Elizabeth Bryer reviews An Elegant Young Man by Luke Carman
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.