VICTORIA HANNAN Marshmallow. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Victoria Hannan’s second novel is a study of friendships under pressure.

After the success of her debut, Kokomo, in 2020, Victoria Hannan’s second novel is another study of friendship. Its five characters have been friends since university. They are now in their thirties and each is grappling with a pre mid-life but post first-flush weariness. But this weariness is not ennui; through their shifting points of view, Hannan brings us their shared sorrow.

Marshmallow lays out the raw pain of grief and its weight, its pervasiveness, its ‘inconvenience’ and, piercingly, its loneliness. There has been a tragedy that has impacted all five of them, and Hannan brings a rippling tension from the first page. She also plants decoys cleverly. Marshmallow opens with Al. He is alone. ‘The absence of Claire was the absence of noise too.’ Who is Claire, and why is she gone? We tread on eggshells following Al and Claire, seeing what they see, ready to raise our guards to protect them, to protect ourselves.

At first, Al, Claire, Nathan, Annie and Ev are like dodgem cars at a funfair. Hemmed in by their experience, they bump, recoil, swerve and crash. Impact is inevitable, though they are desperate to avoid it, and to avoid each other. Where Nathan is hollowed out, his grief opaque, Al snarls, biting; his grief is hungry. He feeds it, poring over websites and news stories, whipping it. He reprises his role and seeks absolution, only to reject it.

He flicked back and forth between the Facebook page and articles about the little boy. Two tragic events. The smiling faces of two kids he’d loved. Two kids he’d lost. He heard Zahra’s voice in his head: Not your fault. Not your fault. He repeated it to himself again and again, in her voice, in his. He screamed it. 

Hannan shows the slipperiness of trauma, its Houdini-like talent to reform elsewhere, our inability to see it clearly.  ‘Nathan didn’t understand, couldn’t see the threads Al had strung between pieces of evidence in his mind.’ Grief slows thinking, muddies actions, sets up false flags; it demands.

Ev is also finely drawn. Generous, clear-headed, self-aware — a bulwark. She cares for each of them, yet fights off loneliness.

Sometimes she tried to tell herself that it was impossible to feel lonely when surrounded by so much outside noise. That there were people everywhere. Loneliness was a state of mind. That she didn’t need someone … The affirmations on rotation in her mind like hits on a commercial radio station.

When you live with grief, it colonises the other parts of your life — work, love, family.  Hannan plays this exquisitely. She imparts each character’s details sparingly, only when needed; they are secondary.

As she did in Kokomo, Hannan invites us to think about hidden lives. Al visits his father, Hadid, once a loving, ‘generous’ man. Now he lives in a small flat, the shadow of a psych ward in his past. Al opens cupboards, replenishes the meagre supplies. They have nothing to say to each other. This man in the grey jumper filled with holes — what is his story?

Unlike grief, it is possible to outrun love. Claire wonders what it would be like to be free of the weight of Al’s pain. She has her own grief, and is practised at running away. And Nathan’s parents, wealthy and powerful, are estranged.  Alone in her palatial home, his mother sits with her pride. Her gay daughter has been reluctantly readmitted but her daughter’s child has not.

Hannan’s gift for observation is present from the novel’s very first words. As Al struggles to focus, he stills his breath; in the silence of that space, he can focus. Ev wakes, ‘sweaty between her boobs’, wiping herself with her pajamas. A lemon, its zest scraped off, sits in a fruit bowl; eye-level with a crotch on the train, a corporate ID pass, complete with bad photo, discloses credentials.

If there is one shortcoming, it is an occasional surfeit of words that was not in Kokomo. Hannan will sometimes set a scene to perfection then add a pointer the reader does not need. The shock of Cherie’s homophobia becomes clear by her words, the commentary superfluous; Ev’s wistfulness on the beach is exquisitely rendered without telling us her thoughts.

But these instances are few and may be attributable to Hannan’s own pain; she wrote Marshmallow in the wake of her mother’s death. In the letter accompanying the advance proof, she discloses that her grief found release in her characters’ lives but, in writing, she also laid herself open. That vulnerability has produced a perceptive novel; it is only when her characters are able to see the loss, and to see the shape of their lives after, can there be some release from pain.

Marshmallow’s themes are sombre but it is impossible not to see Hannan entreating us to run to love, railing against the folly of excluding its joy when life is short.

Victoria Hannan Marshmallow Hachette 2022 PB $29.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

You can buy Marshmallow from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia.

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Tags: Australian fiction, Australian women writers, Kokomo, Victoria | Hannan