A Racy Study Of A Whopping Ego

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 20, 2007

Reviewed by Laurie Clancy

Dinny Going Down

By Desmond O'Grady

Arcadia (Australian Scholarly Publishing), 239pp, $24.95

THERE IS AN odd dearth of Australian novels about journalism and journalists, odd because the profession is so important in our consciousness and because so many journos have turned to writing fiction.

When they do appear in Australian fiction they are usually failed or risible figures such as David Meredith in My Brother Jack - like clergymen and academics, they are seen as living in a world of their own.

Desmond O'Grady's new novel is set in the journalistic world of Sydney, which he clearly knows very well. The eponymous anti-hero is Dinny Hucking (get that spelling right, printer!), wild man of Sydney, hard-drinking, womanising, talented journalist in decline, reduced to writing a kind of lonely hearts column called Helping Hand.

The period in which the novel is set is not specified. It could be the present except that there are odd anachronisms. Dinny mentions three times that he doesn't regard working for television as real journalism, an attitude which was probably common when television first came to Australia but which is surely passe now.

There is mention of wine flagons, not casks. Dinny's mentor is Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and his wife, Lenore, has just seen a controversial 1962 French film, Jules and Jim.

But more generally the kinds of attitudes that Dinny embodies might have passed in the '50s or '60s but are simply unsustainable now. Most women would laugh at the kind of pass he makes at them.

He controls Lenore's finances completely, giving her a minimum of housekeeping money. He uses his failing marriage as an improbable bait for his conquests: "Living together they had grown apart: it was Dinny's clincher when he told other women the sad story."

Lenore tolerates his infidelities, responding only by withdrawing her own sexual favours, but when he begins to suspect (wrongly) that she too is having an affair he goes berserk. When she starts to develop a life of her own, emerging as a quiz star and attractive television personality, Dinny uses his column to question the authenticity of the show and destroys her brief career.

Dinny's going down is both rapid and completely predictable. He is, in fact, a monster, with a vastly inflated ego, a tenuous hold on reality and a total inability to examine himself and his motives.

Even his son, to whom he pays intermittent attention and who seems to be the only person other than himself that he cares for, sees through him and the only surprising thing about his decline is the forbearance shown by other people, especially his wife.

O'Grady's prose is racy and energetic, his portraits of Dinny's colleagues are vivid and there are some witty one-liners: when his wife manages to save the money to buy a new dress, Dinny notes that "Lenore claimed she had it through lay-by but he suspected it was through layback". The novel is, in short, an absorbing sociological document, a portrait of a type of male who is rapidly - and rightly - becoming extinct.

Laurie Clancy is a Melbourne writer and novelist. His most recent book is a collection of short stories, Loyalties (Mockingbird Press).

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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