You Gotta Have Balls
Lily Brett
Picador, $32.95

Fans of the New York based Australian writer, Lily Brett will be somewhat surprised with her latest offering — a sometimes laugh-out-loud comic tale of life and family set in contemporary Manhattan.

New Brett readers will be left wondering, how they have managed to avoid any of her 13 laudable earlier offerings.

Ruth Rothwax and her 87-year-old Polish father Edek (characters from the earlier Too Many Men) return in this very New York Jewish story with the daughter-father relationship at its heart.

Ruth runs a successful letter-writing business and has also branched out into a new quirky greeting card line. She prides herself on the order she's able to maintain in her career.

Ruth is now filled with angst over her father, who has recently joined her from Melbourne to live out his days with her in New York.

Initially putting himself in charge of her office 'Stockings Department', the increasingly frustrated Ruth explains to him that he is purchasing office stock and cannot describe himself as being in charge of 'stockings'. The linguistic subtlety is beyond Edek, as are many of the ever-increasing explanations and questions from his exasperated daughter.

Edek stops coming to the office daily when Zofia and Walentyna suddenly turn up in 'The Big Apple'. They are two Polish women in their 60s whom he and Ruth had met when they revisited Poland and Auschwitz a few years earlier.

Edek begins spending his days with them on an unspecified project. Ruth gets more and more worried, particularly when it becomes evident that in this most competitive and overcrowded of restaurant markets, her father plans — at his age — to open a meat ball eatery with this unlikely partnership whose motivations are, to Ruth, somewhat suspicious.

Brett is herself a daughter of Holocaust survivors whose 89-year-old father recently joined her in New York. In almost all of her writing to date, she has felt a deep personal need to contend with the often dark and tragic shadow of the Holocaust as a permeating background theme.

With You Gotta Have Balls, she seems to have finally reached a point where she can shed this sombre mantle and reveal her rather prodigious skills at comic dialogue.

Those who know her writing, may see this new offering as somewhat less 'serious' than her earlier novels and perhaps therefore, disappointing.

A preferable view is to acknowledge Brett's mastery of multiple genres and skill in adapting and developing her writing style and subject matter over time. She is like talented artists whose paintings change in nature as their skills and inspirations metamorphose over the years.

This is a witty and life-affirming story about setting goals and grasping life — 'by the balls' if you will — no matter what one's age. It's a family story about love and acceptance, about living each day to its fullest no matter what one's circumstances or potentially crippling past. Most of all, it is a book about confidence and optimism. As such, it is hard to imagine reading it without coming away with a lightness of spirit and a smile on the face.

Scott Whitmont is the owner of The Lindfield Bookshop.