Drift Street

Drift Street is a fiction book by Australian author Claire Mendes. Karen Brooks says that along with Edward Berridge's The Lives of the Saints and Andrew McGahan's Praise, Drift Street is a grunge lit book which "...explor[es] the psychosocial and psychosexual limitations of young sub/urban characters in relation to the imaginary and socially constructed boundaries defining...self and other" and "opening up" new "limnal [boundary] spaces" where the concept of an abject human body can be explored.[1] Brooks states that Berridge's short stories provide "...a variety of violent, disaffected and often abject young people", characters who "...blur and often overturn" the boundaries between suburban and urban space.[2]

Analysis

The characters in Drift Street are described as being unhealthy, unclean, overweight, tattooed, having greasy hair, and living in deteriorating dwellings "that resemble the bodies who inhabit them". [3] The Drift Street characters are "vile and abusive" people who prey on "unattractive victims". [4] The Washbourne family in this novel has an abusive, alcoholic father, two adult sons who are mostly unemployed and one of whom is in a Neo-Nazi gang and "pollutes his body" with drugs, and there is an incestuous relationship between the father and the daughter. [5]

Karen Brooks states that Drift Street, Edward Berridge's The Lives of the Saints, and Andrew McGahan's Praise "...explor[e] the psychosocial and psychosexual limitations of young sub/urban characters in relation to the imaginary and socially constructed boundaries defining...self and other" and "opening up" new "limnal [boundary] spaces" where the concept of an abject human body can be explored.[6] Brooks states that Berridge's short stories provide "...a variety of violent, disaffected and often abject young people", characters who "...blur and often overturn" the boundaries between suburban and urban space.[7] Brooks states that the marginalized characters in The Lives of the Saints, Drift Street and Praise) are able to stay in "shit creek" (an undesirable setting or situation) and "diver[t]... flows" of these "creeks", thus claiming their rough settings' "limnality" (being in a border situation or transitional setting) and their own "abjection" (having "abject bodies" with health problems, disease, etc.) as "sites of symbolic empowerment and agency".[8]

References
  1. Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18.4: 87–99.
  2. Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18.4: 87–99.
  3. McCann, Andrew. Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia. Univ. of Queensland Press, 1998. p. 89
  4. McCann, Andrew. Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia. Univ. of Queensland Press, 1998. p. 89
  5. McCann, Andrew. Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia. Univ. of Queensland Press, 1998. p. 94-96
  6. Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18.4: 87–99.
  7. Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18.4: 87–99.
  8. Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18.4: 87–99.
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