Where, asked the New York Times in July, are all the ‘young straight white male novelists’ these days? It’s a question that has been asked many times. And there can be no arguing with the facts: the breakout literary stars of the past few decades have had little in common with the likes of Philip Roth and Martin Amis. The unnamed narrator of Australian author Dominic Amerena’s debut novel couldn’t be more aware that he’s a member of a rare and threatened species: the literary male. ‘You look like a pig in shit,’ says his girlfriend, Ruth, when she catches him in an unusually upbeat mood. ‘Did they find an unpublished manuscript by David Foster Wallace?’

Ruth herself is a writer and a notably more successful one than the narrator. Her essay about her troubled relationship with her mother – a piece she says ‘feels necessary’ – has appeared in a prestigious American magazine and offers of work are pouring in. ‘Do you ever feel like you were born at the wrong time? In the wrong body,’ asks a friend, who’s struggling to find a publisher for his ‘knotty doorstopper about a little-known colonial explorer’. Amerena’s narrator is shrewd enough to realise that any vaguely macho subject isn’t worth staking your career on. As another character puts it, ‘men writing about their erections does not play well with funding bodies – nor readers.’ 

When the narrator sees a faintly recognisable woman at the swimming pool in the Melbourne suburb where he lives, he believes he may have stumbled on a sellable topic. Could this be the novelist Brenda Shales, who produced two scandalous masterpieces of Australian feminist writing half a century ago before