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Title: Is That All There Is?
Review: THE BOOK ALLEGEDLY won the award for best Australian book of 1991-it must have been a slow year... No matter how you try and dress it up with meaning and hyperbole, this is a book about an unemployed slacker having lots and lots of graphic loveless sex and getting drunk/high a lot. It gets pretty old pretty quick, and there's little to take from it. The subject of lost youth in the modern world has been vividly and effectively portrayed in Scotland by writers like Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, and in England and America in countless novels, McGahan seems to be striving for the same effect here, but it's not nearly as well written or interesting. The loser slacker protagonist (Gordon) is introduced in 1988, which has a lot less sex, and is slightly more interesting as a whole.
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