Las Vegas for Vegans (A S Patric, Transit Lounge)

This is the second collection of short stories from Melbourne writer (and bookseller) A S Patric, following last year’s The Rattler and Other Stories. In Las Vegas for Vegans, Patric displays an extraordinary emotional range, moving from comic and sexy to wistful and despairing—often within a single story. Running through the collection is a sense of fatalism, most directly articulated in the story ‘Full Scale’, which begins with the statement: ‘She was a ballerina when she was seventeen, until she destroyed her knee.’ Patric’s writing also explores duty and the costs of its fulfilment or abdication, and he attempts to delight and unsettle his readers by introducing situations that are often ridiculous: a coffee-deprived man fires a gun into a bustling city street; a newsagent receives a package from his long-dead wife; a son leaves his father dying on the kitchen floor to go to work. Much of Patric’s finest work is parochial, its tenderness and sense of claustrophobia driven by the familiarity of the scene. The stories that are less memorable are the ones that betray an anxiety about contemporary life, often in a heavy-handed fashion. While Patric’s gripping, intelligent collection contains some fine moments, there are also unmemorable stretches in what is ultimately an uneven assemblage of stories.

Jennifer Peterson-Ward is an editorial assistant and freelance literary critic

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews