Three Dollars
By Elliot Perlman
Picador, 1998. 381 pp., $16.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/17345
For a few short years, Eddie and Tanya, fresh young husband and wife university graduates, seemed to be making their way through life securely and serenely.
In this first novel by Melbourne writer Elliot Perlman, Eddie works as a chemical engineer in the public service, Tanya is indignantly charting the decline of progressive political economics in her postgraduate research, their family has just gone nuclear with the birth of a daughter, and home ownership is a mere interview away — "there is something about a newly married man who has just been promoted and given a pay rise, however trifling, that makes bank managers want to stand up and sing the national anthem".
Hindsight, however, was to mock this rosy prospect — "this was the mid-eighties when people found it as easy to borrow money as they would find it to lose their homes a few years later". The marauding beasts of downsizing and unemployment lie in wait to snatch two more victims.
Eddie and Tanya's old uni friend, Paul, now a sanctimonious convert to economic rationalism, is unsentimental — "the days of public instrumentalities being havens for the inefficient are over", he declaims. "How else are we going to compete with Asia?", he moans, in his clichéd invoking of "it's all for the good of the country".
Tanya is the first victim of these reactionary economic nostrums, her contract not renewed, and Eddie soon follows. He had recently disappointed his superiors ("top people, mostly men, who had served the public so well and for so long that they were rewarded with the market value of my house every three months") by not showing the requisite degree of punching-the-air enthusiasm for the latest management fads such as mission statements.
Eddie then prepares a report recommending tighter pollution controls for a lead and zinc smelting development on recently privatised land, blissfully unaware of a confidential deal between the government and the company that no new pollution limits are to be set.
After Eddie obeys his social conscience and leaks his report, his immediate supervisor, Gerard (his wife's ex-boyfriend and "a dangerous escapee from a graduate school of business management"), wields the restructuring axe in an act of retribution.
Three quarters of the department's chemical engineers are to go. Eddie tries to adopt a low profile in the forlorn hope that "if nobody saw much of me ... then maybe they might just keep me on inadvertently ... Perhaps they were dismissing only the first seventy five per cent they saw?".
No such luck, of course, and Eddie and Tanya's world slowly heads towards disintegration.
Perlman's novel doesn't have any answers to all this. Tanya and Eddie are socially progressive but are politically inactive and therefore powerless. Tanya's candle of Keynesian economic reform flutters feebly in the gales of its more ruthless capitalist ideological rivals. Nowhere is a trade union to be seen.
What Perlman's novel does have, in spades, is indignation against the human effects of "restructuring", "downsizing" and the other horsemen of the economic apocalypse.
Much contemporary fiction does not engage with economic issues, their literary canvas reduced to self-absorbed explorations of the murkiest recesses of the human psyche or the unresolved Oedipal complexes of people for whom the world of jobs and mortgages may as well not exist. Perlman's characters are part of an all-too-real world, their hopes for love, fun, friendship, ideas, for useful work serving society, sadly suffering the slings and arrows of market forces fired at their flimsy fort of economic security.
Perlman is an exuberant new talent. He is a deft hand at humour, occasionally bittersweet; his dialogue sparkles, his fluid prose rarely flags. A welcome voice of humanity from the dark night of Kennett land.