The big, communal households of 1970s Melbourne have long gone. Now, Janet slopes around her run-down house, working hard to forget the noise and happiness it once contained. There are doors she can’t bear to open, walls she can’t bear to paint – and then there are the lodgers moving into its rooms. Ray, a born-again Christian, hides from his own dark past in the pages of his little black book. But Maxine, ecstatic about spells, auras and angels, has been looking for a sign – and reckons Ray must be it. As the three settle down together, eating separately and randomly and failing to live as a real household, a strange balance of forces begins to wash over Janet’s home. First published in 1992, Cosmo Cosmolino is a carefully structured book about wildly unstructured lives from one of Australia’s greatest writers. A rich, radical work of three linked stories, it asks how we find meaning in art, faith, home and each other.
