“Impossible to Keep”: Home Renovation and the Australian Suburban Gothic in Sonya Hartnett’s Golden Boys

Abstract

ABSTRACT Australia is in the grip of an obsession with renovation. In contemporary popular culture renovation television programs, books and new media platforms have become “a social phenomenon, one that is both expressive and constructive of social relations”. This essay argues that Sonya Hartnett uses the suburban gothic to subvert conventional representations of renovation that appear in popular culture, which uncritically present renovation as a practice “oriented towards upward mobility through the complete and often radical transformation of bodies, homes and lifestyles”. The figure of the renovator in Sonya‘s Golden Boys (2014) is a pedophile, “that most feared and hated of suburban bogeymen”, whose renovations are designed to draw neighborhood children into his home. One dominant Gothic trope is the decaying castle, manor and, later, suburban house, that threatens to exceed its boundaries. In the novel, renovation is a gothic practice that, while attempting to renew and refresh the Jenson home, sets in motion its inevitable destruction through revealing Rex Jenson’s pedophilia. I contend that Hartnett’s suburban gothic subverts the aspirational appeal of contemporary fascinations with renovation, and situates the renovated house as a significant contemporary gothic site.