Eating Out Again and other stories by Natalie Scott (2001)

Scott's prose is characterised by its poetic concision. It's a very particular world she portrays, tinted with disappointed intelligent women, or oblivious dullard ones, or nervously extreme uptight ones, or those who are looking out at their world through coloured glasses of one kind or another. Every now and then it is a man she depicts, and they have some of the same attributes, tending toward the fussy. Her other men are subsidiary characters who have often brought about the intensities of her pointed women through neglect, or lack of understanding. Rarely there is a positive combination too, a second relationship perhaps, where past miseries are forgotten in a flush of new possibilities. The first story here (the title story about a homeless woman) is a partner to the last of the previous volume (about a homeless man). Many in the last half of this collection are brilliantly observed zesty slices of well-heeled Australian life, occasionally brutally funny (Happy Ever After) whilst remaining subtle, otherwise poignant and moving (Totem, The Queen of Disorder). Her major fault surfaces early on with the second story and keeps appearing in at least the following eight: it is the putting of poetic flights into mundane mouths. When down to earth characters emit utterly poetic phrases all semblance of reality is lost. Other than that, and a couple of flat endings, a fine collection.