By Kerryn Goldsworthy
Wild Gestures
Lucy Durneen
Wild Gestures, by Lucy Durneen.
Midnight Sun, $24.99
Lucy Durneen's choice to publish her first collection of stories with the Adelaide publisher Midnight Sun is a coup for the publisher not because Durneen is British but because she is an excellent writer, with a gift for the matching of word and mood, and an unflinching awareness of human weakness and frailty that she never allows to deteriorate into mere smart bitchiness or affected pessimism. Her characters are the dubious, the disappointed, and the unwell, struggling to find solutions or solace. These are tales of love affairs that fail, of gamblers who lose, of desperate people ruthlessly making use of other people and rendering them desperate in their turn. The one serious weakness is the speed with which the different narrators begin to sound like each other and, one suspects, like Durneen herself.