The Australian

by Emma Smith-Stevens

Overview

In her humorous and emotionally resonant debut, Emma Smith-Stevens follows the exploits and evolution of a young man - known only as “the Australian” - over the course of a dozen years, from his time posing for tourist photos as Superman to his life in New York, chasing fame and fortune. Married to a woman he barely knows and struggling to forge a relationship with his son, the Australian travels between the U.S. and Melbourne, seeking to reconnect with his deceased parents through his father’s Australian Outdoor Geographic magazines and the Dreaming Tracks, sacred landmarks his mother longed to explore.

Through this quest for self-discovery, the Australian becomes both more and less enigma: “the idea of this guy you could find in any city, a hostel anywhere in the world, smiling, suntanned, hauling a backpack.” A poignant and at times satirical meditation on masculinity, fatherhood, isolation, New York City, fame, and loss, The Australian examines the human tendency to fall in love with the idea of another person and the importance of knowing one’s essential nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945814082
Publisher:	Dzanc Books
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	552 KB

About the Author

Emma Smith-Stevens’ writing has appeared in Subtropics, Conjunctions, Day One, Wigleaf, Joyland, and many other publications. She holds an MFA from the University of Florida and has taught fiction workshops, literature, and composition at the University of Florida and Santa Fe College in Gainesville, FL. Originally from New York City, she lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and their two dogs.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/01/2017
In her mesmerizing debut, Smith-Stevens reveals the inner life of a man who describes himself as “the patron saint of trying.” The first view of the titular character (who is never given a proper name) is in his Australian homeland, where he’s a young adult parading around as Superman—living in the skin of a superhero, lapping up tourist attention. After college graduation, he’s off to America, landing in Wall Street. The trajectory of his life bounces from one happenstance to the next—venture capitalism, dabbling with cocaine, meeting his future wife in a bar, making and losing a fortune, becoming obsessed with parkour, fathering a child, and becoming a reality TV star. Ever the seeker, he is shaped by a past with no father and a smothering mother. The author imbues the Australian’s constant search for himself with humor and depth while she delves into relationships of all stripes—between parents and children, between spouses, even among polyamorous partners—as well as the vagaries of fame, balancing the main character’s self-indulgence with his genuine need to connect with the people in his life. As the Australian returns to his homeland seeking hope, redemption, and happiness, readers are treated to a captivating and memorable journey. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"The Australian is an astute, often satirical look at self-actualization and what it means to be a man, partner, father and son. Smith-Stevens writes in a marvelously voyeuristic style.... The nameless man, both hero and no-hoper, is a poignant and pointed reflection of the imperfections that vex us all."
—Shelf Awareness

“It's startling to finish The Australian and remember that this is a first novel: It's so wry, clever, swift, and assured that the reader senses immediately that she's in skilled and sympathetic hands. What a seductive voice; what a smart and charming book! And, most of all, what a wonderful new writer we have in Emma Smith-Stevens.”
—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

“Emma Smith-Stevens unmans the titular Australian in The Australian with a quiet, wise, sure-footed humor that is seductive.”
—Padgett Powell, author of The Interrogative Mood

“There are some writers—and Emma Smith-Stevens happens to be one—who seem effortlessly able to fill the page with life. This chronicle of an extraordinarily ordinary seeker is all wit and wonder, so tolerant of human fallibility, so respectful of mystery and complexity, so disinclined to demarcate the heroic from the foolish. I admire this debut for its style and stance.”
—Chris Bachelder, author of The Throwback Special

"Smith-Stevens' evocation of alienation is often profound and her prose is always beautiful..."
—Kirkus Review

“One of the funniest (and smartest) debuts I have read in years.”
—Largehearted Boy

"Smith-Stevens writes with such a brilliant sense of language and humor, with such intelligent mystery and disarming intimacy, that the reader is compelled to follow the Australian in his absurd and moving journey through a baffling world, always wondering what could possibly happen next, until the character ultimately reaches a kind of transcendence. The Australian is an audacious debut novel."
—Michael Kimball, Big Ray

 "A picaresque for the twenty-first century - beguiling, funny, and inventive, intermittently sad and always beautiful."
—David Leavitt, The Two Hotel Francforts   

"The Australian is a sui generis mutation of the coming of age story that, like its protagonist, defies any easy categorization. Fueled by Smith-Stevens's trenchant eye, rollicking humor, and ceaselessly churning imagination, the book sweeps us along, bearing us into topographies that feel at once recognizable and remote, equipped only with a compass set in defamiliarize mode. The Australian himself comes to feel palpably alive, rendered in sinew and flesh but also achieving a kind of mythic grandeur—as does this superb debut."
—Tim Horvath, Understories

“The Australian by Emma Smith-Stevens proves that the picaresque will never die, not as long as there are characters like her titular, never-named fellow…Smith-Stevens keeps the irony coming even in the tenderest moments.” 

—Lit Hub

“A hilarious debut novel about a smiling, suntanned, backpack-wearing Australian (you know the type) and his search for meaning.” 

—Fiction Advocate

"A kind of picaresque novel, one that is charming, affecting, and funny in equal measure...a thoughtful meditation on masculinity, identity, and making a space for yourself in the world." 

—Black Warrior Review

From the Publisher

2017-03-12
An Australian man struggles to find himself.Titled after its unnamed hero, Smith-Stevens' first novel follows a directionless young Australian man in New York and Down Under. From his life as a recent college graduate working on Wall Street to his romance with the woman he later marries to his embrace of parkour to his years as an unemployed house-husband tending to his son and living off his unhappy wife's largesse, Smith-Stevens' protagonist shuffles through life as an isolated and passive observer. But his alienation has deeper roots. Estranged from his mother in Melbourne and suffering from the absence of the adventurer father he never met, the Australian has always been unsure of himself and his place in the world (as the reader comes to see through flashbacks). So when he finds out that his mother is sick, he returns to his boyhood home to tend to her in her final days, hoping to reconnect with not just homeland, but with himself. While Smith-Stevens' evocation of alienation is often profound and her prose is always beautiful, the novel seems to lack a sense of purpose. When the Australian remembers a childhood assignment to meditate on the concept of duende—a notoriously hard-to-translate Spanish word that the novel defines as "the spirit of evocation, soul, and creative expression"— it seems ironic, because it is the exact quality, namely the sense of a soul, that Smith-Stevens' frequently listless novel lacks. Throughout the entirety of the book, the Australian simply is, and while his motivations or interior life are always clear, he never really becomes more than the cipher that his name suggests. A protagonist—and a novel—without any real sense of purpose.

Kirkus Reviews