Help at last! Chris and I are very pleased to announce our very first addition to the LeafSalon team in the form of the rather spunky Louise Wareham (right), our new guest reviewer. Louise is a recently returned NZer who has lived in Sydney and New York. She graduated from Columbia University, then came back here to do the Manhire course in her native Wellington. She's just published her first novel, reviewed by Chris a week or two ago.

So without further ado: her first review is of The Linoleum Room by Katy Robinson. I'm off to the garden to glove up and sort out my big bad black taro. Ooh missus. Go, Louise:

According to the late American writer John Gardner (The Art of Fiction, Grendel), every writer has a tragedy in his childhood. His was the death of his younger brother, killed in a tractor accident when Gardner was 11, and at the wheel.

This thought kept coming to me as I read Katy Robinson’s The Linoleum Room (Vintage, 2005). The novel opens with twenty-something sibling Mia involved in a violent crime. When her family – which basically consists of three other part, full and step siblings – arrives for Christmas, you just know there’s going to be more violence. You know there’s a horrible secret somewhere.

Getting to it is a hard slog through the dark heart of one family’s ‘three o’clock in the morning’, realised here in a Christmas vacation. Robinson can definitely put a novel together. Linoleum Room is almost three hundred pages of steady prose. Though she isn’t a particularly lyrical writer, there are no amateur gaps, no uneven patches.

What there is, however, is a lot of young adult angst, rivalry and desperation. These young siblings are particularly fond of saying things to each other such as “f--- up,” “get f---ed,” “you dick … you stupid f---,” and “maybe we should just shut the f--- up”.

There is also a lot of bleeding. The youngest sibling, Emily, has cut marks on her wrist, Anabelle digs her fingernails into her skin until it bleeds, Mia ‘abrades’ her face against a gravel driveway, even boyfriend Tomas cuts himself with a glass. Meanwhile, everyone drinks a lot (which might actually be good, staving off infection).

Robinson is not shy of telling us that these kids are suffering. As Anabelle says:

I crawl up the steps on my knees, vaguely feel splinters and grind my knees into the wood, because I want them to bleed, I want them to bleed and bleed, because blood might mean something … Shit, my thought processes are nigh on genius with a bit of alcoholic assistance. (209)

It’s a little surprising – though not impossible - that none of the siblings seem to have discussed their common tragedy before. Their parents split up soon after, took on new partners, and basically seemed to have abandoned them. I kept hoping some one of them would show up and put an end to the carnage. But this would perhaps be an easy way out for Robinson. What these characters do to for each other is to stay together – and get a dog they name Dogma.

In the last scene – a mirror of their childhood tragedy – Robinson starts a fire that sets her up for comparison with Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry, or Peter Hedge’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. I had to wonder, though, if the flames are a sign of redemption? Would a phoenix rise from the ashes? Or were these siblings living more in the land of Beckett, pressing on and on, bandaging each other up between scenes?

I’m not sure I’d want to be stuck overnight with anyone in the Linoleum Room. I am pretty sure, however, that Robinson has more than another book in her. I look forward to seeing what she does next.