The Jesus Man is a family saga, recording generations of a multicultural (and possibly Aboriginal} Greek/Italian family – the Stefanos. Set primarily in contemporary Melbourne, it focuses particularly on the three sons, each of their stories being told in a separate section. The gradual deterioration of the middle son, Tommy, whose decline into unemployment, selfloathing, alienation, obsessional and addictive behaviours and finally murder and suicide is the central story. Tsiolkas explores an important theory in Tommy’s story (I kept thinking of those ‘Trench Coat Mafia’ boys) that it’s possible that those who act violently do so out of their inability to assimilate and accommodate the mundane, unconscious violence which we accept in our everyday lives. Tommy’s traumatic reaction to the starvation and death of the space dog Laika is powerfully exemplary.

The story is supposedly narrated by the youngest (and gay) son, Louie. However, the narrator’s voice is problematic. I knew the story was being told from Louie’s point of view mainly because the blurb told me so. The voice of the narrator is awkward and confused. After a short introduction, Louie doesn’t surface directly again as the narrator until he feels compelled to deliver this vital inanity on p.88 ‘I’m blushing. I’m intervening here. It was me, I told Tommy U2 were pompous.’ This confusion begins as early as p.11 with ‘I should have wagged’. We do not know who is speaking or thinking this; similarly, on p.142 ‘December 15. Lou’s Birthday.’ The novel reads as if Tsiolkas has written the various chapters as discrete ‘stories’ and not been careful enough, or had enough editorial assistance, in integrating them. This device is structurally dreary, and putting the bits together (even with the unifying symbol of the crow) does not a novel make.

Similarly, the ‘Sean Sanders Journal 1968–97’ holds another annoying inconsistency. Maybe I missed something but there is no indication anywhere in the writing of this span of years. The whole eighteen pages seems to have been written over a matter of months in 1997.

The novel is larded with phrases such as ‘desiring to sedate all his hungers’, ‘he revved hard, and journeyed home’, ‘I’m requiring no destination’. Boosting up a simple statement with a pomposity or the subjective is a silly schoolboy trick to seem more portentous, weightier. Writers may at times fall into this, but editors should never let these sorts of overblown and undercooked affectations see the light of day.

Perhaps something Tsiolkas should keep in mind is that when publishers tell a writer their manuscript ‘only needs a light edit’, maybe it is because the work is so brilliant but it can simply be a flattery that translates into ‘we don’t want to spend the money’ or ‘let’s just shoot it out in pronto time while the name’s still hot’.

Where can down and dirty, gritty grunge realism go? Sometimes towards a cheap nihilism, which Tsiolkas, to his credit, avoids. He does toss up for questioning our received politically correct wisdoms around gay pride – he expresses some of the deep torment of being gay, the glib ‘I’m not a racist’ racism, the complexity at the interface of childhood sexuality and child abuse. Yet in another type of P.C. he makes a stab at contextualising the Stefano family in the light of political, social and cultural realities. But this ends up a rather earnest moralising at the back of the palate (even a coy Christianity). Under all the ‘hard truths’ there’s still something hiding (even rather cosy). The energy that should be released from these questionings and transgressings is missing, somehow avoided. The novel reads at times as clinically as a case history. We never confront anything like the Real, anything as implicatory as the doppelgänger horror Tommy confronts, ‘Tommy had just looked into a mirror. His reflection was repulsive.’ Tsiolkas is trying to work out his ethics, morality, politics, sexuality but he seems to be doing so within a closed system from which he never exits and his suggestions of exit are timid and irrelevant.

We are finally left with Louie’s search for family history and truths, rather than myth and denial, with his father, Artie Stefano’s, reliability, stoicism and decency, the innocence and hope of Tommy’s daughter Betty and the old man Mr Pericles’ rather limited insights on evil, ‘What we just watched, all of it, especially the woman selling God, that’s evil, that’s what it looks like.’ But this is not enough by a long shot to carry a 400-page novel with such a portentous title. This P.R. sexy friendly (that hum you hear is marketing buzz) grunge reads to me like a bit of a jumped-up film synopsis that has turned out to be a TV mini-series.

Read in the context of Steven Sewell’s The Boys’ terrifying autopsy of male violence, of George Alexander’s Mortal Divide, loaded with the aesthetic wealth it’s possible to glean from the intergenerational and intercultural and masculinity in crisis, of Kinsella’s recent Grappling Eros and the stout moral fibre of its hypermorality or Jennifer Maiden’s apparently ‘unpublishable’ novel Complicity, a brilliant study in the mundaneness of suburban violence, The Jesus Man attempts to cover much the same territory but never really leaves home base.