All the Rage: A Short Festival on Westies

The most successful - which is to say the wildest, the loudest, the drunkest, the most fun - house party I ever had ran under the theme title of "Westock". More than just a party, it was our late-'90s suburban answer to Woodstock and we were proud of our ugh-booted, flannelette-wearing, hard-rockin', beer-drinkin' "pass-the-longneck", "let's rage" cultural heritage.

Our decorations included a torn-off car door from my house-mate's old Toyota, placed carelessly in the front hallway so people had to walk over it, and a badly sprung, lime-green lounge wheeled in front of a backyard barbecue fire assembled from the rotting paling fence.

The punch was mixed in a plastic garbage bin and the party tapes had cutting-edge songs by AC/DC (Whole Lotta Rosie), Cold Chisel (Home and Broken Hearted), Midnight Oil (Surfing With A Spoon), Hunters and Collectors (The Slab) and the Warumpi Band (Jailanguru Pakarnu) as well as more contemporary tunes by The Cruel Sea, You Am I and Silverchair - not to mention Kiss's Rock'n'Roll All Nite and an old vinyl 45 of Hush doing Bony Moronie ("she's as skinny as a stick of macaroni!"), which was unbelievably popular on the night with people in flares and a stupid friend who came dressed as Dennis Lillee.

Reminiscing about this grand event on the way back from my mechanic's - actually the flashbacks began while I was examining the flaming logos on his exhaust systems - I decided the time was right to share a more public-minded version of this festival. A Westock II that celebrated "westie" culture in all its grunting proletarian glory.

Hey, I admit it: my idea of the suburbs is a thing of memory, like that great line in the Pretenders song: "I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone." To put it in cinematic terms, I'm more Mullet than Mall Boy.

So perhaps we should clarify the meaning of the word "westie": a derivation of the Sydney compass point and a tribal title for anyone not interested in - or some distance from - the beach. Over time it's a term that has become synonymous with being, shall we say, noticeably suburban anywhere on the east coast.

With that in mind words like "bogan" and "yobbo" might be swapped for "westie" so that out-of-state visitors could understand the flavour of the event more clearly. However, I must make a small point of order: I regard a yobbo as nothing more than a stupid, aggressive "knob" - as we say in the 'burbs - a mutant subspecies found both with and without a business tie and therefore not a true representative of the westie.



Nonetheless, it would be a lie to romanticise westie culture. One sees the conformist torment of it in novels such as Andrew McGahan's Praise and James Ricks's criminally underrated Eleven Months in Bunbury. You also see something of it too in the chip-on-the-shoulder "humility" that Tim Winton carries about him like an attitude, and in the Subhuman Redneck Poems of Les Murray, an aesthetic defiance against the inner city's superiority and pseudo-sophistication, a feeling of primitive roots, however dark, versus surfaces.

Velocity is a keyword here because the suburbs are literally and metaphorically an "edge culture" slowly receding into a west-world many people think of as a wasteland or something to be frightened of.

Given the huge spaces that make Australia what it is, the ability of our cities to sprawl and finally dissipate, we have inevitably become a car culture. Our love of the six and eight cylinder machines, manifest in the mythology of the Bathurst 1000, Peter Brock, the Valiant Charger, the Ford GTHO, and "the history of the muscle car" as writer Clinton Walker puts it, is no accident. Indeed Walker - who previously completed books on AC/DC (Highway to Hell) and Aboriginal country music (Buried Country) - is now at work on that car history and how it defines us.

When one thinks of our national identity, I'd argue there are only two major cultural forces worth noting apart from the burgeoning indigenous scene - and that's the westies and the surfies, conflicted cousins whose differences are more a function of geography than class, and whose common interests often overlap (tying running shoes together and hurling them up onto power lines; constantly reinventing the length of a pair of shorts; appreciating The Very Best of Richard Clapton, etc) and, more seriously, a sense of ecstasy and anger fundamentally embedded in the landscape.

With all this in mind I'd go further and say that while bourgeois intellectuals fret over that hoary question, "What is Australian culture?" - without finding much of an answer - it is suburban westie culture which is forging the vernacular reality of all that we are and will be: from our slang and our humour through to the songs, poetry, novels and film-making that count for anything in our contemporary life. What a rage, eh?

- Mark Mordue



* This article was first published on May 25th, 2003 as part of the 'Short Festival' series that ran on the back page of the Sydney Morning Herald's Spectrum pages. The concept for this series of stories about imagined festivals was launched by editor Michael Visontay, one of the best and most original editors to ever work at Fairfax.

Iran: Waiting for a Chance

I wrote the following story in Iran almost a decade ago. Nothing much, it seems, has changed:


He laughs and says, "Khamenei" in a low voice. Then he makes a slicing motion with his thumb all the way across his throat along with a quick, hacking sound. Then he looks at me.


"I don't think so," I say back to him.


But I hardly understand what I am saying at all, just the sounds of confidence these automatic words somehow conjure, a droll white noise in place of language.

I keep walking and let the door swing shut behind me as we leave the restaurant. Still tingling with the tracheal gesture. Still feeling as if he means me, me who will lose my head in Iran.

Oddly enough, there is no particular menace to the moment.

It all happens so quickly I barely take in the interchange. It almost seems humorous: the bland smile, the smell of baking food, his weary gesturing.

For some time afterwards I still try to take it as a joke. A joke for Westerners fresh to the "madness" of Iran.

Then I wonder again if it is what he wishes. If he wants to see a jihad, "a struggle in the way of God," continued against the infidels now beginning to infiltrate his country as tourists for the first time since the revolution. If he would really like to see my head roll.

My girlfriend and I have sat eating rice with fish, a bowl of salad with a vinegar and yogurt dressing and a plate of mint with two halved onions. It's a typical Iranian meal in a clean, basement-level restaurant in Isfahan, the city of merchants and glass, a place renowned for its crafts and craftiness, its skillful liars.

I talk to the men who work in the restaurant, making self-effacing fun of my guidebook "Farsi" phrases: Where are you from? Hello. Goodbye. I'm sorry I don't speak Persian ("Bebakshid, farsi balad nistam"). One man on his lunch break smiles at me from across the room. The others look on bluntly, staring slowly from the fluorescent, middle-aged weight that seems to color the whole room and drag at the heels of their boots. Moving like men in some invisibly thick soup.

We stand. Go to the cashier. "Chand-e?" I inquire. He holds up a 10,000 rial note. The money changers on Ferdosi Avenue call this "a Khomeini," after the dead Ayatollah whose stern face stares out from it. I leave an extra 1,000 rial tip (about 20 cents). And we start to walk out the door.

That's when the mustachioed, 40-ish man in the washed-out khaki uniform of a cleaner or a dishwasher looks at me and makes his little cutting motion to the throat.

It's not because I'm a lousy tipper.

I'd already heard about this gesture yesterday from a Frenchman who had just visited Tehran. He wasn't clear on the meaning of it either -- if it was a joke or something very nasty indeed.

In Tehran people had done the same thing to him, but they had made a brief whirling motion about their heads as well, to signify the turbans of the mullahs (Islamic clerics), before they too slashed at their throats with their thumbs and laughed.

At first I don't tell my girlfriend about all this symbolic throat-cutting. But eventually I have to mention my goodbye message at the restaurant as we walk off into the silence of the city's 10 p.m. streets. It troubles her, then she says, "Perhaps they mean death to Khamenei?"

Well, do they?

People say there is much unhappiness with the rule of the mullahs in Iran. In the 1998 parliamentary elections for the Assembly of Experts, clerics ensured that the candidates who could run were predominantly conservative. Only 46 percent of the population bothered to vote. It had already been decided behind closed doors by the mullahs. What was the point?

The Assembly selects and appoints Iran's Supreme Leader -- currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the similarly named successor to Ayatollah Khomeini -- who controls both the military and the security forces. This is Khomeini's real vision of the world's first Islamic theocracy, an indisputable leader who can interpret God's will with an iron fist wherever and whenever necessary.

President Khatami is an anomaly in this scene, a freak victory in a landslide people's vote that saw 76 percent of the voting population, mostly women and the young, turn out to elect him two years ago. But the conservative mullahs aren't so impressed with a man who studied philosophy in Germany for two years, or with the Western "liberal decadence" he is encouraging.

Khatami lacks real power, yet he has popular support. He balances himself delicately on this edge. As one local told us, "Khatami says such beautiful words. Such beautiful words. But what is really happening in Iran? What is really going on?"

More recent local council elections in March suggest change by stealth. All over the country women and young people managed to get elected, a surprising defeat for the hard-liners. Despite the people's renewed optimism, it remains to be seen whether the executives appointed by the mullahs to supervise these councils will allow them much real freedom.

And so it is that a strange tension underlines Iranian daily life, as if the impetus to open up the country is meeting a firm vice that will only allow it to expand so far. The question seems to be: When will the unstoppable force meet the immovable object?

The very word "mullah" swings in the mouth like a club. It carries weight when you say it.

Walking around the streets of Isfahan, we get very used to being stared at by people curious about Westerners in their midst. Whenever the turbaned shape of a cleric approaches, however, there is not a flicker of interest or recognition in their eyes. We do not exist. We are not here.

One feels the mullahs' neutralizing power, the sheer stoicism of how they refuse you through the mere act of not looking and looking right through us at the same time. They simply erase us from the scenery.


Under such weight, such force of erasure, there is a terrible longing for freedom.

You sense this when you talk to the young. At first there's pride, of course, in their country. The initial images that they paint of Iran are almost Disneyesque, 1950s pure. They're also very aware of Western stereotypes of them as screaming, crazed religious fanatics. Most people hate this global media cartoon of them and their country and their faith. As if to counter it, people are ridiculously friendly -- strangers literally invite you home for dinner, take you on personal tours of their city, give you small gifts. It's actually a hassle to deal with all this enthusiasm and courtesy wherever you go.

But as in the 1950s, there's a lock on the mind and the spirit. As we talk more and more to young people and they open up to us, they admit to being somehow "stuck" in their lives, often speaking of their desire for change, or of simply wanting to leave Iran altogether. They also, with a naive enthusiasm, tend to idolize the West as a dream of freedom, as a total fantasy, with all the forbidden fruits that go with it.

Within six months of coming to power in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini made a speech declaring, "There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun or enjoyment in whatever is serious."

It's hard to maintain that kind of reverence when over half of your population is under 25. Iran is witnessing a youthquake, and it can't cope with the energy. The strange thing about its youth is how common it is for them to refer to the time of the Shah with yearning and nostalgia -- when they have no memory of his brutal and exploitative reign or the revolution that deposed him. It is as if they yearn for a past that never existed.

In Tehran we read a newspaper article warning that the clerics in parliament have voted to send a paramilitary group known as the Basiji into the universities to help police and suppress "liberal Western influences." This means more than intellectual oppression. It means intimidating young people from holding hands in public and stopping women from using lipstick and from wearing their chadors pulled back provocatively onto their heads to reveal a little of their hair: all the pagan rebellions of Persian youth today.

"What will they do?" asks one Tehranian man benignly. "This is nature. A boy and a girl. It is like trying to stop running water."

We talk to a tour guide about it all. He tells us how he wants to escape. Maybe through India. Maybe through Hungary. He can hardly go anywhere in the world, he complains, as very, very few countries will give him a visa, with a few exceptions such as India, Pakistan, Nepal and Japan. It is hard to get out. It is hard to go anywhere.

"I am 26. Two years ago I fall in love with a German girl," he tells us. "I could not go to see her. They would not let me leave here. And Germany would not give me a visa, either.

"I was very angry. Very crazy." He shows us pictures. Two shots of a blond, one of her sitting on a beach, another of the two of them in his car. The photos look creased and old.

"Many times I have been arrested for mixing with tourists too much. They put me in prison one week, two weeks. I say, 'Why do you this to me? I am representing Iran to tourists in a good way. I am working hard for my country. I am contributing to my country.'"

He looks at us with a salesman's eye. "OK, of course I do for myself as well. But I work hard. It is good for Iran, too.

"And they arrest me! So I tell them, 'Send me away. You arrest me. You don't like me, you don't want me. You don't want hard-working people. You would rather I did nothing. So let me leave this country.' This is a crap government that wants crap people.

"They tell me, 'You talk a lot,' and put me in jail," he smiles. Then laughs. "But I am not political. I don't care about that.

"I am 26. I just want to live. I meet tourists. Sometimes I go to Goa. They tell me things," he nods childishly, conspiratorially, alluding to the reputation Goa, India's rave capital, has for partying and drug-fueled abandon. He wants us to understand that he knows what real pleasure is. "If you have tasted an orange and an apple, and you want the orange, you want the orange. If you do not ever taste it, then maybe you don't know.

"I know my country is very beautiful. But it is no good for me. I am 26," he repeats as if it is something to be astounded and depressed by -- his mantra. "How can I meet girls? I am not allowed to wear a bracelet even," he says, looking at mine as it sits heavily on my wrist. "It is too Western.

"No!" he cries out. "What sort of life is this? To get up early to work all day, to come home at night quietly and sleep like a cat. There is nowhere to go at night.

"My friend tells me I should stay. Iran is changing. Sure, maybe in five years. Maybe in 10 years. He is 35 and married. It is OK for him. But what about me now? I am 26."

And with that outburst over, he shares his simple plans of escape: how he will sell his car, his motorbike and his rare Persian carpet. How he will go to see the girl in Germany. How he doesn't like the cold, however, and he will wait till spring before he escapes to Europe. How Western girls on tours often flirt with him and try to kiss him even when they have husbands or boyfriends. "Why they do this? I think sometimes they want to punish their men."

We explain to him that sometimes Western girls play games and that it doesn't mean they are really interested in him or love him. He lights up with recognition -- this is a suspicion confirmed.

"Now I understand," he nods. "Now I understand."

He considers himself a man of the world. He didn't live with his family as a boy. He was brought up in the snake turns of the local bazaar, "working very hard. Very hard. Very hard like you cannot understand."


Now life is good. He is a man on the move -- or at least, on the make. But he has no freedom. He cannot fall in love. He cannot go anywhere. He cannot wear a bracelet. And there is that burning experience of two years ago, and these two photos of the girl he loves, both pictures marked with sticky tape where he has pulled them from his bedroom wall to show us. Marks that show he has pulled them from the wall a dozen times or more and told this same story to other travelers, to whomever will listen.

He unfurls his carpet, with its myriad patterns and silky blues and royal reds. He shows us where the makers wove an error into the carpet on purpose, so as not to affront Allah, since the Creator is the only one who can make a perfect thing. This is his magic carpet ride out of Iran. "I think if I sell it I can make much money. It's beautiful," he says a little sadly.

I try to warn him that he could be jumping into a deep hole if he becomes an illegal immigrant in Germany. For some reason his fears about the winter cold quietly depress me about his hopes. But he thinks he could just as easily fall down a hole in Iran, he says. "Anything could happen here. Anything."

So we talk about love again. And another painful experience as a teenager, when an older married Iranian woman had an affair with him. He didn't know she was married until after the affair had begun and she finally told him the truth.

"I told her to leave me alone. Sometimes now a married woman here in Iran will try to give me her phone number," he says, disgusted. "This is dirty. I tell her go away, you bastard. I don't want this."

It's hard not to laugh at his moral distaste, so naively expressed. "You are dirty bastard woman, leave me alone."

He is 26 years old, going on 14. It seems to be a part of Iran's 1950s moral atmosphere to reduce people to adolescents. For him, Iran is frustrated desire and perpetual lies behind the backs of people. He wants the girl in Germany. The dream life. The dream love. But thoughts of freedom lead him back to the emotional prison of Iran, and Iran leads him back to questions and plans and schemes to escape. Running his fingers over the carpet, thinking, looking for the error.

We talk about him over dinner that night. In that sullen, slow-moving fluorescent-lit restaurant where everything feels becalmed and exposed. Me twisting my bracelet round and round as I worry about him -- till I'm given something else to keep me thoughtful.

Later still as we lie in bed, I think about the gesture at the throat. Whether it was friendly or aggressive, or even subversive, as quite a few people have quietly suggested. The end of Khomeini and Khamenei, the death of the mullahs? Or a deepening and darkening of the revolution as they fight to preserve their rule? I'm really not sure. But this to me is the hidden Iran: a thumb at the throat, a girl who can't be loved. All blurred, hard to see, waiting for a chance.


First published at Salon.com on July 23, 1999.
Republished as 'Waiting for a Chance' in Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip (Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2001; Hawthorne Books, USA 2004).
Available at http://www.hawthornebooks.com/catalogue/excerpt/7/

A Handful of Sky

The road turned to dirt, then the dirt turned to wheel tracks between mounds of stone, slowly ripping the exhaust system from our old EH Holden and leaving it to drag like an anchor beneath us. We were somewhere between Boulia and Bedourie, out on the edges of the Simpson Desert in far western Queensland. It was about 10 in the morning and getting hotter by the minute. We hadn't seen a single vehicle since dawn and none looked like appearing.

I worried that my driver was a madman and he cursed ``typical Queensland road conditions'' where there appeared to be no road at all, digressing into angry Taoist philosophy, stories of massacred Aboriginal tribes, white historical vanity and just about everything else except his hell-bent desire to head out that way in the first place.

I was convinced he had brought me there to die with him, that it was all some terrible joke. Oh, why had I hitched a ride with him?



His name was Russell Guy. It was 1991. I'd met him in Darwin and he was the only lift heading south all the way to Sydney. I thought it would be an adventure and I was right.

Russell was a former 2JJ DJ who had quit the radio station just after its conversion to Triple J, to become a training officer at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association in Alice Springs, where he produced early recordings for rock groups such as Coloured Stone and the Warumpi Band.



In other words, he'd gone bush and was addicted to driving back and forth across the country in the cause of whatever possessed him. This was someone with white-line fever in his veins. In the boot, somewhere inside the rim of a spare tyre, was a sheaf of paper bound with blackened string, hand-typed, his ever burgeoning attempt to write the great Australian road novel. Unfinished. With at least four absolutely brilliant potential titles he kept testing out on me and constantly changing as we moved along, all of which I coveted for my own.

Russell's chief claim to fame had been a radio play he wrote years before that featured the ever-so-crisp ABC newsreader of the day, James Dibble, doing the voice of a young man driving up the coast of NSW while high on hallucinogenic drugs. What's Rangoon to You is Grafton to Me was first published in the surfing magazine Tracks in October 1978, then broadcast on Sydney's Double J about a half-dozen times before being remixed yet again in stereo for the launch of a national Triple J in 1981. It was a big hit at the time and remains one of the great pieces of subversive Australian radio, twisted to the point of almost straight again. Now I seemed to be living in some extended aspect of the play with the human corkscrew. He had to be mad and we were certainly going to die. But after clanging around in the red dust and rocks for hours Russell wrenched the last piece of exhaust, plus the muffler, completely off the car and we were on our noisy way again.

That night we camped just out of sight of the roadside and he told me stories about patches of Australian highway notorious for the number of their disappearances and murders. It was well before the Belanglo backpacker killer was a news sensation, but he knew about that stretch in NSW and quite a few others as well. ``Always best not to draw attention to yourself when you're camped by the roadside,'' he said, kicking out the fire for the night. ``There's some pretty strange people out there.''

Exhausted, I watched a lightning storm moving towards us across the desert like some elemental equivalent to an atomic bomb. It was so big we spent a few hours timing the gaps between the lightning and thunder, until Russell threw his swag over his head and zipped up safe and dry for the night. As the storm closed in I felt shaken and tiny, exactly how it must be for a small boat during a mighty ocean nightmare. I found myself trying to hedge my more inferior swag beneath the undercarriage of the car, in part to keep dry and more because I was grovelling in fear at the lightning, by then striking the earth in tree-like bolts, igniting the desert blackness into shots of daylight clarity.

Still quivering, I fell into a drained sleep, car grease staining my swag, the parting heat of the vehicle at odds with the falling rain. The next day Russell laughed at my paranoia about the storm as we set off into a clear horizon. It was as if nothing had occurred the night before. We stopped at one point where he pulled out a didgeridoo and played a while to the desert spaces. He said he sometimes felt the presence of the people who had lived in these places before and this was his attempt to show some respect for those who might be still there. ``Just to let their spirits know we're passing through.''

Then we moved off again and the sky was all we seemed to be heading into. I reached out the window and grabbed handfuls of the passing breeze and looked out at forever, thinking about Russell and his way and all that he said, about these ghosts in the land and those still living, and where in the world I belonged.

I often think back to those moments and how deeply they marked me. And I wonder how my road mentor is going out there and if his book is still in the boot of his old EH. If we might unravel the black string like a strip of bitumen and see those pages like so many white lines taking us somewhere and get some new vision of this country, its wonder and horror, its blankness and possibility. And if that's too much to ask of him, if we might just take a drive and hope for the best. And see where the wide open road takes us.

- Mark Mordue




Map sourced from Bonzle:
http://maps.bonzle.com/c/a?a=p&p=1148&cmd=sp&d=pics

Story first published as 'Hard Day's Fright' in The Weekend Australian Travel section, in the Journeys column, September 27, 2003.

Inner Voices - A Conversation with the Novelist and Editor David Ebershoff

There’s been some criticism. “Oh yes,” the American novelist David Ebershoff knows what I’m talking about. He laughs if off – but like any good writer he still seems to be digesting the highs and lows in releasing one of the New York publishing scene’s most anticipated works last year, his third novel The 19th Wife. And so it is that a question lingers, unspoken, impolite, beneath our conversation: does that book succeed?

Ebershoff’s sprawling novel tells the true-life, nineteenth century tale of Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife of the Mormon “Prophet” Brigham Young. Her story of outspoken apostasy (she would campaign against polygamy as a form of slavery and become a national celebrity in her day) is twinned with a modern-day murder mystery set among a Mormon sect in Utah who refer to themselves as “the Firsts” because of their on-going loyalty to Young’s polygamous vision.

The 39-year-old author uses a host of voices and source materials – including a mock Wikipedia entry, newspaper articles, letters, hymn lyrics and online conversation transcripts – to unfold his ambitiously structured narrative. It’s this array of characters and patchwork storytelling techniques that has brought Ebershoff such uncertain praise.

Ironically enough The 19th Wife is an enquiry into the relationship between faith and doubt. It takes its cues quite sincerely (as well as ambiguously) from an epigraph attributed to St Augustine: “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”



The process of developing a novel can be a mysterious business, for the writer as much as any reader. “Writing my way through it told me how to do it,” Ebershoff admits of The 19th Wife. “So I really appreciate you responding [positively] to the structural aspects. They’re so central to the book and what it is – and also how I came to the book to begin with.”

“I actually heard about Ann Eliza Young about seven years ago. How she was the 19th wife of Brigham Young,” he says. “That phrase really intrigued me: ‘the 19th wife’. About four years ago I moved into her story and really started working on it, reading her memoirs, her lectures, the hundreds if not thousands of newspaper articles about her, material from people she knew, Brigham Young’s biography, which didn’t gibe at all with her version of him…

“Information came from all kinds of places and different texts. But I still couldn’t quite get an answer to a central question, what did it mean on an intimate level to be the 19th wife? That’s why I wrote the book as fiction. I realized I needed to interview some ‘plural wives’, so I went down to a remote and isolated community in Texas. Everyone in that town, all the families, were polygamous. But I wasn’t able to get an interview because I was such an outsider no one would talk to me.”

As Ebershoff drove around he became aware of a police vehicle tailing him. It followed him until he left the local limits feeling suitably intimidated. “I couldn’t believe that in modern day America I’d just been driven out of town.”

“I saw that this was another part of the story – and got in contact with people who helped people leave that community. That’s when I found out about ‘the lost boys’ (boys and young men who are expelled for their crimes of sinfulness, largely to prevent competition with the senior men for fresh young wives). Their stories were just heart-breaking. I saw that if the nineteenth century story was that of a wife, the contemporary one should be of a child of polygamy.”

Over time Ebershoff accumulated more and more documents, texts and interviews. “What I kept coming back to me were all the voices,” he says. “It was very compelling to me. I just kept telling myself: Believe in the voices. That is what is taking me through the material and that’s what will take the reader through it too. Even if you disagree with what the people are saying! So the structure actually came out of the story.”

In the end, two figures come to dominate the book: Ann Eliza Young herself, whose memoirs and public speeches Ebershoff re-tuned and extrapolated from to create a stunningly convincing picture of early Mormon life; and the 20-year-old Jordan Scott, a ‘lost boy’ who has been excommunicated from ‘the Firsts’, only to be pulled home again after reading over the internet his mother, a contemporary ‘19th wife’, has been arrested for the murder of her husband.

Jordan is something of a gay Holden Caulfield, sardonic and sentimental by turns. Ann Eliza is more upright, but her narrative shows similarly persistent flashes of sarcasm that stab at the core of polygamous practices: “In the Saints’ troubled institution, a wife’s confessions to her husband hops from one pillow to the next with the determination of a bed bug.”

It’s worth noting that despite these elaborate weavings The 19th Wife is not so much a post-modern literary experiment as an old school blockbuster. One’s mind immediately drifts to films like The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Witness for structural and dramatic comparisons, as well as the HBO program Big Love. That television series, along with a controversial raid on a cult in Texas early last year gave The 19th Wife added topicality upon release, not to mention the fact Mormonism is the fastest growing religion in the USA today.

Ebershoff hastens to clarify that his book has been well-received by mainstream Mormons who remain proud of their history despite the fact they now abhor polygamy and find themselves embarrassed by these recidivist cults. He nonetheless talks with great intensity about interviewing former “plural wives” and “lost boys” – and how much their testimonies matched documentary records of a hundred years ago, when people similarly questioned their religion while caught inside a totally confined community world. “The loneliness of it,” Ebershoff says, each word pounding out, “the confusion, the self blame, the very difficulty in forming doubt and the overwhelming disorientation in the formation of that doubt as it rose up inside of you.”



In the past Ebershoff has stated he “began writing to escape from the emotional drama of being a teenager.” While that experience is hardly unique for a novelist, it’s not hard to assume connections between his development as a gay young man and the consolations of literature. It was perhaps fated that as a hotshot young editor for Random House he would be put in charge of Truman Capote’s literary estate, including the discovery of an early lost novel entitled Summer Crossing published in 2005. Ebershoff heard of an auction of four notebooks at Sotheby’s purporting to be a ‘lost novel’. He flew to London expecting to find notes and scene sketches. Ebershoff recounts the thrill of sitting down in a tiny room and reading “Capote’s small, crabbed handwriting” and realizing it was a complete work. “So I contacted the [Truman Capote] Estate and said we have to take this seriously.”

Fortunately the New York Public Library bought the note-books to add to their Capote archives. Written when Capote was just 19, “it was clearly an early novel, wonderfully precocious,” says Ebershoff. “We spent several months discussing should we publish it and what would it mean if we did? And we decided, one, it was a very good first novel as long as we didn’t publish it as a lost masterpiece. And two, when you look at Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, that the publication wouldn’t dent them. They’re too good. As long as we put Summer Crossing out modestly there would be people who welcome it, especially seeing an early character in the book who is the prototype for Holly Golightly.”

During this time Ebershoff was also appointed Norman Mailer’s editor, working with him for the last five years of his life on Why Are We At War? (2003), The Castle in the Forest (2007) and a collection of poetry and drawings entitled Modest Gift (2003).



“Working with Norman was not what I expected,” Ebershoff says. “His reputation was very large. I made an assumption that he wouldn’t want an editor; that he would fight for his own way on everything… In fact he wanted to know exactly what I thought and why. I loved being so wrong about him – he was always so generous to people and their ideas, so curious about everyone he met. About what was being discussed, what was in the air. And he applied that interest equally and democratically, which of course explains the breadth of his work.”

“Norman actually spoke of Capote very fondly,” Ebershoff adds. “He enjoyed his company a lot and [told me] he admired his courage and his books.”

Now an editor-at-large for Random House, Ebershoff is engaged at the time we speak on a book about Iran by the journalist Azadeh Moaveni as well as the new biography of Abraham Lincoln by the historian Ronald C. White, Jnr. “It’s the editor’s job to understand the writer’s vision and help the writer achieve that vision,” Ebershoff says. As a commissioning editor he goes one step further – what he looks for in a writer is “not just a story well told, but the depth of talent to sustain a career”.

Ebershoff’s own career has been tilting towards big things for some time. His debut novel, The Danish Girl (2000), was based on the first person to undergo sexual re-assignment surgery and is currently being turned into a film starring Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron. His next book, a collection of short stories about teenage boys and young men entitled The Rose City (2001), was named one of the year’s best by the L.A. Times. Ebershoff’s second novel, Pasadena (2002), a highly romantic attempt to write a Californian equivalent to Wuthering Heights, hit the New York Times best-seller lists – as has The 19th Wife more recently.

Outwardly it’s the kind of solidly ascending career any writer would be glad to have. And yet it’s not quite the heights Ebershoff clearly would like to reach. He tells me he is “beginning a new novel, and I’m just as nervous as ever.” He sounds very sincere about those nerves – and way too professionally razored as a top American editor to give in to his doubts. However underwhelming the critical reception to The 19th Wife has been, book sales indicate he has struck a popular as well as literary nerve, a balance the likes of Mailer and Capote similarly sought. Ebershoff is already talking of a new novel that “has a pulse, a beat. I can feel it, hear it. And it demands attention, like anything alive does.”

- Mark Mordue




= David Ebershoff is a guest at this year's Sydney Writers Festival 2009.

* An edited version of this story was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum Books pages on September 20th 2008. It can currently be found in full at the American art, design and media website, Culture Now, which I can thoroughly recommend as a site to join and explore - link below:

http://www.culturenow.com/site/item.cfm?item=35989