AustLit

It would be almost redundant to note the strangeness of Shaun Prescott's debut full-length novel The Town, with each review of the novel to date—now including this one—emphasising the novel's purported oddity. These observations of eccentricity are not wholly surprising; major elements of the narrative seem purposefully estranged from any semblance of verisimilitude. Certainly the rhetorical positioning of the text encourages this reading, with the rear cover blurb describing the novel as a sequence of consecutive paradoxes: performances, absent audiences, services sans clients, pubs deprived of patrons (though not of beer). Indeed, one of the major plot points has the eponymous town literally disappearing, as it is consumed by inextricable holes that open up the fabric of the text's reality. A deeper consideration, however, reveals the fact that The Town very carefully constructs its inextricability through a fog of banality, shimmering with formal conventionality that undermines its ostensible abnormality. In the great rush to attribute oddity, what has been consistently overlooked is the sheer mundanity of much of the novel, which manifests in an ironic tension that causes The Town to straddle a fine line between gravity and levity.' (Introduction)