Book review: Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere
Short and sharp as scalpels, Adelaide author and academic Alex Cothren’s collection of satires wields a wit cutting enough to leave scars.
Anyone following the media reports about a certain president will be familiar with the current struggle to separate the news from satire. Award-winning writer and local academic Alex Cothren takes this predicament as his starting point, crafting pieces that slice like paper cuts – these are short stories that sting long after you’ve put them down.
Inventive, devastating and vivid as fever-dreams, these stories slide between the hilarious and the horrific. All situated within a foreseeable future, these pieces take the policies and problems that unsettle us today and extend them to absurd yet plausible extremes. It’s reductio ad absurdum in literary form – critiquing society by showing how the trends and technologies of today can be amplified to bizarre, dystopian endpoints.
The collection opens with ‘Dirk Champion, RFL Talent Scout’, a story that pulls readers in with the narrator’s hilarious vernacular as he pines for the good old days of Australian Rules Football – before liability and head trauma shut down the league. Yet within four pages this story devastates: RFL stands for Refugee Football League, the game now almost gladiatorial as refugees at offshore processing sites battle for the ultimate goal of citizenship.
Concise and honed to razor-sharpness, these sixteen pieces are savage in their critique, yet compassionate at their core. ‘Empathy International’ is an indictment on the shallow performative nature of first world activism. ‘Ocean Paradise’ a grim, supernatural recrimination of the hotel gambling industry, ‘The Juansons’ a character portrait of a neighbour that doubles as cutting critique of community intolerance and how racism flourishes in the absence of human connection. And a particular favourite, ‘Big Love’ explores the consequences of a drone delivery system deciding to move beyond provision of nutrition needs to meet a client’s psychological needs instead.
While Cothren’s political satire is incisive to the point of devastation, it is his inventiveness with form that makes this collection stand out. The eponymous piece, ‘Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere’ takes the form of a mock academic paper to satirise the bleak employment conditions of casual academics, ‘Royal Commission into the Koala Repopulation Scheme’ uses a meeting transcript to lampoon the political policy process, and LAPDTV is written as a screenplay to satirise the public’s voracious appetite for TV crime procedurals.
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Embedded throughout the collection are bleak speculative pieces enlivened by first-person narration. We hear the voice of an artist reconstructing the Great Barrier Reef, a guard working within a ‘Quantum’ prison that uses the theory of Schoedinger’s Cat, and the opener with that football talent scout observing the game play of desperate refugees.
Yet there’s also delight in amongst the Black Mirror-style dystopia. Told in the form of a subreddit, ‘Where’s a Good Place for an Adult to Hide?’ is hilarious in both concept and form.
The final story, ‘Let’s Talk Trojan Bee’, is the pinnacle of the collection. This masterclass in political satire details the terrifying progression, step by step, from the ecological fallout of the bee population crash through to conspiracy theories and domestic terrorism, all told through media headlines and sound bites, from respected media outlets to 4chan.
Fans of George Saunders, Jennifer Egan and Wayne Marshall will devour these stories. Bite-sized and deeply spiced, these pieces will linger long after consumption.
Playing Nice Was Getting Me Nowhere by Alex Cothren (Pink Shorts Press) is out now