Blain’s return to literary fiction is re-energised by this new emphasis on affect and impulse. Hers is the pep that comes from having an opposing view. Among its many aims, Too Close to Home wants to offer a correction of a tenderising and exonerating kind. Yes, Blain says, difference does make us bristle, but we’re not unreconstructed or missing a frontal lobe – most of us are trying hard to do the right thing and to be good people. The novelbegins, Slap-like, with its characters assembled on the borderlands of the inner city and the ‘out there’, Melbourne’s Northcote swapped for Sydney’s Marrickville. Anna is turning a reluctant forty and best friend Freya has enticed the old gang west, where ‘the Real People’ live – her family’s neck of the woods now, thanks to the housing bubble – with the promise of ‘truly authentic’ Portuguese cuisine. ‘So much art is lazy,’ says publisher Clara to Anna over the piri piri chicken. ‘It peddles extremes. It allows us to congratulate ourselves. We are not that xenophobic, or that misogynistic, or that wicked. It simply reaffirms our own comfortable position, allowing us to ignore any challenges to that.’ This, in a nutshell, is Blain contra Tsiolkas. His shtick is to shock and stick it to the little ‘l’ liberals; her goal is to make them look in the mirror. Freya is writing a PhD ‘on whether art can make a difference’; Blain thinks that it can, but that soap opera-style caricature won’t do the trick. People have to be able to recognise themselves in the books they read for them to do their transformative work.

In playwright Freya and her architect partner, Matt, Blain offers a counter to Tsiolkas’s garish skips, Rosie and Gary. Thoroughly nice people, they recycle, practise permissive parenting with daughter Ella, avoid saturated fats, try not to use the clothes-dryer on sunny days, and rail against boat people being used as a wedge issue in politics. But they also have their doubts, prejudices, and failings. Matt has never been that comfortable with the idea of commitment, and isn’t sure about his set’s current ‘phase of acquisition’. At home he often distances himself from those who know and love him. At work he is underinvested, fantasising about erecting cheap canopies among the trees instead of the expensive concrete cubes that he sees as desecrations. As for Freya, she is honest enough to admit to some pretty ugly emotions: envy, clinginess, narrow-mindedness – even latent bigotry. While she enjoys being able to stroll past African hair braiding salons, she is not too sure about the Vietnamese boy who revs the engine of his hotted-up car after midnight. Things come to a head between the couple when Matt’s long-lost friend Shane and his two children move into the neighbourhood. Soon Matt and Shane are getting drunk and reminiscing about the old days up in Brisbane. Freya is left to play single mother to all three children and to tie herself up in ethical knots: she wants to frown upon Shane’s excessive drinking, lax parenting style, and lack of boundaries, but wonders guiltily whether this attitude stems from her assumptions about Aborigines. As she tries to explain to Matt:

‘It’s complex. I’m judgemental when anyone drinks too much, I suppose. But with him it’s loaded. If he wasn’t black and went next door and got pissed and left his children on their own, what would I think?’ She shrugs her shoulders. ‘I’d probably still be judgemental.’ She glances up at the ceiling and then affirms her statement. ‘I would be.’

Blain has made two intriguing decisions on the level of craft in Too Close to Home. The first is to give us Shane’s speech in a light Aboriginal English. At first the strategy appears misconceived. To speak for an Indigenous Australian, and ungrammatically, is risky, especially given that Shane, as Matt explains to Freya, is ‘educated’. But Blain’s intention is to make her readers encounter Shane’s otherness for themselves: readers are colour-blind, but dialect makes them black and white. Also worthy of comment is Blain’s use of the present tense. As Philip Pullman and others have noted recently, it is a contemporary literary tic, often employed to manufacture immediacy and intensity, but also to disguise authorial timidity and a lack of penetrating insight. This is not what is going on in Too Close to Home. Indeed, Blain uses the present tense to prove the device’s very fictiveness. Shane comes to Sydney with news of Lucas, a boy of seventeen, who may or may not be Matt’s son. A large proportion of the novel is given over to showing that no one has the privilege of living entirely in the present moment, for there is no insulation from the past and the consequences of the things we did there.