I don't often write about books I haven't finished, but it's warranted when it comes to books by the late Frank Moorhouse...

Like many, I 'discovered' Frank Moorhouse through his Edith Trilogy, and though only Cold Light (2011) is reviewed here, obviously I liked its predecessors Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2001) more than enough to buy and read my way through those very long books. (Both of those are 678 pages long; Cold Light is 719 pages. And you can read more about them at Brona's Edith Readalong pages.) So when Moorhouse died, I had a spending spree to buy up as many of his earlier books as I could find, and when there was news of two (!) forthcoming biographies, I set my Moorhouse books aside to read my way through them.

I read and enjoyed The Electrical Experience (1974), but had some misgivings about Forty-Seventeen (1988). By then I had a copy of Frank Moorhouse, A Life (2023) by Catharine Lumby and had learned from that that his work and life were, in some of his stories, clearly entangled, and that the novella Forty-Seventeen was one of those where his life and work were juxtaposed. As I wrote in my review, it felt transgressive to read a narrative about a man turning forty who is having a sexual relationship with a girl of seventeen.

That is, a semi-autobiographical narrative about an older man and a teenager...

Well, The Everlasting Secret Family made me feel more uneasy, so much so that I have read only the first of its four short stories: 'Pacific City'; 'The Dutch Letters', 'Imogene Continued', and 'The Everlasting Secret Family'. 'Pacific City' is about a cinema proprietor in a country town whose secret is that he is attracted to children, and acts on it. It's not explicit but it is more than distasteful. It mocks the parents who come to complain about teenagers necking in the cinema darkness while the proprietor wonders which of their children he has 'pleasured'.

I now also have a copy of Matthew Lamb's Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths (2023), so I got that out only to discover that it doesn't have an index! (Bizarre! What kind of LitBio doesn't have an index so that we can come back to it any time to find references to the books??) I only scanned through its 460 pages for content about TESF so I can't be sure, but I didn't find anything because it's only Vol 1 of two volumes and it stops at 1975...

So, back to Catharine Lumby's bio, where I read about an academic's enthusiasm for TESF despite it being 'deeply unsettling' which she usually associates with 'the really extraordinary female writers'...

TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/29/the-everlasting-secret-family-1980-by-frank-...

I don't rate books I haven't finished.

Within Frank Moorhouse's four stories in The Everlasting Secret Family, each complete in itself but together creating a reverberating atmosphere and the suggestion of unrevealed connections, there are all manner of intriguing secrets. The stories abound with secret brotherhood, with foreigners defying all attempts at assimilation, with strangers whose only real identification marks are the secrets they carry. And they're still as shocking and thought-provoking today as they were when they were first published nearly thirty years ago.