Set in Fraser, a city in the south east of Australia there is much about this fictional city that is completely relatable to our actual cities. One of the protagonists Alice (an artist) thinks of her work, "[i]t hadn't been Fraser, but it was almost certainly from Fraser" and the same can be said of Davis's work in Hovering.

The tale of Alice who returns home to Fraser after 16 years overseas. She returns to the family home to stay with her sister Lydia who wants everything to follow the usual pattern and her nephew, George who doesn't speak. The city is shifting around them.

This family context provides the setting for the author to explore colonisation, the treatment of Indigenous people, art and individualism, the progression of modern society, our place in the world, belonging, abandonment and so many other ideas about humans and the way we impact the planet, the people and the environment around us.

George is an endearing character (he can communicate digitally despite his vow of silence). Alice and Lydia and their inability to communicate is highly irritating which I am sure is the point. A lot happened at the same time as not much happened but Hovering is definitely worth the read for the very interesting ideas it presents.

[Rhonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly awesome work. Human physical presence, in all its external forms, and AI finally interconnect on the playing field of reality - both virtual and three dimensional. Expressed through the skills of the artists of the human race - whose role in the recent decades have undergone - not so much a total reversal - but as maximumly complete as we and it can ever get. And it is conceivable. I read this while simultaneously looking deeply into Gerard Manley Hopkin’s ‘Pied Beauty’ as part of my local poetry writers group challenge to redo a published work by another writer and there was an energy between book and poem that resonated deeply - except for the poem’s last word, which should be Life - not Him. Both a lovely and amazing read. And just as reading a book is satisfying or not in different ways for each of its readers so, for singular me, this work gained a different sort of depth in finding in the Acknowledgments that it was set, and actually written, in Victoria, in a large regional city that is sister to my own nearby Ballarat, which is on Wadawurrung country from which sovereignty was never ceded, my home town being in adjoining Dja Dja Wurrung country likewise unceded - though Hovering would have satisfied and succeeded wherever fictionally based.

[Yvette Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up this debut Aussie novel from a cafe library on our recent trip to Merimbula. The cover appealed to me and it sounded interesting. This is an unusual writing style which I didn't mind - mostly traditional chapters mixed with text messages, articles, programming language and weird tables. Alice returns to her hometown after 16 years living in Europe. For some reason the city keeps rearranging itself, like those city-building computer games. I liked this idea at first and was waiting for some clever commentary on modern life, but I guess I missed it. Not sure what the point of this was. Please read this and explain it to me. It's in my street library now.

[Brenda Clift · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting premise. A timely book for me to read having just spent time in Melbourne after a long absence. Apart from the esoteric aspect of connections to people and places there were some themes and descriptions that truly represented an ex-pat view of a place from childhood. An interesting writing style with some chapters written in an altered format. Overall, although it connected, it could have benefited from some editing.

[Giovanna Walker · Rating 1 out of 5]

A lot going on in the novel - several layouts that didn't work for me (the columns, the IT language, the messaging). It felt like the novel was aimed more around the gimmicks than what was happening to the characters, who felt one dimensional (like in a game?). I skimmed most of the novel past about page 120. I'm not a gamer at all, so maybe that's why it was all lost on me.

[Faye Weston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book might be clever but it is a hard read. Set in a fictional place with three main characters who can’t quite work each other out, they find solutions in abstract or virtual forums. George the teenager doesn’t speak because it interferes with his life. I found the interview with the author a help in understanding where all of this was leading.

[Katie Snell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more like 4.5 stars. This is a really unique and really engaging first novel. It's very hard to explain without giving away the book but I would recommend it to readers who enjoy novels with some element of fantasy/whimsy to them. I really loved this and have not stopped thinking about it. Can't wait to read more from this author!

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly I have no idea what I’ve just read and I was so close to putting this as a DNF

Actually I’m not even sure what the point of the story was and yes I’m sure there’s a whole lot of symbolism in there but by golly it was hard work.

I did appreciate the little nods to Geelong and Melbourne throughout the book. Perhaps the best bits.

[Emma Balkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this one but I found it really hard to follow. I was keen to spot the references to Geelong, but they didn’t mean much inserted until a fictional city. The storyline was too fragmented and vague - something about trees and computers and inexplicably moving buildings- and the ‘genre bending’ side of it was too abstruse for me.

[amelia nairn]

‘She could have been satisfied, if not for those stories. But instead she craved distance and shape and glorious shades of blue and green, towers and mountains and galleries and coliseums. She had to see what stranger wonders lay beyond the horizon. So she chased them, and the closer she got, the more familiar they became, and those wonders became not that strange at all’.

[Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It was unsettling and strange (in a great way) and kept me hooked and interested the entire time. The city of Fraser was too familiar for comfort and the characters were well thought out and relatable. Definitely makes you think and is well worth buying.

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had hoped for something better. From the start I found that the relationships between the sisters, and then a nephew, to be almost unbelievable. Interspersed with that were some pages devoted to phone texting, a format that jars with me and eventually I abandoned the book.

[Victoria McCaffrey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hated it. Did not fulfil any requirements of a narrative. I did not care about the characters. The setting was wobbly and smug. He expects the reader to fill in the gaps. Did not care at all. Did not finish.