‘Smokehouse’: Melissa Manning
Source: UQP
F Scott Fitzgerald philosophised, ‘Find your key emotion; this may be all you need to know to find your short story.’ This is true of Melbourne-based writer Melissa Manning’s debut interlinked short-story collection, Smokehouse (UQP, 2021). As each of her characters battles various forms of loss, we may finish the collection unsure of their physical attributes, but we are acutely aware of everything they’ve felt.
Predecessors in Australian short-fiction collections The Turning (Tim Winton) and Shadowboxing (Tony Birch) best exemplify what this genre has to offer: comfort in knowing that a set of characters’ comparable hardships speak to the universal nature of struggle. Manning continues the rich vein of Australian short-story collections with Smokehouse.
Fresh off its 2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards win for fiction, Smokehouse is a meditation on the way loss impacts our choices, and how this specifically affects family dynamics. What starts as a slow build gently sweeps into a bona fide page-turner; the result is a collection that can be absorbed in one sitting.
Told with extraordinary empathy and beautiful prose, Manning captures a tightknit community filled with vibrant characters: a mother realises once moving to Kettering that her marriage might be over. A stonemason experiences loneliness through his inability to connect with others. An adopted daughter relives trauma after her adoptive mother dies. They read like real people – self-sabotaging and self-preserving, selfish and selfless, despairing and hopeful. At its core, this collection examines what it means to be human while living through grief.
Having grown up in Southern Tasmania, Manning weaves the Tasmanian landscape throughout Smokehouse like a peripheral character. There’s a raw, tangible quality to the depictions of places like Kettering, North Hobart and Bruny Island. Sometimes, the small-town aesthetics strangle the characters, suffocating us along with them. Other times, we’re encouraged to reminisce with them as they long for past suburbs and lives. In depicting these varying perspectives, Manning deftly utilises this genre to demonstrate how the relationship between place and identity is intrinsic to the human condition.
The only misstep in this collection is ‘Chainsaw’, a tale of grief structurally lacking in climax and resolution. But maybe that’s the point – maybe grief realistically doesn’t always neatly trace a convenient story arc. And besides, it’s not enough to break Smokehouse’s overall momentum.
With this must-read debut, Manning has announced herself within the Australian writing scene as a force to be reckoned with.
