Rubik

February 12, 2018
Tan knits subtle critique of a hypercommodified, networked world into her debut, an inventive linked short story collection. In “Retcon,” Jules Valentine’s small role in an experimental film shot in Perth, Australia, sets in motion a series of mysteries that build toward the uncovering of an insidious viral marketing campaign for Seed tablets and phones. Her image from the film as the “falling girl” becomes a hollow symbol of edgy individuality around Australia in “This Page Has Been Left Blank Intentionally.” In “Good Birds Don’t Fly Away,” young Peter Pushkin searches for his missing piano teacher, who was driven to a breakdown through the marketing campaign’s prank calls. Tim voices the automated tech support in “T” and gains a rabid following in “U (or, That Extra Little Something).” Other connected characters correspond with spambots (“Congratulations You May Have Already Won”), get cornea transplants (“Light”), and write anime fan fiction (“Luxury Replicants”). The stories slowly reveal their connection to Seed, but mostly overlap through oblique details that reward the reader’s attention, such as a cat’s red collar or the imagined unisex clothing brand Ampersand. A particularly poignant thread tracks the accidental death of Jules’s best friend through the history of a five-cent coin and a convenience store meat pie. The disorienting effect of accreting, repeating details and unanswered questions makes the final cohesion of Tan’s only slightly fantastical Perth even more delicious. Tan’s careful layering and nuanced craft will gain a strong following among fans of experimental narratives.

February 28, 2017
In Elizabeth Tan’s debut novel-in-stories, the untimely death of young Perth woman Elena Rubik tears a hole in the fabric of reality, and the reader is thrown into a sprawling world of shady corporations, sentient memes and hackable bodies. Threaded throughout these fast-paced and brain-bending plotlines are moments of poignancy and pure delight involving five-cent pieces, Japanese cartoons and fan-fiction forums. The novel culminates in an Inception-like metanarrative that both epitomises and undoes Tan’s grand experiment, bringing together a lonely schoolboy’s search for his disappeared piano teacher, a voice actor’s lost cat, a complex and sinister plot involving a student reporter, a cult novel, a catalogue model and a Rube Goldberg machine. Conceptually and structurally breathtaking, Tan’s novel darts between layers of time, space and reality—fictions within fictions that seem disparate at first but later reveal themselves as inextricably linked. Tan has constructed, fittingly, a narrative Rubik’s cube, jumbled flashes of colour that slowly click into shape. Recalling the wit and social commentary of Julie Koh’s Portable Curiosities alongside the surreal connected-universe storytelling of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Rubik is a shot in the arm of Australian fiction, one that will undoubtedly reveal more secrets on successive rereads. Alan Vaarwerk is the online editor for Kill Your Darlings