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Sunnyside
Alice and Harry Haskins have moved to Sunnyside, an affluent beachside suburb, to finally embrace the encumbrances of middle family, responsibility, stability, debt. Harry is an English professor at the local college. Alice is a once successful writer, trapped in writer's block. Alice and Harry's son, Joe, cannot read and worries too deeply about the world. Their daughter, Grace, is fuelled by an ambition unseemly in a child. Eleanor, their teenage neighbour and babysitter nurses her own grievances about the world she is growing up into and worships the elegance of the Haskins family over the fence.Sunnyside is the place where affluent, educated men and women buffer themselves against mortality, disaffection and boredom. Surrounded by big houses and swimming pools, cocktail parties and tennis tournaments, they coat their inner worlds in the saccharine pleasures of the suburbs. But when Alice and Harry's closest friends crash on the rocks of infidelity, the shock-waves reverberate through the neighbourhood. Alice and Harry face the big how relationships camouflage the fault-lines of character, the vulnerabilities of families in the wake of emotional anarchy and the ever perplexing question of which is more passion or love?
396 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 20, 2013
I bought Sunnyside by Joanna Murray-Smith ages ago, when she gave an author talk at my local library, and now I’m feeling rather a fool for having left it so long to read it. It reminds me that there are some real treasures on my groaning TBR shelf – about 600 books at last count – but I keep adding to it for fear that if I don’t buy a book when I see it, it may vanish off the booksellers shelves because they are so merciless about ditching literary fiction, no matter how good it is.
If you saw my Sensational Snippet from Sunnyside, you will know that the novel is a comedy of manners satirising The Good Life. Murray-Smith is a well-known playwright here in Melbourne, and she has chosen what is obviously Mt Eliza on the Mornington Peninsula as the setting for a privileged suburb called Sunnyside, with less stylish Frankston masquerading as nearby Deptford. The main industry in Sunnyside is real estate, and the annual community event is the Real Estate Agents’ Race, aping the inner-city waiters’ race but with estate agents running the course carrying Open For Inspection boards.
The novel begins with the dinner-party revelation that Molly, wife of David and mother of Justin, has been enjoying herself with the man who cleans their pool. This triggers an existential crisis among their set, some wondering if they too are missing out on sexual adventure and self-fulfilment, and others analysing the purpose and direction of their own marriages. New temptations arise: a sexy old school friend arrives in Sunnyside, and a university lecturer gets perilously close to a student. Children on the cusp of adolescence have their own existential crises too: school, of course, but also dismay about parental behaviour, and anxiety about contemporary issues and their own powerlessness in the face of adult indifference.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/09/21/su...
If you saw my Sensational Snippet from Sunnyside, you will know that the novel is a comedy of manners satirising The Good Life. Murray-Smith is a well-known playwright here in Melbourne, and she has chosen what is obviously Mt Eliza on the Mornington Peninsula as the setting for a privileged suburb called Sunnyside, with less stylish Frankston masquerading as nearby Deptford. The main industry in Sunnyside is real estate, and the annual community event is the Real Estate Agents’ Race, aping the inner-city waiters’ race but with estate agents running the course carrying Open For Inspection boards.
The novel begins with the dinner-party revelation that Molly, wife of David and mother of Justin, has been enjoying herself with the man who cleans their pool. This triggers an existential crisis among their set, some wondering if they too are missing out on sexual adventure and self-fulfilment, and others analysing the purpose and direction of their own marriages. New temptations arise: a sexy old school friend arrives in Sunnyside, and a university lecturer gets perilously close to a student. Children on the cusp of adolescence have their own existential crises too: school, of course, but also dismay about parental behaviour, and anxiety about contemporary issues and their own powerlessness in the face of adult indifference.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2013/09/21/su...
April 23, 2024
Murray-Smith is one of Australia`s premier playwrights (I directed her Ninety some years ago) so I was intrigued to see how she adapted to prose. As it turns out, brilliantly. Sunnyside is a social satire, set in an affluent, bayside suburb, & the author takes it apart clinically. But she doesn't simply skewer these largely entitled individuals & families, even those who arguably would deserve it. She is much better than that. All her characters live & breathe, like actual human beings, & she finds reasons to care for them. Highly recommended.
January 15, 2016
I read Joanna Murray-Smith’s novel, Sunnyside, while sitting on the beach. Basically, it’s the perfect beach read for a Mornington Peninsula holiday because fictional Sunnyside is a thinly disguised Mt Eliza and scungy Deptford is Frankston.
Anyway, I digress. It’s the story of Alice and Harry Haskins, their children, their flash house, their neighbours, their dinner parties and their friend Molly’s fling with the pool-man.It doesn’t get much deeper than a bowl of smoked salmon dip, which is exactly what you want in a beach read.
“All of them…made a good go of pretending they still led interesting lives. They subscribed to the Guardian Weekly, attended arts festivals, even went on the odd adventure-travel holiday. But was the stirring of the soul really answered by a two-week hike in the Himalayan foothills?”
Although this book would have benefited from fewer plot arcs, fewer points-of-view, and a hundred less pages, the joy is in Murray-Smith’s wry, on-point observations about life in upper middle-class suburbia. And it is in the character of Harry that this comes to the fore.
“Maybe what Harry really wanted was to be married to another heterosexual male. They could sit around watching prison movies on the weekends eating toasted sandwiches or visit Bang & Olufsen showrooms and not talk at all… Attractive, non-drug-addicted, cello-playing callgirls with law degrees could pop over every so often. It was a thought.”
and
“He’d been trying to get Harry to go on a surfing holiday for middle-aged men, their original orange kombi vans now replaced by Audi station wagons. Now that old people stayed young, surfing had become the new golf. Harry had declined. He had no desire to reclaim his youth or smoke pot with a bunch of barristers in boardshorts.”
Despite its glossy, chick-lit cover, Murray-Smith does delve into the issue of aging, using the trade-off between suburban security and edgy city living as her stage. Sunnyside, despite its glamorous trappings and prosperous community, is as threatening to the soul as dirty, petty-crime-and-dole-queue filled Deptford.
“It was the job of suburbs to withstand change, to be small pockets of resistance… They had as much and as little happiness as their neighbours.”
3/5 Don’t take it too seriously.
Anyway, I digress. It’s the story of Alice and Harry Haskins, their children, their flash house, their neighbours, their dinner parties and their friend Molly’s fling with the pool-man.It doesn’t get much deeper than a bowl of smoked salmon dip, which is exactly what you want in a beach read.
“All of them…made a good go of pretending they still led interesting lives. They subscribed to the Guardian Weekly, attended arts festivals, even went on the odd adventure-travel holiday. But was the stirring of the soul really answered by a two-week hike in the Himalayan foothills?”
Although this book would have benefited from fewer plot arcs, fewer points-of-view, and a hundred less pages, the joy is in Murray-Smith’s wry, on-point observations about life in upper middle-class suburbia. And it is in the character of Harry that this comes to the fore.
“Maybe what Harry really wanted was to be married to another heterosexual male. They could sit around watching prison movies on the weekends eating toasted sandwiches or visit Bang & Olufsen showrooms and not talk at all… Attractive, non-drug-addicted, cello-playing callgirls with law degrees could pop over every so often. It was a thought.”
and
“He’d been trying to get Harry to go on a surfing holiday for middle-aged men, their original orange kombi vans now replaced by Audi station wagons. Now that old people stayed young, surfing had become the new golf. Harry had declined. He had no desire to reclaim his youth or smoke pot with a bunch of barristers in boardshorts.”
Despite its glossy, chick-lit cover, Murray-Smith does delve into the issue of aging, using the trade-off between suburban security and edgy city living as her stage. Sunnyside, despite its glamorous trappings and prosperous community, is as threatening to the soul as dirty, petty-crime-and-dole-queue filled Deptford.
“It was the job of suburbs to withstand change, to be small pockets of resistance… They had as much and as little happiness as their neighbours.”
3/5 Don’t take it too seriously.
December 28, 2015
I really struggled to get through this book. It was given to me at a flea market as the seller couldn't sell it. I should not have accepted but once I'd felt the cover I had to read it. It didn't seem to move forward until after page 160 and even then it regressed so many times that I became outright bored with it. I trudged on until the end because I hate not finishing books. I seriously should not have bothered. I just could never get into this read. I'm sorry to the author and her supporters but I just couldn't like this book. I hope others find it better than I did. I still don't really understand what the point of it was. There was a lot of analysing of people, places and how humans think and why they do the things they do but no deeper than you or I would do in our own minds so I felt nothing was gained from reading it. I do hope others who read it find something valuable in it.
May 9, 2013
I really love Joanna Murray smith's plays and was pleased to have this book recommended to me. At times this book is quite depressing and a bit uncomfortable. There were some excellent insights into the way we love our lives and the things one finds important and I felt as though I reassessed some of my ambitions, of only slightly. The reason this book gets four stars is that I felt like it ended really abruptly.
March 22, 2016
Louise - 6.78
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews