Exploded View is narrated by an unnamed teenage girl, who lives with her mother, her brother, and her stepfather, whom she refers to as ‘father man’. She signals her resentment at father man’s controlling presence by retreating into herself and refusing to talk. ‘You have to stop listening to yourself to be able to speak,’ she thinks. ‘You are only lost to others – not inside yourself.’

From this position of wilful detachment, she views the world as a succession of images and disjointed scenes, which she records in neutral, precisely observed, sometimes fragmented, but invariably elegant sentences. Everything in the novel is filtered through her singular consciousness. She possesses an intelligence that is disinterested and logical, yet always alert to metaphorical implication. Her peculiar mode of perception, at once systematic and analogous, collapses the distinction between the rational and the emotional, charging her observations with double meanings. Tiffany’s mechanically minded narrator often slips into the dry idiom of an engine-repair manual, but her inflected thinking makes even these apparently affectless remarks seem like wise saws: ‘Every car is a collection of failures waiting for their time and place’; ‘When a part is damaged all of the surrounding parts are put at risk. The site of the fresh damage can be far removed, in time and place, from the cause.’

Carrie Tiffany (photograph by Celeste De Clario)The novel’s defining conflict – between the narrator and father man – is enacted at arm’s length, indirectly for the most part, almost as a curious kind of allegory or fable. He is a mechanic by trade, and she is also attracted to the intricacy and elegant logic of machinery, schooling herself with an old Holden manual she keeps under her bed. ‘In a manual, everything is straight,’ she thinks. ‘Everything is clean. A pure view.’ But in telling her how to put an engine together, the manual also teaches her how to identify its weaknesses, how to coax it apart. It provides her with a means of subversion. She rebels against father man by sneaking out at night and tampering with the cars he repairs for a living (he expresses his hostility in a much more crude fashion by chopping off her ponytail).

Exploded View is an offbeat coming-of-age story. Its middle section describes a hypnotic trans-continental road trip undertaken at the insistence of father man, which traps the family in their car – ‘the ideal container for a family’, because it fixes everyone in place, even when they are travelling to a new destination – and places them squarely under his control: ‘When father man gets behind the wheel the car becomes included in his body, so that the outer edge of the car becomes his outer edge, even with us inside.’ The novel dramatises the narrator’s desire to break out of this enclosing family structure and seize control of the machinery of life for herself, something that is expressed most effectively through Tiffany’s perpetual awareness of the various ways in which her dominant metaphors are conventionally gendered – a phenomenon that usually devolves into the false assumption that men are logical and women are emotional. (‘There isn’t much that’s female in an engine,’ the narrator muses early in the novel.) Tiffany does nothing so banal as point out that these stereotypes are patently untrue. She co-opts and manipulates them, plays scientific and poetic understandings against each other, conflates their notionally opposed logics in order to make them speak of her narrator’s burgeoning sexuality and discontentment.

Tiffany’s interest in the expressive potential of mechanistic or taxonomical modes of discourse has been a feature of all three of her novels to date. In Exploded View, she has honed her technique to produce a work that has a late-modernist density. The figurative yet scrupulously unemotive language is remarkably efficient; there is hardly a detail that does not reverberate beyond itself, evoke some deeper implication. What the novel lacks in narrative momentum, it more than makes up for in the refinements of its style and imagery.