Diana Reid’s highly anticipated second novel Seeing Other People opens with a breakup, hilarious and truly wicked in its staging. It is a CBD food court in the middle of the lunch-hour rush that provides the backdrop as Eleanor and Mark end their relationship. They’re seated at the table closest to the only bin, with a lid constantly left swinging by departing customers and misaimed packaging occasionally landing, dripping, at their feet.
It’s a wonderfully theatrical setup, heightened by the sharpness of their wit and the snappy movement in their dialogue: that Reid’s background is in theatre is evident here. In fact, theatricality is one of the main forces that energises the novel, and it propels much of its narrative, too. After this ignominious breakup, Eleanor finds herself coming to reassess so many aspects of herself and her life, and beginning to make real decisions about them, rather than just falling into step with whatever comes her way.
Eleanor is in her early 20s and works in a high-paying but spiritless city job (“She’s a business analyst? Investment analyst? Something with numbers,” her sister explains to a friend). Her job is functional and entirely bland (much like her now-ex) and it serves as one of a series of counterpoints that establish Eleanor’s difference from the characters that she soon meets. Eleanor aside, the novel is populated almost entirely by performers, artists and creative types whose approach to life and style of living are less conventional than Eleanor’s, even wildly chaotic in comparison.
Eleanor is introduced to this quirky circle at a party at her younger sister Charlie’s ramshackle share house. Charlie is an actor (“A good one,” Eleanor adds whenever she explains this to others) and lives with a standup, a DJ and a director, respectively. She is also a person full of feeling and easy charm; impulsive and accustomed to imagining herself a character within a drama. She possesses none of Eleanor’s practicality, restraint or sharpness of humour, but the pair are nonetheless great friends and deeply care about and for each other.
The friendship between these sisters is one of the great pleasures of this novel, especially because they each genuinely admire in the other those qualities that make them both so different. It is important too, because their counter-positioning is so overt a setup that it could easily strip them of dimensionality without the nuances of their relationship, their history and their individual characters that Reid reveals in this way. This dimensionality becomes all the more vital once their desires – and not just their personalities – become opposing forces: once Eleanor finds herself drawn to the charismatic Helen, for whom Charlie has fallen too.
There are moments in Seeing Other People, especially as the book progresses, where some of its contrivances wear thin or characters begin to feel device-like. There’s a flatness to some of the minor characters and a tonal unevenness that interrupts the narrative world on occasion and allows its artifice to become visible. This is largely because the novel works by building scenarios in which the ideas and problems of philosophy – the subject of Reid’s own university studies – might actively play out. This was also the mode of Reid’s debut novel, 2021’s Love and Virtue, which was remarkable for the ideas that underpinned it and the complex moral ambiguities and power dynamics it explored.
Reid always avoids offering simple answers and absolutes to the problems her novels pose – there are never right or wrong courses of action or decisions that are made lightly. Seeing Other People is less successful than its predecessor in balancing the scope of its ideas against the demands of narrative, but it is also a book much more ambitious in its ambit and aims.
The dilemmas with which Reid’s characters are grappling across this novel all centre on love, duty and care. Eleanor’s desire for Helen is reciprocated, and this seems to open up for Eleanor the possibility of a gentler, less punitively disciplined way of being in the world, even as she knows this can only happen at her sister’s expense. This negotiation of what a person might want for themselves, or allow themselves to want, against what they want for others is the most pressing of the moral issues here. But Eleanor, Helen and Charlie are also trying to understand what it means to love someone and fully see their flaws, and how to allow other kinds of love to exist on equal footing with the romantic version that our culture celebrates so forcefully.
Seeing Other People always takes seriously the inner lives of its young characters and their attempts to find their ways of being – and loving – in the world. There is a genuine warmth as well as capacious intelligence and sly humour to Reid’s writing, and a dynamic energy to the novel that’s always compelling, even at its weaker or more tenuous moments.
Seeing Other People by Diana Reid is out now, published by Ultimo Press ($32.99).
