A History of the Beanbag and Other Stories (Susan Midalia, UWA Press, $24.95 pb, ISBN 97800980296501, October) ***

It’s great to see a resurgence of Australian short story collections being published by smaller publishing houses. Recently, both Cate Kennedy’s Dark Roots (Scribe) and Paddy O’Reilly’s The End of the World (UQP) have been published to critical acclaim. UWA Press has entered the fray with Susan Midalia’s A History of the Beanbag. Midalia likes to take a broad statement or question and use it as a springboard to explore intimate experiences. The history of the beanbag, for example, from the eponymous opening story, is used as a framework upon which to hang
the sweep of two women’s lives from a share house in the early 1970s through to middle age at the turn of the century. In Freeze Frame, a girl’s realisation that the world is a more dangerous place than she ever thought is transposed upon a visit to the cinema with her sister and her lover and the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the movie changes from black and white to colour. Though Midalia’s subject matter and plot construction are engaging enough for literary readers, these stories lack the elegance of expression that successful short stories require. There
is, unfortunately, not enough space for situations and characters to reveal themselves successfully.

Shane Strange is a bookseller at Riverbend Books

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker