Jen Montgomery, aka ‘Monty’, after fourteen years of marriage, wakes one morning to find herself not, thankfully, turned into a dung beetle, but ‘with a well-defined sexual attraction to my next-door neighbour who ... was female’. Not long after, Monty leaves her husband, Dave, and their son for a woman, Renny, whom she meets through her part-time band. She follows Renny to Melbourne. Monty, a social worker, begins employment at Marlowe Downs, a suburban institution for child psychiatry on the site of a former horse stud.

Monty’s job entails a novice’s excitement, followed by promotion and frustration. She and her colleagues are all subject to structures they must accommodate and can only partly shape – more autonomous than Kafka’s ‘K’, but disempowered nonetheless. ‘I felt like a wet plaster cast of myself, unravelling,’ Monty says.

In early chapters, the trajectory of This Too Shall Pass suggests that the breakdown of Monty’s relationship with Dave and new attachment to Renny will be the novel’s focus. These remain core concerns – or, as the management at Monty’s workplace might say, key performance indicators – but the personalities and politics of Marlowe Downs soon occupy the bulk of the narrative. With a light metafictional touch, Monty introduces the main characters: her immediate superior, Celia, who ‘walked as if her thoughts had amalgamated to cause a magnetic field, one that pulled her northwards or towards the moon’; Nigel Pathmanathan, a psychiatrist who ‘dieted on kinesiology’ and leaves Christian pamphlets and notes with smiley faces in staff pigeonholes; ‘team leader’ Elliot Burton; and the slick Anton ‘Antwerp’ Pilsner, who is zealous about Marlowe Downs’s financial ‘bottom line’.

They are soon joined by others such as Eddy, ‘whose nose-picking and sock-showing had the unusual effect of making you feel you were special’; and James, a mildly hippy psychologist who becomes Monty’s sole unqualified friend at work. Finn is adept at pinpointing characters’ idiosyncrasies. But the expanding cast can be overwhelming; one or two minor characters might have been dropped to allow others to flourish. One character in need of more space is Celia. We meet her during a lecture, when she pulls a screen down on her head, and she proves insightful in her diagnoses of Marlowe Downs’s troubled children and of Monty’s own sometimes-troubled head. For Monty, Celia lacks the charisma she hoped for in a superior. Monty comes to appreciate her dogged professionalism, but the compelling Celia remains a lesser member in the cast of institutionalised characters.

Nigel Pathmanathan, by contrast, commands much of Monty’s attention, and ours, in the novel’s later chapters, due mainly to an inappropriate note he leaves in Monty’s pigeonhole, in which he makes plain his religious objections to her choice of sexual partner. Nigel, with his mix of friendly charm, adherence to unproven clinical techniques, matter-of-fact misogyny, and Christian fundamentalism, is a vivid character. Their restrained sparring leads to Monty’s resentment at Nigel’s homophobia. Egged on by Renny, she takes the matter further, but this leads to more time spent attacking Nigel’s belief systems than nuancing him as a character.

For the most part, though, Finn subtly threads sexual politics through the narrative. Despite his occasional lapses into resentment, Dave remains a sympathetic character. Finn’s description of him soon after he learns of Monty’s defection, ‘his walk housing a strange rickety-ness’, is affecting. Because of their shared responsibility for their son, he and Monty continue to meet spasmodically. These constitute some of the most engaging scenes in the novel; it’s a pity there aren’t more of them.

Finn is also part of a recent tradition attacking the new managerialism pervading the workplace; a world of throughputs, accreditations, and cost-cutting. She does a fine line in cataloguing excess. But banalities of corporate management have been widely pilloried – in novels (think of Max Barry’s spoof Jennifer Government [2003]), essays, newspaper columns, television satires, blogs. Some of Finn’s dissection might have been diverted to further examining her well-drawn characters. Towards the end of the novel, in what proves a catalyst for further change, Monty witnesses a tragic unfolding of events for one of her clients and his family. Finn, whose biographical note tells us that she is a social worker, knows her subject. Her depiction of the grief-stricken family, continuing on in its ‘out-of-body ordinariness’, is touching and rings true, as do her brief portraits of other clients of Marlowe Downs. Deft though her take on workplace politics is, we would have welcomed more sustained witness to one or two such clients.

This Too Shall Pass is, nevertheless, a skilfully crafted first novel. Finn’s succinct characterisations are filled with insight and are often very funny. Her story adroitly records a short but telling period in a life. ‘“Chapters”, as people call them,’ notes Monty. We look forward to more of them from Finn.