However ‘ordinary’ the settings and actions, Carman’s prose can feel overwritten and sometimes weirdly old-fashioned. A character feels not ‘dizziness’ but ‘nauseating dizziness’; a fence is not broken but ‘crumbled in rigid disassembly’. Alliteration is all-pervasive, its more intemperate instances including ‘a clue in a cryptic crossword’ inducing ‘comprehension in a cul-de-sac of confusion’, and a ‘motoring mouth’ uttering ‘strangled-sounding soliloquies’. In the title story, a young woman finds ‘all sorts of curmudgeonly indigestions crowd[ing] in on her consciousness’ as she reviews dating app messages ‘in the blurred disturbance of eyes still coarsened with sleep’, which recalls the protagonist ‘rubbing the crust of sleep’s shock away’ in the previous story. In ‘A Woman to Her Lover Clings’, another young(ish) woman can ‘admit to a certain fascination with [her partner’s] unsavoury disquisitions’.

Reassuringly, this prolixity is overtly thematised in the first story, in which neighbour Sue tells the retiree protagonist Joseph: ‘You’re all full up with words, like a piñata.’ Joseph’s pleonastic idiom is attributable in part to his schooling by ‘barnacled nuns’ in ‘civilisation’s footnotes’. Yet point-of-view characters in the other stories also speak or think in a baroque Carmanese, to a greater or lesser degree. This stands out all the more because some dialogue sections are pitch-perfect naturalistic, especially in ‘Sit Down Young Stranger’, the story of a young man colliding without warning with an ex-partner at a Katoomba art show.

I confess that Carman’s adjectival excess had me running to Hemingway and Carver (the Lish edit), so I was amused to see Carver ironically name-checked on page 135. Literary allusions abound in these seven stories. Some blend in, others are more obtrusive: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea how to swell a progress ... I am no Joan Didion, nor was I meant to be,’ thinks the journalist narrator in ‘An Article of Faith’. Carman’s allusiveness seems less purposeful here than in An Elegant Young Man’s wry rendition of the youthful bromance of the Australian artist manqué with American greats Kerouac and Whitman. Yet if Carman is keen to showcase his reading (the first story drinks deep from Joyce), the results are never derivative. Whether or not you take to the style, Carman is a genuine stylist: his writing is highly distinctive, and – like other distinctive stylists from William Faulkner to Lawrence Durrell – would be easy to recognise with identifiers removed (no small achievement in a century groaning with passable lyrical-realist prose). Among its distinctive features are the free-wheeling, tracking-shot sentences which range impressively over multiple subjects, objects, and senses, looping action and characterisation into scenic description. Put any awkwardness down to exuberance (after all, ‘ecstasy’ can mean madness).

Startling images accumulate. In ‘Tears on Main Street’, one man’s legs wrap around another’s waist like ‘tattooed pythons’. Holly in the title story thinks of her head as ‘an emoji made of meat’, and a kettle ‘beginning to shake’ then ‘sh[aking] terribly’ is the perfect object correlative for Holly’s complex, inchoate rage. ‘Tears on Main Street’ is the collection’s highlight – a suspenseful revenge comedy-cum-road trip with a moving punchline. Its more flowing first-person narration offsets the excessive erudition of much of its dialogue (the protagonist and his mate August, a delicatessen employee, don’t so much speak as speechify) with a jarring, semi-surreal effect that somehow works. The mates’ travels up the New South Wales coast yield the hilarious image of August leaning on the Big Banana with his head bowed, ‘as though trying to commune with some site-specific energies the structure might possess’.

Likewise hilarious are the pretensions and self-absorption of self-styled literary genius Justin in ‘A Woman to Her Lover Clings’, who sponges off his hard-working partner Alice while mapping the imaginary crab kingdoms of his massive poetic archive, ‘The Chronicles of Greater Crustacea’ (we imagine a wannabe Gerald Murnane, whom Carman has met, or Henry Darger). There may even be gleams of self-satire in how Carman presents Justin’s verbose vanity through Alice’s eyes. An unintentionally fanciful note intrudes when, four years into her casual academic career, ‘the head professor talk[s] Alice into taking on a full-time lectureship’. What is a head professor, and where is this magical university where casual academics are begged to take permanent roles? The collection contains other clangers. When a pregnant woman in ‘A Night at the House’, having just learned that her foetus has no heartbeat, tells her husband, ‘We’ll get over it, of course […] but what is it in Macbeth, “I must first feel it as a man”?’, I have to mutter, ‘Said no woman ever.’ Yet this final story wins us back as its oblique topicality belatedly births an unexpectedly urgent, understated conclusion. Carman is excellent at endings, and the moments when he hits his stride in this collection give us reason to look forward to his next.