What The Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam, Sleepers Publishing, $24.95.
There’s something fresh and engaging about Steven Amsterdam’s writing — a lightness of touch with some of life’s more troubling human scenarios sprinkled with a frisson of other worldliness; in this instance the idea that we may all have a special power that could reveal itself when we least expect it.
This is the Melbourne-based author’s second novel and like his 2009 debut Things We Didn’t see Coming is packed to the brim with fascinating ideas that play on your mind and characters so vivid they seem to leap from the page.
The tale opens with Ruth descending on her sister Natalie’s house with kids Ben and Giordana in tow having abandoned her husband — and this time for good.
From there we immediately experience the scene through 15-year-old Giordana’s eyes, who at first sees her cousins’ suburban ordered home as a place of normalcy but soon discovers there’s no such thing.
“Tell me which you want: to be able to fly or to be invisible,” poses her precocious and slightly disconcerting cousin, seven-year-old Alek. “Can I walk through things?” replies Giordana. “Yes, but you can’t steal stuff, like from the bank,” comes the reply.
Soon Giordana is developing her special power and using it to gain an insight into her family’s world.
Each chapter increases our knowledge of this sprawling family unit through a different character’s eyes and also at a different time during a 30-year period.
En route each character unlocks their own special power. Giordana’s father — a disgruntled stay-at-home dad unable to find employment — literally soars above his world when he discovers he can fly while Giordana’s mother Ruth, a nurse, hears people’s inner thoughts — including those of a dying patient.
It’s a magical concept that doesn’t necessarily enrich the characters’ lives but does add an out of body dimension and sense of playfulness to this deep study of the tensions dividing and binding family life. Steven Amsterdam is definitely a new talent worth watching.
About the author: Steven Amsterdam
Born in New York City, the son of a literary agent mum — “who taught me much but did not sell my book,” — and a city planner dad, Steven Amsterdam, 45, always had a yen for writing.
In 2003 he moved to Melbourne where he divides his time between writing and palliative care nursing. “Nursing impacts my writing,” he says. “The whole strangeness of being briefly but intimately involved in people’s lives exposes me to all sorts of behaviour.”
His first book, Things We Didn’t See Coming won The Age Book of the Year in 2009, was shortlisted for the 2010 NSW Premier’s Prize, and long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award in the UK.
The inspiration for What The Family Needed, says Steven, came from “…several stay-at-home dads I knew who weren’t quite getting along with their working wives, largely because they didn’t have jobs. The question came: what if one of them discovered he could fly?”
And so a recognisable but magical world was created.
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