The first tale sets the scene. The mood is dreamy, the narrator undefined – part of collective youth growing up in suburbia, with the soundtrack provided by cicadas, lawnmowers and the Top Forty. The refrain ‘On Saturday Afternoons in Nineteen Seventy-something’ takes us back to an endless summer that forms the backdrop for these coming-of-age stories.

Charlie’s persona is fleshed out through the course of the book. He is an innocent, a peacemaker, a nerd. He has a milk round, plays bass in a band called Vaguely Autistic, and lusts after unattainable girls. Charlie is a rather unreliable narrator, and much of Divola’s humour hangs on his innocence, especially in the fumbling sexual encounters. Divola succeeds in evoking the 1970s through character, idiom and the minutiae of the era, taking every opportunity for comedy along the way. By the fourth story, he becomes less impressionistic and employs a stronger sense of narrative, spinning tales around a series of unfortunate characters and reaching beyond comic effect to pity and catharsis.

The stories in Nineteen Seventy-something are exercises in nostalgia, at times pointless, at others poignant. They improve with a second reading, when expectations of a narrative curve are removed, and the rhythmic humorous writing becomes compelling. The most effective of them – ‘Vaguely Autistic’, ‘Nixon’, ‘The Cows and the Foxes’, ‘Patience’, ‘Cartwheel Bill’ and ‘Ray G’Day’ – would work well as audio short stories.