I’ll admit that I pounced on The Ruiners by Ellena Savage because I wanted a bit of a sticky-beak.

Sticky-beak because when I read a novel by Savage’s partner – I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena – I was thrilled (in an unabashed gossipy way) by the Melbourne-literary-scene setting that focused on a handful of characters, including a rather unflattering presentation of the narrator’s partner, a ‘…Melbourne-famous’ essayist (how much did Amerena draw on his relationship with Savage, a known essayist?!). So, I was desperate to see whether Savage returned the auto-fiction favour… and if she did (in the character of Sasha), what a burn!

The story focuses on Pip, a woman whose life has stalled. She’s in a dead-end job, is broke and has no plan to return to her university studies. When her long-absent father dies, she inherits fifty-thousand dollars and soon after, meets Sasha, a star in the narrow, academic world of postwar Yugoslavian literature.

Sasha is a walking red flag. He is also the kind of self-important person who I would avoid at a party. But Pip doesn’t see flaws, she sees vulnerabilities –

It was then that I understood who Sasha was: he was someone who presented himself at the radical fringes of the institution he nonetheless depended on for his identity and self-esteem.

They begin a passionate and intense relationship and within months have married and hatched a mad plan – use Pip’s inheritance to buy a decrepit house on a Greek island, where Sasha will write and Pip will sort out what to do with her life.

Not the life I had once imagined in a grand metropolis where I might self-actualise; not Milan, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles. Instead, I envisioned a simple life, a village life in which I could tend the garden, read in the shade, work the lunch shift at a little local tavern. Then, as the sun retreated each evening, I would rest my hand on my hip, look out at the horizon, smell the wild thyme, listen to the cacophony of insects, and watch the sky turn mauve, fuchsia and crimson on the horizon.

However, the house is not what they expected –

Veins of black lined the amber exterior. The building looked wet, rotten, amphibious.

Pip struggles to make the house habitable. Sasha is preoccupied with his writing. Pip’s closest friend, Viv, an environmental journalist, who is having his own career and relationship crisis, arrives for a visit. He spots a potential story relating to the island’s waste disposal, and this dominates the last part of the novel.

There’s a climate-crisis message in the book (the title refers to humans, the ‘ruiners’) as well as strong themes around political activism and cultural property. It’s a lot, particularly when you throw in nods to Dickens’s Great Expectations and mentions of Derrida and Hegel…

Perhaps we were not after all mere products of post-modern tea-towel circulation; I could still be moved by the world. 

Maybe I’m particularly shallow but I don’t have thoughts like this crossing my mind too often (and this is one example of many similar lines in the book).

Did Savage attempt too much? I can’t answer that but personally, I didn’t feel invested in any of the plot threads and by the end, every mention of Sasha made me roll my eyes. Hard.

Which brings me back to Amerena’s novel – when I finished it, I assumed it was satire, because there was so much overblown, academic grand-standing. I initially thought the same about The Ruiners, especially all the bits about Sasha, because he is a truly ridiculous, entitled man. However, the philosophizing in this novel seems much more serious and heavy-handed. So I began to wonder, is this how Ellena and Dominic are with their friends? Is this their experience of life? Is neither novel satire?

Side-note – I was fascinated by the role of mothers in this book (three were mentioned, each quite different).

My mother had loved me without me having to alter myself, and this experience had spoiled me for conditional love, the proleterian labour of adult romantic entanglements. Yet in Sasha I recognised this same quality: he could love without inflicting expectations on his beloved. He didn’t intercede, reprimand or judge.

This quote was early in the book because Sasha reveals himself to be none of those things. If I had any more energy for these characters, I’d delve into the mother theme, but I think I’m done here.

2.5/5

The food came out quickly on small ceramic ovals: deep-fried whitebait, black-eyed pea salad with pickled octopus, Greek salad, boiled potatoes with herbs, oil and red vinegar, and a triangle of yellow cheese. Every morsel was delicious.