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Dodge Rose
Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge's apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women's lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, "Dodge Rose" calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth.
202 pages, Paperback
First published November 10, 2015
4 people are currently reading
400 people want to read
About the author
Jack Cox
98 books10 followersJack Cox has a master’s degree from the University of Sydney and is currently living in Paris. Dodge Rose is his first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
March 4, 2016
I'm very sad not to have liked this better, and want to be very clear about one thing: I would far, far rather all bad novels be bad because, like this one, the execution and the extraordinarily high ambitions didn't add up, than that they be bad, as most bad novels are, because they're not trying to do anything other than expression the author's emotions or make the reader feel sad.
Caveat over.
One quarter of the way through this book, I started to suspect it was a hoax. Perhaps the best known Australian literary modernist (apologies to White), Ern Malley, was a made-up poet who submitted what he thought were bullshit 'modernist' poems to an important journal, which printed them. Critics have been finding great merit in those poems ever since. Dodge is published by an American publisher well known for publishing experimental work. Its author is not particularly well known; he seems to have only a couple of publications before this. Could it be, I thought to myself, Ern Malley II?
So I did some googling, and way happy to find the editor at Dalkey Archive saying precisely the same thing in a review essay plumping the book. Worst case scenario, we the literary world have not been taken in quite as easily as we were in the Ern Malley case.
I thought the book was a hoax because it's boring, predictable, derivative, and often unreadable, and has been hailed by all and sundry as a highly original work of genius, just like Joyce and Beckett. Note to reviewers: if a work is just like someone else's, whatever else it is, it isn't highly original.
What Dodge is, unless it's a hoax, is a work of genre fiction, where the genre happens to be high modernism. It follows all the rules (=breaks all the right rules): sketchy punctuation, authorial intrusions about the place of the book in the academic canon, cack-handed analogies and metaphors that make it 'poetic', incorporation of alternative discourses (here, the law of inheritance), and a Faulknerian second half. The content (a serious flaw in the modernist genre: having content) is hilariously similar to that in another Australian book I just read, Patrick White's Eye of the Storm, but White does approximately infinitely more with it.
On the upside, Dodge made something very clear to me: I don't care to read more of this stuff, unless it has clear literary-historical importance, or the rule-breaking has a purpose (Woolf), or the tiresome self-importance is made bearable by the sheer beauty of the prose (Joyce).
And it made me wonder why the angl0-modernist tradition is so focused on works like this one. Consider, 'we' have Eliot, Pound, and Joyce as the big three (I speak here of literary history, not intrinsic merit), where the French have Mallarme and Proust, and the Germans have say, Mann and Musil. Why are we the anglosphere so keen on books that demand of the reader an archaeological fascination with details: what is this quote from? what is this reference to? what Sydney street are we supposedly walking down?
I so much prefer the Musil or Proust version: if there's a reference to a work of art, that work is discussed with the reader; if there's a thorny intellectual question, that question is worried over with the reader. We walk with Musil and Proust, whereas Eliot/Pound/Joyce preach at us. A friend has suggested that this preaching at us has, oddly, allowed scholars to argue that Joyce (in particular) is a great democrat, since everyone understands as much of Joyce as anyone else. There's no need to think along with him, just to catch whatever few references you can. So everyone can have their interpretation.
But that's not 'democracy.' That's demagoguery. I propose that the real democrats are the authors who assume that their readers are their intellectual equals, and that their readers can work through their problems with the author. Cox is very much a Joyce/Pound/Eliot type, demanding that the reader do all the work, and refusing to work with them.
If this wasn't literature, we'd call that managerial capitalism.
Caveat over.
One quarter of the way through this book, I started to suspect it was a hoax. Perhaps the best known Australian literary modernist (apologies to White), Ern Malley, was a made-up poet who submitted what he thought were bullshit 'modernist' poems to an important journal, which printed them. Critics have been finding great merit in those poems ever since. Dodge is published by an American publisher well known for publishing experimental work. Its author is not particularly well known; he seems to have only a couple of publications before this. Could it be, I thought to myself, Ern Malley II?
So I did some googling, and way happy to find the editor at Dalkey Archive saying precisely the same thing in a review essay plumping the book. Worst case scenario, we the literary world have not been taken in quite as easily as we were in the Ern Malley case.
I thought the book was a hoax because it's boring, predictable, derivative, and often unreadable, and has been hailed by all and sundry as a highly original work of genius, just like Joyce and Beckett. Note to reviewers: if a work is just like someone else's, whatever else it is, it isn't highly original.
What Dodge is, unless it's a hoax, is a work of genre fiction, where the genre happens to be high modernism. It follows all the rules (=breaks all the right rules): sketchy punctuation, authorial intrusions about the place of the book in the academic canon, cack-handed analogies and metaphors that make it 'poetic', incorporation of alternative discourses (here, the law of inheritance), and a Faulknerian second half. The content (a serious flaw in the modernist genre: having content) is hilariously similar to that in another Australian book I just read, Patrick White's Eye of the Storm, but White does approximately infinitely more with it.
On the upside, Dodge made something very clear to me: I don't care to read more of this stuff, unless it has clear literary-historical importance, or the rule-breaking has a purpose (Woolf), or the tiresome self-importance is made bearable by the sheer beauty of the prose (Joyce).
And it made me wonder why the angl0-modernist tradition is so focused on works like this one. Consider, 'we' have Eliot, Pound, and Joyce as the big three (I speak here of literary history, not intrinsic merit), where the French have Mallarme and Proust, and the Germans have say, Mann and Musil. Why are we the anglosphere so keen on books that demand of the reader an archaeological fascination with details: what is this quote from? what is this reference to? what Sydney street are we supposedly walking down?
I so much prefer the Musil or Proust version: if there's a reference to a work of art, that work is discussed with the reader; if there's a thorny intellectual question, that question is worried over with the reader. We walk with Musil and Proust, whereas Eliot/Pound/Joyce preach at us. A friend has suggested that this preaching at us has, oddly, allowed scholars to argue that Joyce (in particular) is a great democrat, since everyone understands as much of Joyce as anyone else. There's no need to think along with him, just to catch whatever few references you can. So everyone can have their interpretation.
But that's not 'democracy.' That's demagoguery. I propose that the real democrats are the authors who assume that their readers are their intellectual equals, and that their readers can work through their problems with the author. Cox is very much a Joyce/Pound/Eliot type, demanding that the reader do all the work, and refusing to work with them.
If this wasn't literature, we'd call that managerial capitalism.
October 30, 2019
A striking first novel from an Australian talent with a hard-on for hardcore modernism. Set in the pleasing suburb of Woolloomooloo, Sydney, the novel is split into two parts: the first written from the supposed daughter of Dodge Rose, Maxine, upon the arrival of her niece Eliza who has arrived to claim an inheritance. Narrated in what might be termed Dodgese, the novel forces the reader into a close examination of the text: often the logic and meaning evaporate within a sentence, phonetic spellings are used, dubious French phrases appear, and a string of neologisms or archaic words are dropped at times into the mix. One section is a fifteen-page descent into property law, where terms are hurled into a blender and meaning is pulverized (and later there is a long unpunctuated section mocking banking jargon). The second section is ‘written’ by the young Dodge Rose, told sans punctuation in lower case, narrating fragments from her parents’ lives, never connecting with the preceding narrative in a way that seems meaningful. The star of the novel is the warped syntax that creates a unique and stunning sentence structure, leading to a truly captivating style, and even if the novel seems surreal and aimless, Cox’s Dodgese, a truly crazy invention, carries the work to magnificence.
April 26, 2016
“She stretched the red elastic between her fingers… Her voice faltered. Something obvious appeared to be beginning to dawn on her and she frowned until the elastic had slowed to a stop and her thought come home”
Dodge Rose is the first novel by Australian author, Jack Cox. Maxine tells of the arrival from Yass of twenty-one-year-old Eliza, come to Sydney by train to deal with the estate of her late Aunt Dodge Rose. Maxine is fairly certain she is not Dodge’s daughter, but has been living with her in the King’s Cross flat since she can remember. Matters don’t turn out quite as expected and legal complications see them trying to make money from the contents of the flat. About half-way through the book, the narrative suddenly switches to the nineteen-twenties, with the story being told by a young girl (probably Dodge Rose).
The initial narrative is fairly straight-forward, as the quoted passage above, and “Dodge had spoken about them but always in the past tense and her sister had seemed to flicker so dimly through the rooms of her memory …” show. Cox gives the reader some excellent descriptive prose like “…the train wound up the rusted arteries to Central Station”.
But soon, the text becomes less clear: “Her words came and went as a revelation, everything in the wake of that great property expanding into so many impalpable and inadequate dividers, being at first just a vague tergiversation and then as if the same abstract shades that had clabbered every particle in the flat turned for a moment as full as fleeting as a rush as a rush of oxygen into a spumous surplus, leaving me floating in their airy mould, surprised. I have never made plans, being by nurture far from pleonectic. I made some”
Much conventional punctuation is abandoned: without quote marks for speech and question marks, and often commas, the reader has to work hard to make sense of the text. By the time the pages (and pages and pages) of the silk, Smith’s legal ramblings are reached, even the most diligent reader will be tempted to skip this (no doubt intentionally) impenetrable, irrelevant and pointless material. Ditto the pages of inventory of the flat’s contents, and the pages of colonial banking history.
While it is apparent that Cox has done extensive research, it is a pity the information is so inaccessible: as well as the creative spelling (phonetic? typos?) and incomplete sentences of the first half, in the second half, capitals and apostrophes are also absent (who could ever envisage longing for apostrophes!). Perhaps this is meant to represent an inner monologue or stream of consciousness, but some will see this as laziness or arrogance on the part of the author, and lack of respect for the reader.
What redeems this work from a lower rating is the historic content (where it can be interpreted) and the descriptive prose. The typographical representation of the piano being smashed to pieces looks like a toddler tantrum on a keyboard. This is a novel that may appeal to readers looking for something different, something outside the square. It had been described as original and brilliant: the average reader will certainly agree with the former. An unconventional debut.
Dodge Rose is the first novel by Australian author, Jack Cox. Maxine tells of the arrival from Yass of twenty-one-year-old Eliza, come to Sydney by train to deal with the estate of her late Aunt Dodge Rose. Maxine is fairly certain she is not Dodge’s daughter, but has been living with her in the King’s Cross flat since she can remember. Matters don’t turn out quite as expected and legal complications see them trying to make money from the contents of the flat. About half-way through the book, the narrative suddenly switches to the nineteen-twenties, with the story being told by a young girl (probably Dodge Rose).
The initial narrative is fairly straight-forward, as the quoted passage above, and “Dodge had spoken about them but always in the past tense and her sister had seemed to flicker so dimly through the rooms of her memory …” show. Cox gives the reader some excellent descriptive prose like “…the train wound up the rusted arteries to Central Station”.
But soon, the text becomes less clear: “Her words came and went as a revelation, everything in the wake of that great property expanding into so many impalpable and inadequate dividers, being at first just a vague tergiversation and then as if the same abstract shades that had clabbered every particle in the flat turned for a moment as full as fleeting as a rush as a rush of oxygen into a spumous surplus, leaving me floating in their airy mould, surprised. I have never made plans, being by nurture far from pleonectic. I made some”
Much conventional punctuation is abandoned: without quote marks for speech and question marks, and often commas, the reader has to work hard to make sense of the text. By the time the pages (and pages and pages) of the silk, Smith’s legal ramblings are reached, even the most diligent reader will be tempted to skip this (no doubt intentionally) impenetrable, irrelevant and pointless material. Ditto the pages of inventory of the flat’s contents, and the pages of colonial banking history.
While it is apparent that Cox has done extensive research, it is a pity the information is so inaccessible: as well as the creative spelling (phonetic? typos?) and incomplete sentences of the first half, in the second half, capitals and apostrophes are also absent (who could ever envisage longing for apostrophes!). Perhaps this is meant to represent an inner monologue or stream of consciousness, but some will see this as laziness or arrogance on the part of the author, and lack of respect for the reader.
What redeems this work from a lower rating is the historic content (where it can be interpreted) and the descriptive prose. The typographical representation of the piano being smashed to pieces looks like a toddler tantrum on a keyboard. This is a novel that may appeal to readers looking for something different, something outside the square. It had been described as original and brilliant: the average reader will certainly agree with the former. An unconventional debut.
Read
February 11, 2023I read this book with the intention of reviewing it but couldn't drum up enough enthusiasm. However, here are some notes I made that may or may not prove useful to the potential reader:
A novel about the Australian legalities of inheritance, a topic as dry as American tax law as found in The Pale King. While Cox’s first novel doesn’t reach the heights of DFW’s last, there are still glimmers of artistry throughout.
What does anyone own? What does it mean to own?
Perhaps that’s why dialogue is unattributed and bleeds into the rest of the text, including free indirect discourse. Although idk what explains the use of a period where a question mark is called for.
Vocabulary range this side of Theroux and Brodsky. Including one of Joe’s buzzwords: colloidal
Cruft, but in such a slim volume
A list of the entire place’s contents for valuation
This debut is certainly a curiosity. Full of promise but whether that promise is kept or not will depend on the sophomore effort of which there is not a hint of news. Overall, it's hard to recommend Dodge Rose to anyone except a connoisseur of debut novels and the promise they hold for an author's future, whether empty or not. At its best, there are glimmers of James Joyce, Joseph McElroy, David Foster Wallace, and Eimear McBride. Emphasis on glimmers.
A novel about the Australian legalities of inheritance, a topic as dry as American tax law as found in The Pale King. While Cox’s first novel doesn’t reach the heights of DFW’s last, there are still glimmers of artistry throughout.
What does anyone own? What does it mean to own?
Perhaps that’s why dialogue is unattributed and bleeds into the rest of the text, including free indirect discourse. Although idk what explains the use of a period where a question mark is called for.
Vocabulary range this side of Theroux and Brodsky. Including one of Joe’s buzzwords: colloidal
Cruft, but in such a slim volume
A list of the entire place’s contents for valuation
This debut is certainly a curiosity. Full of promise but whether that promise is kept or not will depend on the sophomore effort of which there is not a hint of news. Overall, it's hard to recommend Dodge Rose to anyone except a connoisseur of debut novels and the promise they hold for an author's future, whether empty or not. At its best, there are glimmers of James Joyce, Joseph McElroy, David Foster Wallace, and Eimear McBride. Emphasis on glimmers.
i-want-money
December 8, 2015Dalkey is primping this with Henry Green, Joyce, and Gaddis. But it's too short!
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/...
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/...
May 31, 2016
Feel like I missed something with this but I found it basically unreadable
September 17, 2025
I am torn between calling Dodge Rose a work of literary genius or dismissing it as excessive gibberish straining toward higher meaning.
I imagine the author had a jolly time writing it. The problem is that the book is so cryptic it often feels more like an intellectual puzzle than a piece of difficult fiction. I love works that are not obvious, that demand effort to decipher—especially these days, when people are accustomed to oversimplification. But in the end, fiction should still flow, allowing some kind of truth to emerge through language and imagination. And Dodge Rose was simply too uneven a ride for me.
I did enjoy the two articles below, though—they helped me appreciate Jack Cox’s tour de force more fully.
https://sebald.wordpress.com/2016/02/...
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/dodge...
I imagine the author had a jolly time writing it. The problem is that the book is so cryptic it often feels more like an intellectual puzzle than a piece of difficult fiction. I love works that are not obvious, that demand effort to decipher—especially these days, when people are accustomed to oversimplification. But in the end, fiction should still flow, allowing some kind of truth to emerge through language and imagination. And Dodge Rose was simply too uneven a ride for me.
I did enjoy the two articles below, though—they helped me appreciate Jack Cox’s tour de force more fully.
https://sebald.wordpress.com/2016/02/...
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/dodge...
March 23, 2021
Given the latent hostility towards formally inventive fiction that has long pervaded the Australian publishing industry, Dodge Rose's origin story made it pretty appealing to me: a young-ish, publicity-averse, stalwartly intellectual writer mails his manuscript to Dalkey Archive and has it picked from the slush pile, unearthed from beneath a teetering pile of god knows how many terrible books, and released to hushed praised everywhere. This kind of thing doesn't happen much in Australia, and having a novel approved by a foreign literary force like Dalkey flatters the more self-conscious parts of our cultural consciousness.
And it turns out that praise wasn't unjustified. Dodge Rose is a challenging, strange novel that looks backward on the past hundred years of Australian history, questioning the colonial claim of ownership through an opaque and recondite interrogation of property law. The form of the book shifts between Gaddis-like torrents of unattributed dialogue, and a Beckettian rejection of punctuation and and capitalisation. Cox uses this engagement with a now historical modernism to engage with its unrealised promises of aesthetic liberation, but also to consider its relationship with Australian history and indigeneity. As pointed out in this excellent essay on the novel, Cox doesn't just recycle Joyce's formal innovations, but he uses them in a way that considers the cultural erasure of Indigenous Australians. Admittedly, on my first reading, it was completely lost on me that x was intended to be a member of the Stolen Generation, and this decoding opened the book up for me.
It has to be said, however, that while Dodge Rose is without doubt an intricately crafted and carefully wrought novel, it often feels joyless, something that couldn't be said of its forebears. The book can occasionally feel inert, rebuffing the reader through 20-page, inscrutable diatribes on the development of legal ownership in colonial Australia. While these do serve some narrative and thematic function in the book, the experience of reading them is incredibly exasperating, and more than tested my patience. I found the conceptual underpinnings of the book very interesting, but its formal subversions felt too hermetic to really work for me.
And it turns out that praise wasn't unjustified. Dodge Rose is a challenging, strange novel that looks backward on the past hundred years of Australian history, questioning the colonial claim of ownership through an opaque and recondite interrogation of property law. The form of the book shifts between Gaddis-like torrents of unattributed dialogue, and a Beckettian rejection of punctuation and and capitalisation. Cox uses this engagement with a now historical modernism to engage with its unrealised promises of aesthetic liberation, but also to consider its relationship with Australian history and indigeneity. As pointed out in this excellent essay on the novel, Cox doesn't just recycle Joyce's formal innovations, but he uses them in a way that considers the cultural erasure of Indigenous Australians. Admittedly, on my first reading, it was completely lost on me that x was intended to be a member of the Stolen Generation, and this decoding opened the book up for me.
It has to be said, however, that while Dodge Rose is without doubt an intricately crafted and carefully wrought novel, it often feels joyless, something that couldn't be said of its forebears. The book can occasionally feel inert, rebuffing the reader through 20-page, inscrutable diatribes on the development of legal ownership in colonial Australia. While these do serve some narrative and thematic function in the book, the experience of reading them is incredibly exasperating, and more than tested my patience. I found the conceptual underpinnings of the book very interesting, but its formal subversions felt too hermetic to really work for me.
December 15, 2017
‘An original, at times brilliant work that in its avoidance of cliche, its restorative effect on language, actually does recall Beckett.’
Guardian
‘A wild, untamed work, one of the most ambitious, unusual and difficult first novels in recent Australian literary history.’
Australian
‘Dodge Rose is fresh and astonishingly good, but it is also an author’s challenge to a reader. Not a challenge to question one’s morals or their life-choices, but to examine the very technique of reading.’
Readings
‘Frequently brilliant.’
Literary Review
‘A book about the way language can hum…Cox is a beautiful writer.’
Saturday Paper
‘Brilliant and dark, mysterious and immediate, moving and maddening, disturbing and entertaining…[an] extraordinary first novel that compacts the histories of a continent and of a family into a dazzle of two hundred pages.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘In a literary landscape dominated by realist fiction, Jack Cox’s debut, Dodge Rose, is striking for its engagement with the modernist novel. Cox’s bold pleasure in language is exhilarating, as is his concern with the politics of settlement.’
Michelle de Kretser, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading
Guardian
‘A wild, untamed work, one of the most ambitious, unusual and difficult first novels in recent Australian literary history.’
Australian
‘Dodge Rose is fresh and astonishingly good, but it is also an author’s challenge to a reader. Not a challenge to question one’s morals or their life-choices, but to examine the very technique of reading.’
Readings
‘Frequently brilliant.’
Literary Review
‘A book about the way language can hum…Cox is a beautiful writer.’
Saturday Paper
‘Brilliant and dark, mysterious and immediate, moving and maddening, disturbing and entertaining…[an] extraordinary first novel that compacts the histories of a continent and of a family into a dazzle of two hundred pages.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘In a literary landscape dominated by realist fiction, Jack Cox’s debut, Dodge Rose, is striking for its engagement with the modernist novel. Cox’s bold pleasure in language is exhilarating, as is his concern with the politics of settlement.’
Michelle de Kretser, Sydney Morning Herald’s Year in Reading
February 2, 2021
Made it to the end... somehow...
March 10, 2017
Very strange and meticulous history of a family in modern Sydney and in 1920's Sydney . For a first novel it is amazing.
August 15, 2016
An absolute disaster. So much hype and after the first 40 pages or so, unreadable. The Emperor's New Clothes in literary form.
November 26, 2018
26/11/18 Gasp! I I forgot to add my review here when I read this over a year ago!
Better late than never, here it is:
Regular readers know that I am making my way through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and have begun to recognise aspects of it that have made their way into other works of fiction – but I never expected that reading it would be good preparation for reading Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose, recently shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for New Writing. The opening lines only hint at what lies in store:
I will say at the outset that there is much about this book to like but also much that puzzled me. I suspect that re-reading would reveal some answers, but that clever as this work of fiction undoubtedly is, I did not like it enough to want to re-read it now even if I could. (It is due back at the library). It might, however, be a book that niggles away at me demanding to be re-read in the way that Ulysses did, (and still does although I’ve now read it four times). Dodge Rose might be the brave start of a great author’s career.
Or it might, as others have suggested, be a prank written to prove a point … In fact, I was quite surprised to see from the photo at the ABC RN Books and Arts page that Jack Cox is actually a real person… because I had wondered, thoughts triggered partly by the allusive names of the title and its author, and partly by my adventures in reading Mud Map, Australian Women’s Experimental Writing whether Dodge Rose was written by a women’s collective. I can only rationalise this intuition by noting that feminist issues of power and agency jostle for dominance throughout the book. (Yes, I realise that men can be feminists too).
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/12/d...
Better late than never, here it is:
Regular readers know that I am making my way through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and have begun to recognise aspects of it that have made their way into other works of fiction – but I never expected that reading it would be good preparation for reading Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose, recently shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for New Writing. The opening lines only hint at what lies in store:
Then where from here. When the train rolled over a canopied bridge the eyes of the boy in the opposite seat opened and closed to the broken sun but he dozed on. His head was rocked against a woollen sleeve. Eliza had stretched her legs out in the space beneath his feet and now she crossed them and pressed her thumbs to the bundle in her lap. The shoes above hers swung back and forth like pendulums staccato lights between the shadows that beat through the carriage through the bridge but for all his moving parts the boy remained oblivious and his brief eyes gave back nothing but the wrong end of his reveries. Eliza yawned and turned towards the window. Before wide green plots the spokes of the canopy blew past, then they were gone. (p.1)
I will say at the outset that there is much about this book to like but also much that puzzled me. I suspect that re-reading would reveal some answers, but that clever as this work of fiction undoubtedly is, I did not like it enough to want to re-read it now even if I could. (It is due back at the library). It might, however, be a book that niggles away at me demanding to be re-read in the way that Ulysses did, (and still does although I’ve now read it four times). Dodge Rose might be the brave start of a great author’s career.
Or it might, as others have suggested, be a prank written to prove a point … In fact, I was quite surprised to see from the photo at the ABC RN Books and Arts page that Jack Cox is actually a real person… because I had wondered, thoughts triggered partly by the allusive names of the title and its author, and partly by my adventures in reading Mud Map, Australian Women’s Experimental Writing whether Dodge Rose was written by a women’s collective. I can only rationalise this intuition by noting that feminist issues of power and agency jostle for dominance throughout the book. (Yes, I realise that men can be feminists too).
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/12/d...
February 21, 2024
boy howdy. this is a doozy. excruciating in parts and delightful in others, occasionally both in the same sections. plenty of people have commented on this novel's use of lengthy lists and rambles that sometimes go on for ten-plus pages, expounding on the history of property law and banking in australia and sometimes easier-to-digest topics like the complete contents of one's antiques collection. these are disorienting but even if keeping all of that information in your head is no easy feat for anyone it's worth it to read every single word, for this book is full of incredible stylistic choices and great understated humor. plus after a 40-page reread i found that there's quite a bit of straight-forward storytelling that can get brushed over when your head is full of legalese. cox is a master of crafting sentences that as part of a dense cloud of disembodied voices just hit different (in one scene, our protagonists maxine and eliza are chilling after a visit from the auctioneer's when their stream of idle thought is interrupted by such gems as "got gloop in my eye, unless that's just the brain evaporating"). he also has a vocabulary that goes on for as long as the bushman bread at outback steakhouse and a sheer gift for using written language to illustrate pretty much whatever he wants; in one ramble in the second section, consisting of dodge rose's own childhood recollections, the language is disordered and blurry, a speech half-remembered by the child on the receiving end. in that second part we also get the sound of a piano being smashed to bits written out in painful detail. who is this jack cox character, this aussie freak whose writing is so taxing but so virtuosic, so evocative? i imagine him sitting somewhere in paris right now, perhaps at les deux magots or le procope, reciting poetry and hymns to himself and playing the wooden peg game. sitting in the botanical garden, watching the sky for helicopters. maybe he's back home, watching game show reruns in a house in woolloomooloo, or wolloomoloo, or woolomooloo, whoomoolooloo, wollloomooloo... you should read this book. i finished this book and i still need to read it. e n o w.
January 26, 2024
Very much felt like a book that I needed to do a great deal of outside work to "get" or be "in on." An interesting start that showed quirky syntax and punctuation at times that hinted at the foibles or gradual decline of the first person narrator, the deterioration was such that the book became less pleasant to read. I'd rather read Finnegan's Wake twice than dust this one off again.
September 1, 2020
It would have been an interesting premise if it wasn't completely unreadable. Admittedly I only made it to page 99 whilst skipping huge swathes of the book where he was going on about property law and listing antiques.
August 1, 2025
This is a difficult book, but one worth persevering with. I strongly recommend this outstanding article that does a brilliant job decoding its many layers.
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/revie...
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/revie...
Read
October 23, 2025really interesting and absorbing—and a little inscrutable for THIS american reader in that I totally missed the “open secret” of the book, which was helpfully explained in an article by Alys Moody in the Sydney Review of Books!
April 10, 2018
Disappointing. I'm not averse to books that make the reader work, but this wavered between tedious and irritating to the point that I completely lost interest in it.
November 11, 2018
You know, this was somewhat incomprehensible.
Read
September 1, 2020Could not get into. Gave up. Unusual style.
April 26, 2023
what the hell ?
January 7, 2026
truly hated reading this. hated sound and fury and hated this even more. hate Australian property law by proxy
xoxo
xoxo
June 10, 2016
Not for me, when you read the back cover the premise sounds great, however the many different tangents this novels heads in just doesn't do it for me. it's like art, I love it but I don't get abstract, this book is like a piece of abstract art, parts are interesting but as a whole seems very disjointed. Thankfully I read other reviews before hand.
June 16, 2016
Fascinating Neo-modern first novel. The comparisons with Joyce are valid though he's not there yet. Can't wait for his next effort which I'd imagine would be better crafted. Either Cox is brimming with talent or Peter Carey has manufactured his Ern Malley moment
June 18, 2016
I tried, several times, to get into this book but life's too short.
July 3, 2016
Reads like an exercise in high modern literature. Seems to forget to engage the reader in liking or caring about the characters or story. Very disappointing read.
January 22, 2017
I wish I didn't spend the time trying to read this book. I really struggled with it.
Want to read
September 24, 2017S.
Read
June 4, 2018Effort! Stress! Work you know, hard work, sheer hard work!!!
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