Her Fidelity (Katharine Pollock, Vintage)

Cathy works at a revered Brisbane record store full of indie snobs and turntable pedants. But now their days of rock royalty are gone as streaming services and online retailers take over, and Cathy is starting to feel a shift. While her friends are growing and changing their lives, she feels stuck, paralysed by uncertainty and mired in the misogyny of the music industry. The first half of Her Fidelity, Katharine Pollock’s debut novel, is almost episodic in nature as Cathy chronicles her seemingly endless days in the shop, sharing anecdote after anecdote about the way she and her friends are disrespected, ignored or mistreated by the men around them. The book then transitions to a story of self-improvement, as Cathy stops complaining and instead wonders what she can do about the atmosphere of misogyny around her. This gives the book a strange feel, as it seems unable to decide whether it is a gritty story about the daily sexism in the music industry or an empowering novel of personal growth. Her Fidelity is infused with Brisbane flavour: the heat, the concrete, the music, the locals. Cathy is a droll slacker of a narrator, peppering her first-person narration with, as she calls it herself, ‘disingenuously witty repartee’. Her voice is at times ironic and sarcastic but it can also be funny and light, adding to the confusion of tones. A riot grrl High Fidelity, this feminist-slanted, self-aware coming-of-age story is a cross between Nick Hornby and Meg Bignell.

Fay Helfenbaum is a freelance writer and editor and was a bookseller for five years.

Category: Reviews