'Community radio host Ciara receives dozens of unmarked cassette recordings every week and broadcasts them to a listenership of none. Ex-musician Tom drives an impractical bus that no one ever boards. Publican Jenny runs a hotel that has no patrons. Rick wanders the aisles of the Woolworths every day in an attempt to blunt the disappointment of adulthood.
'In a town of innumerable petrol stations, labyrinthine cul-de-sac streets, two competing shopping plazas, and ubiquitous drive-thru franchises, where are the townsfolk likely to find the truth about their collective past – and can they do so before the town disappears?
'Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town follows an unnamed narrator’s efforts to complete a book about disappeared towns in the Central West of New South Wales. Set in a yet-to-disappear town in the region—a town believed by its inhabitants to have no history at all—the novel traces its characters’ attempts to carve their own identities in a place that is both unyielding and teetering on the edge of oblivion.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'At the 2003 Ecohealth Conference in Montreal, Australian scholar Glenn Albrecht introduced the term ‘solastalgia’ to refer to a particular form of psychological distress, one that is environmentally induced. Expanding upon the concept in 2007, Albrecht and colleagues defined solastalgia as being the painful “lived experience of the physical desolation of home” (96), and it is thus, as they note, a psychoterratic illness, one in which the psyche suffers due to its relationship with the earth.' (Publication abstract)
'From Patrick White’s Voss to Tim Winton’s Breath, white, male Australian novelists have reproduced the hero character through sexualised conquests of other bodies and spaces.' (Introduction)
'Shaun Prescott worries he will wake up and discover the success of his debut novel, The Town , is just an existential dream, he tells Mandy Sayer
'When I finished reading Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town I was naturally curious about the author, whose book jacket biography is unusually brief: he lives in the Blue Mountains and has had a few short pieces previously published in literary magazines.' (Introduction)
It would be almost redundant to note the strangeness of Shaun Prescott's debut full-length novel The Town, with each review of the novel to date—now including this one—emphasising the novel's purported oddity. These observations of eccentricity are not wholly surprising; major elements of the narrative seem purposefully estranged from any semblance of verisimilitude. Certainly the rhetorical positioning of the text encourages this reading, with the rear cover blurb describing the novel as a sequence of consecutive paradoxes: performances, absent audiences, services sans clients, pubs deprived of patrons (though not of beer). Indeed, one of the major plot points has the eponymous town literally disappearing, as it is consumed by inextricable holes that open up the fabric of the text's reality. A deeper consideration, however, reveals the fact that The Town very carefully constructs its inextricability through a fog of banality, shimmering with formal conventionality that undermines its ostensible abnormality. In the great rush to attribute oddity, what has been consistently overlooked is the sheer mundanity of much of the novel, which manifests in an ironic tension that causes The Town to straddle a fine line between gravity and levity.' (Introduction)
'Shaun Prescott worries he will wake up and discover the success of his debut novel, The Town , is just an existential dream, he tells Mandy Sayer
'When I finished reading Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town I was naturally curious about the author, whose book jacket biography is unusually brief: he lives in the Blue Mountains and has had a few short pieces previously published in literary magazines.' (Introduction)
'The Town is Shaun Prescott’s full-length fiction debut and the sophomore novel from The Lifted Brow – the avant-garde Australian literary mag that, since moving into trade publishing last year, has championed writers whose ideas and execution run against the grain of commercial literary trends. Take this book: a deep dive into weirdness that reads like a blend of Donald Horne and García Márquez – although it contains little of the magic realist’s joie de vivre. Call it magical fatalism.' (Introduction)
'Shaun Prescott’s début novel shares obvious conceptual territory with the fiction of Franz Kafka and Gerald Murnane, both of whom are mentioned in its promotional material. As with The Castle (1926) and The Plains (1982), The Town recounts the dreamlike experiences and observations of an enigmatic narrator–protagonist after he arrives in an unnamed town. But unlike Kafka’s surveyor or Murnane’s filmmaker, Prescott’s narrator is a writer who claims to be researching ‘a book about the disappearing towns in the Central West region of New South Wales’. These towns ‘had not deteriorated economically, its residents had not flocked to the closest regional towns in search of work, the buildings had not been dismantled’. Instead, they had ‘simply disappeared’. When this project fails, he decides to write a history of the town he now lives in, in the hope of uncovering its ‘essence’.' (Introduction)
'Riffing off authors such as Gerald Murnane, Shaun Prescott builds an idiosyncratic vision that is simultaneously banal and powerfully moving. The Town is the debut novel of this short fiction writer from the NSW Blue Mountains. The narrator comes to an unnamed NSW country town to work part-time while writing a book on the disappearing towns of central-western NSW. He finds share accommodation with Rob in a townhouse and a job stacking shelves at the local Woolworths.' (Introduction)
'There are three modes in which most stories about Australia’s regional towns can be categorised: horror (‘New to the ‘Yabba?’); affectionate satire (‘Goodbye, Porpoise Spit!’); and that particular nostalgia we cultivate for small-town life, a Wintonesque keening for place and belonging for which there seems to be no cure.' (Introduction)
It would be almost redundant to note the strangeness of Shaun Prescott's debut full-length novel The Town, with each review of the novel to date—now including this one—emphasising the novel's purported oddity. These observations of eccentricity are not wholly surprising; major elements of the narrative seem purposefully estranged from any semblance of verisimilitude. Certainly the rhetorical positioning of the text encourages this reading, with the rear cover blurb describing the novel as a sequence of consecutive paradoxes: performances, absent audiences, services sans clients, pubs deprived of patrons (though not of beer). Indeed, one of the major plot points has the eponymous town literally disappearing, as it is consumed by inextricable holes that open up the fabric of the text's reality. A deeper consideration, however, reveals the fact that The Town very carefully constructs its inextricability through a fog of banality, shimmering with formal conventionality that undermines its ostensible abnormality. In the great rush to attribute oddity, what has been consistently overlooked is the sheer mundanity of much of the novel, which manifests in an ironic tension that causes The Town to straddle a fine line between gravity and levity.' (Introduction)
