Waiting (Philip Salom, Puncher & Wattmann)

Award-winning poet Philip Salom’s third novel, set in inner-city Melbourne, is an absurdist fiction following the haphazard lives of oddball couple Big and Little. Big is a large, Rabelaisian, somewhat gruff 60-year-old cross-dresser partial to fright wigs and loud dresses. Little, his partner, is a diminutive woman in her mid-30s. They both live, quite contentedly, at a rooming house that is thronged with an array of eccentric characters. During the day Big and Little traipse around town, battling it out at the supermarket, the bank and other institutions of cold, contemporary rationality. When Little discovers she may stand to inherit a considerable amount of money, it throws her and Big’s world into emotional disarray. Could they leave the safe, if madcap, world of the rooming house? Little then involves her cousin, Angus, who designs lake-scapes and is romantically involved with Jasmin, a university lecturer in semiotics. As the title intimates, Salom’s novel is a Waiting for Godot of the inner-city—an existential comedy of urban survival. Written in a style that surges and foams with endless wordplay and invention, Waiting has warmth and humour. It will appeal to readers who like gritty realism, but also appreciate a postmodern style brimming with irony and literary references.

Chris Saliba is co-owner of North Melbourne Books and a freelance reviewer

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