'A story about sexuality, the ache of friendship and love, and sticky summers at the pool, this exhilarating debut novel captures the heartbeat of one transformative summer where alliances are made and broken.
'‘I was an agent of Dan, a captive of his, really. I went where he wanted me, and did as he wanted, and for a long time, in this way, I was happy.’
'It’s been a long winter in a creaky house in Brunswick, where a young man has devoted himself to recreational showers, staring at his phone, and speculating on the activities of his best friend and housemate, Dan. But now summer is coming, and Dan has found a boyfriend and a job, so the young man is being pushed out into the world, in search of friendship and love.
'The Adversary is a sticky summer novel about young people exploring their sexuality and their sociability, where everything smells like sunscreen and tastes like beer, but affections and alliances have consequences. It asks what kinds of stories are possible – or desirable – for which kinds of friendships, and what happens when you follow those stories to their natural conclusions.' (Publication summary)
'The 2017 Marriage Law Postal Survey marked a historic moment for the gay community in Australia, as it resulted in same-sex unions being recognised under law. For novelists, this historic change served as the impetus to re-evaluate the position of gay men as queer subjectivity became more articulable through the market and was no longer excluded from the social mainstream or, in Marxist terminology, totality. This presents a challenge: how do writers dispense with outdated taxonomies of oppression, while still identifying the unique ways in which those who exist along axes of sexual difference continue to be exploited and oppressed? This article examines The Pillars (2019) by Peter Polites and The Adversary (2020) by Ronnie Scott to identify ways in which this nascent dimension of gay life is being depicted in fiction, arguing that gay fiction in Australia can meaningfully represent, and critique, its relation to capitalism. ' (Publication abstract)
'The highly anticipated first novel from founding editor of The Lifted Brow, Ronnie Scott.'
'Reading Ronnie Scott’s (of The Listed Brow esteem) debut novel ‘The Adversary’ struck me with its wistful immediacy. A kind of sentimentality that made me simultaneously longing and repellent for my days of inner-city sharehouse living, in all its messy, hellish finitude. Yet, it was the complicated politics of gay friendship and companionships that were intriguing as they were foreign to me (as a sedentary, hetero-homebody) that kept my mind occupied until long after it had drawn its conclusions.' (Introduction)
Live Recording : Ronnie Scott on The Adversary
Chris Somerville
(interviewer),
2020
23470280
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Ronnie Scott chats with fellow author Chris Somerville about his debut novel, The Adversary. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.' (Production summary)
'This is a rather extraordinary first novel. It is written in a style that ravishes the reader because it is constantly inventive and nervily inflected with a maximum suggestiveness. Ronnie Scott is superb at capturing the intimations and innuendos that any human heart – perhaps especially a not fully formed, post-adolescent one – is capable of. He is as good at evoking a world of young men who are a bit in love with, certainly not uninterested in, each other. But The Adversary is too talented a piece of debut fiction to be received with hands-off courtesy. The besetting problem of this putative novel that everyone should have a look at – to cotton on to a writer who has a wizardly quicksilver command of language – is that not enough happens in the book, and the author’s apparent belief that it does comes to seem like naivety.' (Introduction)
'One of the few details we learn about the unnamed narrator of Ronnie Scott’s début novel, The Adversary, is that he is fond of Vegemite. Although only a crumb of information, this affinity for the popular breakfast tar reveals much about our hero. Just as Vegemite ‘has to be spread very thin or you realised it was salty and unreasonable’, his human interactions give him a soupçon of a social life, a mere taste that never threatens to overwhelm his senses.' (Introduction)
'Reading Ronnie Scott’s (of The Listed Brow esteem) debut novel ‘The Adversary’ struck me with its wistful immediacy. A kind of sentimentality that made me simultaneously longing and repellent for my days of inner-city sharehouse living, in all its messy, hellish finitude. Yet, it was the complicated politics of gay friendship and companionships that were intriguing as they were foreign to me (as a sedentary, hetero-homebody) that kept my mind occupied until long after it had drawn its conclusions.' (Introduction)
'Ronnie Scott founded a high-profile literary magazine at 21. Now 34, his debut novel is a social comedy set in Melbourne’s gay community.'
At Home with Ronnie Scott
Astrid Edwards
(interviewer),
2020
19698895
2020
podcast
interview
'Ronnie Scott is a novelist, editor, critic and comic specialist. He published the Penguin Special Salad Days in 2014 and released The Adversary, his first novel, in 2020. In this interview, Ronnie unpicks the idea of writing craft using the example of how he wrote The Adversary.
'Ronnie lectures at RMIT University and has edited several anthologies. His short works are published in everything from major news outlets to independent journals.' (Introduction)
Live Recording : Ronnie Scott on The Adversary
Chris Somerville
(interviewer),
2020
23470280
2020
single work
podcast
interview
'Ronnie Scott chats with fellow author Chris Somerville about his debut novel, The Adversary. This is a live recording of an online event hosted via Zoom during the Covid-19 crisis.' (Production summary)
