You know that feeling when you get on a reading roll? You finish a few books in quick succession and it’s like you’ve taken on this momentum. You have to be lucky with the books you pick though or you bog yourself in something that allows itself to be put down midway through and forgotten about. Tony Birch’s second collection of short stories, Father’s Day was certainly not one of those books that you could put down for too long.

It’s a subtle yet incredibly moving collection of short fiction that’s over-arching themes can be best described as dealing with family, those on the fringes of society and characters with something missing. After reading the story ‘Shadowboxing’ and his novel Blood last year, I have come to love not just how Birch is drawn toward dealing with marginal characters, like I do in my own writing, but his realist mode of writing. It is direct and unobtrusive. The danger I find with collections of short fiction is the pause between each piece and having to immerse yourself in a new one each time. But Birch’s realism allows for you to do that easily. You are not lost each time in thick obscure description in the beginning. Birch places you in the scene clearly and immediately. It is like the author is not even there.

But I guess critics of writing like Birch’s would argue that there is no art to it, and Birch often breaks the rule that you’re meant to “show not tell” but he does it so well. The statement of “fact” and the placement of those events without the intervention of the author is in itself quite moving. And to me, the style and the insignificant way in which he finishes most of his stories conveys a realism situated in the often mundane, subtle and trivial details that portray what it is to be a marginal character in society, so much so that they seem to be the kinds of stories that other writers would overlook and deem not significant enough to tell.

I’m someone who looks for books that punch you in the stomach. I look for great, cataclysmic events that leave me breathless. This collection is not like that but still leaves me thinking this is a very good collection of short stories. There are moments when pieces feel unfinished, but necessarily so and the sense of loss you get from some of them is a reaction that I think is not always the one you seek, but I think worthwhile all the same.

I haven’t posted a book review on here in a while. Actually, I haven’t posted on here in a while, but I felt compelled to say something about Tsiolkas’ Loaded. After reading it in just two-sittings last week, on the way to Perth and then back again. I read The Slap a few years ago and it’s a novel I still think about, and had been meaning to read more of his work, and my friends had raved about Loaded.

It is sharp and intense. It’s about a 19-year-old boy Ari who likes to have sex and take a lot of drugs, and it takes place over one night. The novel moves seamlessly through the various places he goes out to, to the various people he meets. It feels a little like a drug trip as you read it, but it’s never just drugs and sex and nothing under the surface.

As with many successful novels, I think Tsiolkas has managed to nail the voice, along with a kind of minimalism that is not too over the top. The casual language and pace make it easy to keep reading and finish in a short while. There is politics there. It alludes to a feeling of apathy and powerlessness that I think was a common mood of the 90s and it speaks a lot to me about the motivations for the kind of lifestyle Ari leads, without being patronising about it, perhaps because it also feels to me as if it might be semi-autobiographical. There are details that seem to match up.

I saw Tsiolkas speak at the Wheeler Centre a few weeks back, where I bought the book and got him to sign it. He did a reading from his forthcoming novel, Barracuda. Like someone like Tony Birch, he has a fascination for characters perhaps marginal, perhaps just those overlooked. I’m interested in that too as a writer. But I’ve only just discovered them recently, never the kinds of texts they gave to me in high-school, but then I wonder if I would’ve read them then.