The novel opens in the late 1990s, with Walt and Duncan meeting at a Magpies home game. Rugby binds their friendship throughout prepubescence, adolescence, and beyond, despite increasingly disparate personalities and interests. Walt is into vaguely political acts of vandalism inspired by a downloaded copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. Duncan is into girls, first the digital partners he half-glimpses in the fledgling world of cybersex, and then more concretely in Walt’s sister, Helen. But Helen, after a brief stint as a junior rugby star, is more interested in trawling chat rooms and record stores for edgy art, desperately seeking ‘something that could shock her life out of its stagnation’. As they breach adulthood and drift apart, their hobbies begin to appear more like manic attempts to distract themselves from their precarious, hollow lives.

Easton writes with authority on these subworlds his characters shelter in. A former rugby player himself, he clearly knows his halfbacks from his inside centres, and he neatly elucidates the complex class fault lines of NRL. His time in punk bands also gives Easton an insider’s perspective on Sydney’s underground music scene, albeit not a particularly generous one. At one point, Helen dismisses the hyped Sydney sound as nothing but a ‘litany of reclusive men who collected analogue synths off eBay to play in front of an audience of eight’. The novel, via Walt’s political awakening, is also an excellent primer on communist politics in the city’s West, from the 1970s militancy of the NSW Builders’ Labourers’ Federation to the ‘petty schisms’ of the modern parties who let ‘someone a hundred and fifty years dead do the thinking for them’.

These communities, flawed as they may be, should give the characters some sense of belonging. As Walt optimistically tells Helen, ‘anything that involves people coming together means something’. Yet the older they get, the more siloed they become. Duncan treats ‘sex like a handshake’, Helen seeks the ‘perfect combination of good drugs and an absence of people she wanted to avoid’, and Walt is the founder and sole member of a Liverpool Communist Party so obscure that it is ‘unlikely that anyone would discover it was even there’. The neglect of their hard-partying parents is no doubt partly to blame for this disconnect. Helen has already left home by the time she receives the ‘first authentic embrace’ from her mother. But Easton pulls back the lens to suggest the contribution of wider societal trends, such as the dehumanising effect of convenience technology. In one eerie passage, Helen laments the distracting wave of Uber Eats couriers arriving in a restaurant, only for her bored date to remind her that people get delivered too: ‘Tinder brought you on demand to this restaurant did it not?’

Further disorientating matters are the constant gentrification and redevelopment of the novel’s backdrop. The entire Southwest is described as ‘on its way to becoming a tacky refurbishment’, while the Sydney CBD looks like ‘an alien took a shit on the horizon’. Even the characters’ personal identities as ‘Westies’, symbolised by Duncan and Walt’s matching Magpies tattoos, is not immune from trendy renovation. In places where they were once met with condescension, Walt begins to notice the ‘odd sensation of his background coming into vogue … his upbringing becoming fetishized’. Seeking to distinguish his homeland from the Inner West’s ‘automatons in craft brewery T-shirts and fashion mullets’, Walt writes a manifesto for Western Sydney succession that starts out as a joke but soon becomes his idée fixe. Even this rare moment of impetus is stalled, however, when it’s pointed out that Walt’s new country would be ‘just another sticker on a map covering over hundreds of nations with … olde English fucking bullshit’.

Two hundred and thirty-three pages of maladjusted white people going nowhere sounds like a literary root canal, but the premise soars on a delicious current of humour that refuses to take any of this too seriously. The narrator has a cold detachment that occasionally curdles into outright disgust, spitting out phrases like ‘Walt had clearly been reading Chomsky again’. Easton also has a knack for moulding the omnipresent capitalist jargon of the modern landscape to fit his own sly irony. It wasn’t until my second reading, for example, that I realised one of Duncan’s meaningless sexual encounters takes place in a dark carpark near the ‘Homemaker Centre’. Elsewhere, the sentences seem to be playing hipster Mad Libs, conjuring surreal scenarios out of random details: ‘Walt had also taken acid and he decided he wanted to listen to the Butthole Surfers on his phone while watching people play tennis in Wicks Park.’ There are some moments of genuine pathos sprinkled throughout the absurdity, although the well-frayed threads of the characters’ lives are never forced into neat knots of resolution. That’s impressive restraint for a début novelist, and it suggests that while his creations might be hopelessly adrift, Easton knows exactly what he’s doing.