Reviewed: Losing Face, George Haddad, UQP
Nineteen-year-old Joey’s fatal flaw is inertia. He floats around Western Sydney, working at Woolies and feeling ambivalent about the ‘wrong guys’ he hangs out with. His lethargy is apparent from the first page of George Haddad’s Losing Face, when he asks ‘for extra chilli in his bánh mì because it numbed his mouth and he liked numbness’. He finishes the roll, then lobs the scrunched-up paper bag into the tray of a parked ute; he can’t be bothered walking to a rubbish bin.
People and circumstance seem to reinforce this attitude. ‘I never thought I would give birth to such an annoying son,’ his mother Amal says. ‘You’re useless,’ complains his friend Emma, who to Joey appears so much more purpose-oriented. ‘He felt like he’d been placed on the damaged rack in the back dock whenever Emma spoke […]. Surely he’d been born to never have an interest in anything.’ It’s this inertia that comes to bite Joey when he fails to act at a key moment, making him complicit in an event of sexual violence perpetrated by a group of his friends, and around which the novel then orbits.
Haddad very thoughtfully—almost languidly—establishes people and events in the lead up to and aftermath of Joey’s arrest. And its dynamics and repercussions are parsed through multiple perspectives. Besides Joey, every second chapter is narrated by his Tayta, Elaine, an unsentimental matriarch with a semi-secret pokies habit that can either inject life with small moments of victory or make daily essentials unaffordable. Elaine’s inner world is also quite private, and she moves through a variety of maternal roles that she feels have been carved out for her by other people—her children and grandchildren, following on from roles delegated by father, husband and village. But Joey’s arrest sparks an acute, embodied disgust and humiliation in her. And while she ‘very delicately’ ‘cradle[s] the idea’ that her grandson will be safe, her ‘red hot’ rage is shot through with a migrant widow’s lifetime of fury and disappointment with men.
Elaine’s almost traumatic reaction suggest how the things we call ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘rape culture’ have a long history. Losing Face is framed by an ancient myth about a djinn that terrorises the mothers and children of Arab families living in the desert when the men are away. The women call her ‘Ma’raka’, ‘the Battle’. They forge a pact with her, Ma’raka agreeing to leave them alone in exchange for ‘the manhood’ of the young boys. It’s a potent metaphor about what people will do in the face of fear in order to survive or to get a moment’s peace; it gestures to what men lack, what women know about it, and how guarded we can all be about those dynamics. In Haddad’s Ma’raka myth, the young men never grow beards or learn how to herd cattle. ‘Even when the confused young men had to be led through the desert […] The women never said a word.’
A wave of Australian films since the late ’90s (such as The Boys, Snowtown and Animal Kingdom) have explored the group dynamics of masculinity and coercion, though with a tendency to focus on extraordinary examples of white male violence through a lens of horror, fascination and repulsion. Losing Face contributes to a more nuanced set of recent literary portrayals of masculinity and male violence in the context of rich and realistic everyday experiences shaped by the contingencies of neighbourhoods, local histories of migration and undulating social stratifications of race, class and sexuality. It wasn’t surprising to discover that Haddad was steeped in the work of Raewyn Connell (‘hegemonic masculinity’), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (‘male homosociality’) and Elspeth Probyn (the affective dynamics of shame) while writing his debut novel. But if the book’s sensitive portrayal of Australian masculinities is informed by the insights of queer and feminist theory, it wears these influences lightly, never feeling didactic or schematic.
Losing Face offers a further twist to these conversations via Joey’s queerness. Although one of the seemingly quieter aspects of the novel, it too emerges as sticky and unresolved. Is his burgeoning desire for men a secret alibi that makes him ‘less culpable’? Is it a source of optimism, a salve for this apathy? Either way, when it comes to gender-based violence, being queer doesn’t get you off the hook. Although sexuality, race and socioeconomic status may place men in positions of subordination to other men, as Connell’s concept of the ‘patriarchal dividend’ suggests, all men are rewarded for their participation in gender orders. Elaine delivers a particularly excoriating view on the matter when she declares that, deep down, all men view women as weaker ‘no matter what they like to fuck—women, other men, goats’. ‘And this is why’, she declares, in one of the more forceful of the novel’s ‘verdicts’, that ‘all around the world, men are always doing shit to women in carparks’.
Dion Kagan is a critic and academic researcher in the Gender, Law and Drugs program at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University. He is the author of Positive Images: Gay Men and the Culture of ‘Post-Crisis’.
