Which story to tell?

Abstract

Which story to tell? Richard Carr Christos Tsiolkas. 7½. Sydney: Allen and Unwin Press, 2021. 344 pp. A $32.99. ISBN: 9781761065330 Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) centers on a filmmaker suffering from director's block who goes into retreat in a hotel [End Page 296] seeking to overcome this personal and artistic impasse. Christos Tsiolkas gives a nod of homage to the late director in his latest novel, 7½. Like the Italian master, the narrator—Christos, a novelist—enters into a two-week retreat in a rented seaside house, intent on making headway on at least one of the writing projects bedeviling him. "It is treacherous being a writer," the narrator avers after sketching the floor plan of the house and environs (4), laying out for his readers the current relationship between himself and his profession. "I have come here to write a book," the narrator states (4), and though he struggles to name what kind of book it will be—a novel? a play? a screenplay?—he is firm about its focus: "I do know this. … All of those matters—politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality, the future—all of them now bore me" (4). These early sections of 7½ introduce us to Christos at this stage of his life—successful, nearing sixty, his body conceding some defeat to the predations of old age—as he sets up his routine and presents us with a current manifesto: "I am writing at a time when the novel is unbearably timid" (33). Christos follows memory threads back to childhood and adolescence—to Stavros, a man sharing the Tsiolkas household in his childhood, defined, for the young Christos, by the alluring reek of his sweat; to his cousin Manolis, or Mani, growing up a peasant in Greece, who encourages "the chubby young boy from Melbourne" (36) to scale a cliff with him and his friends; to his surprising interruption of two men in sexual congress alongside a urinal. Such memories, in fact, are a source or set of sources for one of his book ideas: "I want to re-create a world that has disappeared through the sensual experiences of a child" (38). It is another idea, however, that has most captured the narrator's imagination. Another memory thread leads us back to the 1990s, when Christos watched gay porn on a VHS tape featuring a white actor identified as Paul Carrigan cavorting with a Black actor. Something electric in that viewing experience has stayed with Christos as he shares a history he has invented for Paul over time and a likely story line for his new work. Paul will now be a retired actor from the porn industry, an American married to a retired fellow performer named Jenna. They now live in her native Australia and are blessed with an adolescent son, Neal. In the developing draft, Paul receives an offer from an American viewer of his videos, an elderly man who, for $180,000, requests that Paul fly to California to spend three nights with him. Of course, there will be sex but "nothing sordid or disgusting" (48). Enticed by the sum, Paul and Jenna decide that he will return to California, where he will accede to the gentleman's request in return for the sum. While there, Paul will also encounter old friends from the industry and the suppressed temptations of his old life. 7½ unravels in multiple ways. The narrator guides us through his daily regimen of swims and walks and details his breakfast and dinner menus. Though striving to block himself from the outside world, he calls or is called by Simon, his enduring life partner-lover, and he visits Andrea, a lifelong friend with whom he quarrels over the nature of his creative gifts. Telling her that he no longer sees himself as rebel or reformer but as one who loves the world, Christos is humiliated by her dismissal of his current vision: "You can't write about beauty. … You don't have that talent. … You're shit at metaphor" (81). And as he sits at his desk, the narrator delves further into memories—of his immigrant family come to Melbourne in search of the...