Book Review
The Casuals
by Sally Breen
by Jo Case, Aug 2011
The Casuals has been blurbed as Generation X’s version of Puberty Blues. Like Sally, I was born in 1975, and grew up in an outer suburb where ‘new estates explode out of the bushland like instant Lego lands’, so was particularlycurious. Like the Puberty Blues authors, Breen captures the zeitgeist of her generation. The cultural references hit the mark – catching tadpoles in buckets from local creeks, sleepovers watching John Hughes movies on video, proud ownership of ‘boom boxes with double-decker tapes’, ra-ra skirts and white denim jackets. And Breen similarly captures the essence of awkward, painfully uncertain adolescence – the importance of ‘tribes’ (‘for a high school kid, not having a group is terror’), the suppression of self in order to fit in, and, most resonantly, the secondary role of desire when it comes to relationships and sexuality.
‘When gangs of girls begin negotiations with gangs of guys it’s more about power than desire,’ she writes of her reluctant first kiss, in year five. That link seems to continue, from early crushes on seemingly unavailable boys as a teen, to a series of ill-fated encounters with rock stars, and a live-in affair with her university lecturer. Perhaps themen in her life never live up to her idolised, six-foot-something charismatic father, with his ‘movie star style’, his legendary drinking capacity and his commitment to keeping the lawns meticulously edged.
An underlying tone of nostalgia tinged with melancholy reflects Breen’s sadness about her father’s loss, to cancer, when she was in her twenties – and John Breen is a huge presence in these pages. The Casuals is, on one integral level, a daughter’s love letter to her father. It’s also an absorbing coming-of-age; fellow Gen-Xers will enjoy the trip down memory lane, and find much to recognise.
Jo Case is editor of Readings Monthly.
