After reading Lola in the Mirror, the newest and third novel by Australia’s most marketable literary sensation, one thing is clear: Trent Dalton is not a subtle writer. It’s not that he’s incapable of plucking heartstrings (have a gander at any Goodreads reviews), it’s that his tool of choice – piping-hot sentimentality – boils to oblivion any remnants of nuance. It’s not that he can’t spin a yarn either (he’s a journalist, after all), it’s that he flattens complexity into a slurry of platitudes – “The light of our lives is formed by the darkness we place around it”, “The world turns for us all” – ad nauseam. Most concerningly though, his ideas aren’t just merely lazy; when placed under scrutiny, some are misleading, if not dangerous.
If you’ve been under an Australia-sized rock and haven’t heard of Dalton, his works span his award-demolishing debut Boy Swallows Universe (adapted for the stage and an upcoming Netflix series), its follow-up All Our Shimmering Skies, and a nonfiction collection titled Love Stories. A News Corp journalist for the Courier-Mail before becoming a staff writer for the Weekend Australian in 2021, Dalton was stirred to fiction by his tumultuous childhood and stalwart mother. Boy Swallows Universe was clunky, dripping in schmaltz and – as former Sydney Review of Books editor Catriona Menzies-Pike deftly noted – engrained with a conservative worldview of a distinctly Scott Morrison flavour. It was at least alive with some memorable characters.
But Lola in the Mirror charts nowhere new and has little compelling to say. Like Dalton’s other novels, it features an embattled protagonist yanking on their bootstraps with misty-eyed fervour: in this case, a 17-year-old girl without a name who is living “houseless” in Brisbane, where she and her mum eke out a life in a Toyota Hiace van in a riverside scrapyard. The teenager is a rapacious drawer with aspirations of becoming an artist, holding herself aloft with dreams of exhibiting in the Met. Early in the book, her mother abruptly dies, forcing her to take up work as a courier for a drug kingpin called Lady Flo. Things go pear-shaped, unsurprisingly – and it wouldn’t be Dalton without a whole-heart-falling-out-of-sleeve love story too.
Dalton says this novel was inspired by his 17 years of social affairs journalism, which contributed to works such as his 2011 nonfiction book, Detours: Stories from the Street, the proceeds of which he donated to a shelter. His heart is undoubtedly in the right place, having spent countless hours with members of Australia’s most vulnerable communities, hearing their stories of hardship in conditions incomprehensible to most of us.
But Dalton’s heavy trafficking in dewy-eyed earnestness pushes Lola in the Mirror into reckless territory, romanticising and condescending to the very people he’s writing about. Take this passage, for example, describing the apparent intimacy that houseless people have with dirt.
I’m talking about dirt that you can taste on your fingertips when you eat a Burger Ring … Epidermal dirt. Dirt as armour. Dirt as shield. Sounds screwy, I know, but sometimes the intimacy with dirt gets so deep that you start feeling earth intimacy, a soil connection in you, and then you start feeling like you’re part of the ground. Like you can sleep on any patch of grass, anywhere on earth, because that’s what you are now.
Putting aside the use of the word “screwy” as a stand-in to describe almost every anodyne character eccentricity – which he uses 15 times throughout – passages like the above trivialise homelessness. Dalton does confront darker elements – violence, addiction, suicide – but these moments are almost always denuded by his preoccupation with “community, hope and love”, mentioned in his author’s note as the book’s impetus. Even if this “dirt as armour” view comes anecdotally from a person living houseless, contextlessly elevating it in fiction as an object of imaginative charm betrays a lack of authorial care. It sanitises, shifting the readers’ understanding away from the experiential reality of hardship towards the refuge of an anaesthetising optimism.
As with Dalton’s other works, there’s also no shortage of bad guys in Lola in the Mirror. Abusers, violent men, people doing abhorrent things – each are described repeatedly as “monsters”, “tyrant lizards” forcing their victims into dancing the “Tyrannosaurus waltz”. As the author said: “My mum, my real-life mum, totally danced the Tyrannosaurus waltz for the best part of 20 years.” It’s understandable, then, the urge to depict repugnant behaviour as the spawn of a beast. But when a novel centres on domestic violence, carrying with it an implication of how we recognise perpetrators, it’s vital to interrogate it. Domestic violence prevention representatives warn against peddling the “monster myth”, as have the partners of victims. Aside from reducing human behaviour to unhelpful categories of good and evil, it also implies offenders are easily spotted, when they often are disturbingly innocuous, everyday people. To dress abuse, however abhorrent, in a villainous costume doesn’t aid understanding – it impedes it.
Throughout Lola in the Mirror, Dalton also repeatedly sentimentalises the conduit between suffering and creativity. The author has spoken of his origins in community housing, and this understandably offers a personal context for his thinking. But where he missteps – amid all his protagonist’s trivialising, cartwheeling-through-the-dirt wonder (literally: at one point the houseless protagonist whimsically executes “thirty-six consecutive cartwheels” down Queen Street Mall) – is in his glamorisation of pain as a prerequisite to good art. “There are so many beautiful paintings that come from things like love and happiness,” the novel’s protagonist proclaims, in one of many such references, “but I still reckon the really, really great paintings come from really, really great pain.” This elevation of the artist as perennial sufferer has damaging implications: namely that financial, physical and mental stability are not aides for meaningful expression, but strictures.
Trent Dalton is no mere airport pulp writer, though he is that, too. He’s one of Australia’s most widely read cultural exports, having sold more than 1,000,000 copies in a country where the majority sell far, far fewer. His foundational messages – intentional or not, conveyed overtly or by omission – matter. Dalton is earnest, compelled to the page from personal hardship and a heart teeming with good intentions. But his books, of which Lola in the Mirror is the worst, don’t just fail to live up to waffly ideas of literary value (with a waft of anti-intellectualism, his author’s acknowledgment assures readers, twice, that he’s “Not trying to be all clever-like”). They are conduits for simplistic, fantasy-driven ways of thinking about human nature that placate our desire for immediacy, simple explanations and a quick emotional sugar hit.
Lola in the Mirror is out now through HarperCollins
