An Elegant Young Man

by Luke Carman

Giramondo, 2013

ISBN 978-1922146-45-8

Reviewed by ELIZABETH BRYER

Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man, a formally innovative bildungsroman, is composed of eight story cycles set in Sydney’s multicultural western suburbs. The shortest of the cycles are the most experimental; these alternate with longer, more structurally conventional ones. The idea of the narrator as a version of the author is foregrounded from the first sentence, when the narrator tells us that his name is Luke.