The Man In The Shed
by Lloyd Jones
Penguin, $37
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

It was always going to be a challenge for Lloyd Jones to follow up his last novel, the Booker-nominated Mr Pip. Anything he produced would be scrutinised, compared and expected to garner the same amount of global literary glory. In many ways The Man In The Shed is a rather bogus follow-up. It’s a collection of short stories, some of them rather old and published previously in other books or anthologies. The common theme running through them is families and relationships, in particular inadequate men and faithless wives. There is some extraordinary public sex, repeated metaphors of the sea, many poignancies and keen observations. Although the stories aren’t formally linked they share the same tone.

Jones’ writing has a sense of effortless fluency about it. His prose is never overdone. He specialises in small images that say so much. In Dogs for example a man says of his wife: “She had a way of making anger rise from her shoulders”. And sometimes he’ll pinpoint a truth so exactly that you’re left thinking, ah yes that’s how feels, that’s how it is. Like the boy in the title story, The Man In The Shed who suddenly grasps how time can sneak away on you as he avoids his backyard and his mother’s mysterious lover who has taken up residence there: “I became estranged from those things that had one been such a big part of me – the racquet and tennis ball, the shed too, which had once housed a pet sheep. These things were turning into memories. For the first time I was seeing how time sorted the world into current and past”.

There is nothing at all wrong with these quirky stories. They sit well together in an anthology, they say a lot about life. There is black humour in a short piece called Still Lives where a group of guys caught up in a traffic jam end up having to deal with a dead motorist. There are elements we may recognise from our own families in pieces like What We Normally Do On a Sunday, Swimming to Australia and Broken Machinery.

These vignettes are the work of one of our most capable writers and it shows. And yet there’s something disappointing about the collection. It’s like being given a bag of mandarins by Santa when what you asked for was chocolates.
Jones is currently at work on a novel that will be the true follow up to Mr Pip. This book seems more of a stocking filler to keep us going in the meantime
Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino, in addition to being a succcesful author of popular fiction, (her latest The Italian Wedding was published in May this year), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above review was first published on 6 September.