Kill Your Boomers (Fiona Wright, Ultimo)

In her first work of fiction, Fiona Wright turns her sharp eye on Australia’s housing crisis. Kill Your Boomers centres on Keira, a 30-something writer who also nannies for the twins of a dodgy wellness entrepreneur. All the while, Keira obsesses over the warped real estate market she’s locked out of. Or is she? When a hole in the kitchen floorboards of her rented share house starts talking to her, offering distinctly geronticidal suggestions about how she, too, might achieve the Australian dream of owning a home, Keira listens. Kill Your Boomers is propelled by the question of how Keira will respond to her powerlessness, and whether the outcome will live up to the book’s provocative title. While the novel serves as a necessary commentary on the housing market and Australia’s class divide, it struggles at times to sustain narrative momentum; after its climactic moment, the previously voluble narrator becomes curiously opaque. At its best, the prose sings, particularly when Keira articulates the conflicted emotions she feels towards her newly home-owning friends. Elsewhere, it becomes repetitive and strained, leaving the plot feeling stretched. The conceit of the talking floorboard hole is hilarious, and the novel is most compelling when it leans into this magical-realist-parody. Kill Your Boomers has notes of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection in Wright’s attention to the accoutrements of millennial aspiration, and Leila Slimani’s Lullaby in the more class-conscious homicidal tendencies at work.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Melissa Mantle holds a Master of Arts in literature and balances her bookselling work with going to the cinema as often as possible. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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