Claire and Al are holidaying in Croatia, sightseeing at the Temple of Augustus. Al reads from his guidebook that the temple was almost destroyed during an Allied air raid in 1944, then reconstructed in 1947. “They both looked at it, searching for cracks or signs of its destruction. It looked sturdy. Faultless.” Claire recalls the story of her grandparents’ migration from Croatia to Australia and “admired all the things it was possible to survive”.

This same wonderment at human resilience is felt when reading Victoria Hannan’s second novel, Marshmallow, which follows five friends, all in their 30s, one year on from a fatal accident. Although the portrait Hannan renders does not “admire” grief with any romanticism, it is steeped in its dreadful reality.

Opening Victoria Hannan’s book is like opening the door to a rowdy family home full of all sorts of emotions.Credit:

The novel traverses just over 24 hours, and time moves as though every second is being seared into the skin of its characters. Multiple pages are dedicated to games of solitaire, a page to a character observing her body in the mirror, several paragraphs to describe the act of breathing.

It’s a testament to Hannan’s prose that Marshmallow is not a laborious read. Her sentences are clean and sprightly, and she has a knack for pleasingly offbeat similes: “… there was a tone to his voice that hinted to how he was feeling. The clipped tone of extreme sadness, depression, devastation, anger. An orchestra tuning up. The cacophony of grief.”

Marshmallow is a character-driven work and each chapter is told from the perspective of one of the friends. The momentum of this book isn’t forward, so much as downward. Propelling the narrative is the unearthing of more of each character’s past. Like a garden bed with a complex root system beneath its plants, the deeper the reader digs into each character’s life, the more complicated and intricate their stories become.

The cover of Marshmallow by Victoria Hannan.

While the loss of a child is seen as the peak of suffering – in this novel, as in life – much of what is revealed of each character is more pain. The loneliness that can come from being single when all your friends are partnered. Relationships that are struggling to hold on as the cracks grief has created widen into chasms. Overbearing and cruel parents. Parents who need to be taken care of much like children. More grief, from longer ago, that resurfaces. Looking on in envy at friends who earn more or were born to more money than you, or both. Being forced to compliment a racist’s kitchen renovation in order to keep the peace at a partner’s work function. “It felt like a full-time job,” muses Al. “The juggling of all these feelings.”

As in her debut, Kokomo, for which she won the Victorian Premier’s Unpublished Manuscript Award, the saviour Hannan offers to counter all this pain are the moments of joy it’s possible to grasp when surrounded by friends. Both books feature characters singing to daggy Gold FM hits. In Kokomo, it’s the Beach Boys track after which the book is titled. In Marshmallow, the friends enjoy a car ride singalong to Walk Like an Egyptian.

One character comments on the song’s cultural insensitivities. “Don’t ruin this for me,” says the bereaved mother, Annie, as she belts out the lyrics from the back seat. The reader gets the feeling it’s not the song she is referring to, but the moment of lightness it has allowed her to seize, as fleeting as something flying past them on the freeway.

Early buzz about this book saw it compared to that modern Australian classic, The Slap. It’s a fitting comparison – multiple perspectives circling one backyard event, propulsive prose, the ways that class and politics intersect with the characters’ relationships.

But I’m more inclined to describe Hannan as an Australian Anne Tyler. Opening her books is like opening the door to a rowdy family home full of “sadness, depression, devastation, anger” and childish moments of glee. Once you’ve left, it’s easy to picture those characters still going about their days. Going to work, playing solitaire at their desks, grieving and laughing. Carrying on with the full-time job of being alive.

Marshmallow by Victoria Hannan is published by Hachette, $29.99.

Allee Richards is the author of Small Joys of Real Life (Hachette). Victoria Hannan is a guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival. The Age is a festival partner.

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