The raw, moving reality check Australian fiction needs

The world chronicled in Max Easton’s Now, Autonomy is both familiar and foreign. Set in Sydney’s inner west, the novel is peppered with local landmarks and place names: Newtown, Homebush, Parramatta Road, Central Station, Hyde Park, the QVB, the Marrickville Bowling Club.

In that sense, the terrain of Easton’s book is commonplace. But the social world his characters live in is offbeat, at least by the standards of Australian fiction. Most Australian novels are – let’s face it – middle-class affairs. The characters in them don’t tend to be haunted, on a monthly basis, by the question of how to keep a roof over their heads.

This is why Easton’s work feels like a breath of fresh air, even if the air is thick with the smell of traffic fumes and pub carpets and inner-city squats. Easton’s characters belong to the urban working class, or perhaps underclass. They’re smart young people who’ve been shut out of the modern economy or have voluntarily subtracted themselves from it.

Either way, Easton’s people are outsiders. They work menial jobs, never getting enough shifts to lift themselves beyond a hand-to-mouth existence. They play punk music, publish zines and find a sense of purpose in radical politics. They love their city but feel alienated by its materialism. Walking up George Street en route to a march for Palestine, they pass franchise stores they’ve never heard of, “whole shops dedicated to watches and handbags and cosmetics”.

Now, Autonomy is the third novel in a trilogy that has followed the same group of characters from the 1990s up to the present. The connection between the three books is loose. You don’t need to have read the earlier novels to follow the action of this one – or indeed to be seriously moved by it, as I unexpectedly found myself being.

I say “unexpectedly” because Easton’s book sneaks up on you. If you don’t come from the same world as his characters, and don’t share their sometimes crude political views, you may start by seeing them as types, defined by their more conspicuous social markers. There’s Sunny, the non-binary they/them firebrand. Pat, the ageing radical. Helen, the bottle-shop clerk and part-time punk bass player who is always “one bad roster away from declaring bankruptcy.”

Easton cares about these characters, and has a gift for making you care about them, too. As his older characters slip from youth into middle age, they’re visited by the same grim epiphanies that await us all at that time of life. “At some point,” Pat finds, “life had stopped feeling like something he was living, and more like something he’d lived.”

But even in ageing, there’s a class dimension. Easton’s older characters don’t just feel that life has passed them by. They also finally see that the economy has left them behind, and isn’t coming back for them. They want autonomy, but autonomy costs more money than they’ll ever have. Helen, at 38, feels as if she’s holding the social ladder that all her former friends have ascended. “We’re still living like we’re in our 20s,” her girlfriend says. “It’s not easy to be our age and still be fighting for scraps.”

The irony, for Easton’s characters, is that they never craved social advancement in the first place. They’ve missed a bus they didn’t want to catch. Their ambitions, as the book proceeds, zero in on a more modest goal, a kind of parody of the great Australian dream. All they want is a squat to call their own — a place where they can rehearse their music and put on shows. The city around them is full of boarded-up buildings that developers have purchased and then left to rot. Is it too much to ask to “take a space back”, and put one of these abandoned ghost-buildings to civilised use?

The lives of Easton’s characters aren’t wholly defined by the raw economic deal they’re getting. In the course of being fiscally shafted, they still laugh, love, have relationships, make music, create, age, die. Their lives are as real as any others being lived in today’s Australia. Easton humanely documents a social underworld we think too little about, even though it exists right under our noses.

Now, Autonomy by Max Easton is published by Giramondo ($32.95).