There’s a truly good novel fighting to get out and Grubisic clearly has the eye, ear and mind to make a great storyteller.

Debut novels are like first dates; they can go either way. Sometimes they zip along effortlessly, bristling with life and energy, with a satisfying conclusion for all concerned. Other times they clunk awkwardly, juddering and spluttering in clock-watching slo-mo, without a decent climax in sight.

Brett Josef Grubisic’s first foray into fiction-writing falls disappointingly into the doesn’t-quite-deliver-the-goods category. I use the caveat ‘quite’ because there’s still plenty to recommend The Age Of Cities despites its shortcomings.

The narrative device here is complex. Written in fragments with a prologue, two epilogues and two appendices, it’s essentially a book within a book within a book. Still with me? Mmm…

The main narrative, a third-person account told by an anonymous author, is discovered by a graduate student in a hollowed-out home economics book in a second-hand bookshop. The student takes it to a Professor A.X. Palios who, in an afterword, attempts to assemble the manuscript’s pieces, trying to place them within the grand literary canon and how it portrays the gay-repressed 1950s.

He sees the book as an unearthed artifact, an incomplete time capsule completely of its period. Its nearly-brave author recounts his story in the only ways open to him in a very closed era so couldn’t jack the narrative with any real eroticism or sensuality. Significantly, he decides not to give his novel an ending. Grubisic offers up the stories of his characters in loops and swirls with deliberately self-conscious cleverness and nudge-nudge, wink-wink knowingness, ultimately leaving the reader to decide what really happens.

Confused? Me, too! Jilly Cooper it ain’t, but that in itself shouldn’t be a complete black mark against it. The concept is interesting and giving the old grey cells workout isn’t the worst way to spend your time, but Grubisic seems to sporadically lose authorly control of its execution. When he’s writing about the manuscript and that strand of the story, he works his plot and characters confidently so much so you do actually care about what happens to them and what makes them tick.

But when he starts doing his Russian Doll trick with the narrative, you end up questioning whether he’s writing the book for his own amusement or his audience’s. It just becomes too over-archingly complicated to the point I started to think I was The World’s Greatest Thicko, as I had to reread sentences and sometimes even pages to get their gist. And I did English Lit at Uni, for Chrissakes.

As layer upon layer of conceit is added you feel less engaged in the novel and more intimidated and infuriated by it, which surely isn’t the point of any book no matter how well-written or thought-prodding it may be. It becomes too look-at-me po-mo and pleased with itself and, most worryingly of all, begins to feels like homework.

It’s not surprising, then, that Grubisic’s day job is as an English professor and ironically this is probably what handcuffs his prose. Too often you feel he’s scholarly grandstanding, standing back admiring his words like Grade-A teachers’ pets and giving them Gold Stars. His style can be elegant and wonderfully flowing but the narrative’s convoluted concepts mire it in confusion and academic cockiness.

Frustratingly, there’s a truly good novel fighting to get out and  Grubisic clearly has the eye, ear and mind to make a great storyteller. He simply needs to rein himself in.

However, a novel without a climax is something I’m never likely to get on board with. Sadly - and predictably - I need a money-shot.

The Age Of Cities, by Brett Josef Grubisic
Published by: Arsenal Pulp Press
Released: 28 June 2007
ISBN: 1551522128

Buy Josef Grubisic’s Age Of Cities, online and save some money or why not try Contra-diction or Carnel Nation also by this author.