Fiction reviews: Love in Five Acts and other titles
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By Kerryn Goldsworthy
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PICK OF THE WEEK
MacLehose Press, $32.99
This book is what Frank Moorhouse once called a “discontinuous narrative”, five individual stories of women who inhabit the same fictional world and who each know at least one of the others. But these links are mostly incidental and what the women really have in common is their disappointing, damaging or even tragic experiences of sex, romance, and other kinds of love, often as a result of their own character and behaviour but also always connected to the choices and limitations of women’s lives. This is not a cheerful book and there is something detached and chilly about its tone and mood, but it is characterised by the way its beautifully direct and lucid prose conveys complexities, and by a fierce intelligence that shows how closely connected someone’s thoughts and emotions can be to daily experience of the physical world.