Foodies and fame

Ronnie Scott’s pandemic-inflected novel Morgan Nunan

Shirley

by Ronnie Scott Hamish Hamilton $32.99 pb, 292 pp

The unnamed narrator of Ronnie Scott’s second novel, Shirley, is a socially engaged thirty-something foodie from Melbourne’s inner north. She works as an internal copywriter for a health insurance company. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of the vegan-friendly bars and eateries within a fivekilometre radius of her small apartment in trendy Collingwood. She also cooks: scrambled tofu and vegan chorizo soup; Korean vegan pancakes and Cantonese soy sauce noodles; pan-fried gnocchi with blended basil and gochujang. She might wash these down with a glass of wine or whisky, or even a michelada, followed by the occasional menthol cigarette. She has been confined to her apartment alone for 262 cumulative days of lockdown (‘and the wild, long days that have fallen between them’), imposed by the Victorian government to curtail Covid-19. She also happens to be the daughter of a celebrity.

Until the age of fourteen, the narrator was raised by her single mother (then ‘a late-nineties fixture of morning and lifestyle TV’) and an entourage of assistants whom the narrator nicknamed ‘the Geralds’ after the longest serving member of staff, a seemingly ageless business-manager-cum-butler. After the mother was ‘papped’ wearing a blood-soaked coat outside her Abbotsford home (the novel takes its title from the name of the house), she left her teen daughter to the care of ‘the main Gerald’ and the rest of the staff were terminated. Moving abroad, the mother eventually landed a gig hosting an international celebrity cooking show called (fittingly) Chef on the Run, from then on styling herself as an ‘e-parent’ to her daughter.

Almost two decades later, from the vantage point of post-lockdown Melbourne, the narrator reflects on the moveable relationships that wound and unravelled during the 2019–20 Australian summer, when megafires served as an entrée to the global pandemic. There is the ex-boyfriend David, an acid-tripping hospitality worker. While they are still a couple, David surprises the narrator by leasing the apartment next door, then a further surprise comes when he begins pursuing men. The slightly awkward dynamic in the apartment block following their breakup is heightened by the addition of two new residents: Frankie (‘the famous condiment maven’ who happens to be David’s boss), and her partner of convenience, Alex, a self-proclaimed ‘gigolo’, paid by Frankie to father their unborn child. Frankie enjoys the words ‘high’ and ‘drugs’, but her favourite word is surely ‘boss’, which she and her business partner (the similarly ‘famous’ Abi Zhong) wield as a cherished identity marker. Abi’s child also happens to be fathered by Alex. As ‘food entrepreneurs’, both Frankie and Abi are fans of the narrator’s mother. They (along with, it seems, the nation) are dying to know more about the circumstances of the television icon’s scandalous exit from the country all those years ago; circumstances that become the novel’s chief mystery. In passages where Scott flirts with a departure from his mildly grungy realism, the narrator hints (via dreams and flashes of memory) at an elusive confrontation in the basement of the mother’s now infamous home.

Scott is a perceptive and assured writer. His first novel, The Adversary (2020) followed Salad Days (2014), a long-form essay exploring contemporary food culture. With Shirley, Scott’s spare, compulsively neat prose bears stylistic resemblances to writers like Rachel Cusk and Elizabeth Strout. The latter’s My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) has a comparably detached first-person narrator and shares several thematic concerns (complex mother–daughter relationships; the legacies of familial estrangement, childhood trauma, and loneliness), while also involving a period of confinement and a pandemic. Yet Shirley is a decidedly funnier novel. By incorporating a mischievous deadpan humour, albeit one inflected with the battle-weariness that follows lockdown, Scott maintains interest even when some narrative events pale as lower stakes or commonplace.

As with his first novel, Scott has a precise ear for millennial banter and is particularly skilled at representing group social dynamics (house parties and music festivals; run-ins with neighbours and office drinks). He is acutely alert to undercurrents in contemporary life: the unreality of fame, the internet and ecological disaster, the subtle flexes of social standing. In the shadow of celebrity and its muddying effect on people’s motives, Scott’s narrator is in search of something more solid. This is explored most compellingly in the novel’s emphasis on food.

In ‘foodie discourse’, write the authors of Foodies: Democracy and distinction in the gourmet foodscape (2010), authenticity is ‘one of the primary characteristics that foodies use for making culinary choices’, while also being used by some ‘to facilitate status distinctions’. From this perspective, the novel’s elaborate ingredients lists and cooking instructions are anything but gratuitous. Rivalling Ernest Hemingway’s similarly restrained posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986) for its gastronomic detail, Shirley builds on issues addressed by Scott in Salad Days: the interplay of food habits and class; the competing ethics of consumption. In a unique representation of the slippery nature of authenticity, the novel pits the narrator’s humble, open-minded cooking hobby against the opportunism of those around her (neither her mother nor Frankie were cooks until it meant money and status). Yet it is often the narrator who insists on signalling her ‘class knowledge’, as well as her connection to fame (she relentlessly identifies her mother’s house by its famous name, despite the unwanted attention her mother’s profile often brings).

In Shirley, the pandemic becomes incubator for the narrator’s largely psychological journey; a nuanced maturation that slides between cringey and comic; touching and mundane. Ultimately, it is Scott’s attentiveness to language and contemporary culture that proves most engaging. g