Goodbye from Vanilla, Christine Mathieu

I am putting up a review of Goodbye from Vanilla (2006) a) because Bron was kind enough to add my last review, Cut, to her list of AusReadingMonth reviews; and b) because I may well have the only copy in existence.

There are quite a number of books on my shelves that I didn’t know that I had – and quite I few that I thought I had that I don’t seem to – and in looking for an unchallenging read a couple of weeks ago I came across this one that I had bought six or seven years ago in a job lot from a closing down secondhand bookshop.

The publisher, Littlefox of Fremantle WA has no presence that I can locate on the web; and nor does the book. The author, Christine Mathieu is an academic or teacher who seems to have written no other fiction. Apparently, “while in Spain, at the turn of the millenium, she began writing Goodbye from Vanilla in a fit of nostalgia for the old port of Fremantle where she lived in the 1980s” probably while a grad student in Anthropology at nearby Murdoch Uni.

The novel is set in the Humanities school of the fictitious O’Connor University (named for the engineer who famously built Fremantle Harbour and the water pipeline to the Goldfields); in Fremantle and its suburbs; and, briefly, in the Goldfields north of Kalgoorlie. This is not auto fiction, I don’t think, though the protagonist Doucette Ferré, would seem to have in her a lot of Mathieu, the author. Doucette, incidentally explains her name as derived from Don Quixote’s Dulcinea, though I’d be surprised if it’s not also a French in-joke on ignorant Australians (like me).

Milly’s brother was doing his PhD in Education, and I think lecturing, at Murdoch in the first half of the 1980s so I am sending this on to him to see if he recognises any of the situations or people.

Doucette’s proposed doctoral dissertation has the provisional title, A Feminist Critique of the Origins of the Third Republic: Women, the Economics of Sexuality and the Making of French Democracy. I tell you this because Mathieu comes up with some impressive supporting detail, but don’t worry, the novel is in the main a lighthearted satire of University life, with a wide cast and lots of complicated, not to say ridiculous, plot lines.

And we also know why the brutal treatment of justice that followed the worst massacre of 19th century Western Europe [following the Paris Commune] was brought to bear with such vicious savagery upon the most disadvantaged of all, the proletarian women of Paris. Because revolutionary women had dared strike at the very heart of the bourgeoisie, and the horror of the misogynist bourgeois is nowhere more clearly expressed than in those infamous words of Alexandre Dumas who wrote that the female communards resembled real women, only when they were dead.

from Doucette’s dissertation

It is important to recognise that thirty-something Doucette is chronically short of funds, good-looking, sexy and getting a lot of action and her best friend, school teacher Clara, is not (except sometimes with Doucette’s most recent ex-boyfriend, which Doucette doesn’t know). The male lead is Ricky, an Italian-Australian in his late twenties, not at uni, working in his Uncle Leo’s Italian cafe on The Esplanade, handsome, a player, but whose latest girlfriend, Susie, has just discovered she is pregnant. This could be a play – the whole cast rotate constantly through Leo’s Cafe Vinci.

Doucette has a teenage daughter, from a very young pregancy, who conveniently for the plot, follows her own much older boyfriend offstage to Sydney.

Other characters are head of Humanities, Fay E Payne, who it seems gives good marks to girl students for sex, and later in the novel has an ongoing rort whereby grad student grants are not paid out but instead go to fund her lifestyle; Dr David Finch, a lecturer in Humanities hanging out for tenure, American, gay, and it turns out, the writer of a bawdy, unpublished memoir. He is stuck in Perth because he is insanely in love with “a Cottesloe boy, a sous-chef at Paul’s”. (Cottesloe is the next but one beach suburb to the north of Freo); Alex Smith-Moreski, a short, lame, indie film-maker who is hopelessly in love with Doucette; Paul, an older anthropologist who is actually a secret agent with ASIO or the Federal Police; Professor David Hobbes, retirement age and the owner of a fine old house; and lots of others, in and out of each other’s beds like a French farce – I wonder if it actually is, and I missed it.

Doucette falls for an “extraordinarily handsome” student, Akito Foot (an Australian whose mother named him after a Japanese dog breed), 39, ex band member, ex-rich, who is aiming for an MBA so he can be rich again, and who keeps rejecting Doucette because she has no money, until he doesn’t.

Alex makes a movie in Prof Hobbes’ big house starring Doucette and Ricky; Paul gets Akito a job as a cleaner in a mine 600 km in a straight line north of Kalgoorlie – a road which I was on yesterday (Saturday) and regard as hilly and windy, but which I can see why a Frenchwoman might not; Doucette gets a grant to follow up her dissertation in Paris; Paul solves the smuggling case which he has been sure all along Akito holds the clue to; various people end up with other people, some happily. It’s a romp. I’m sure you’d all like it, if only I didn’t have the last remaining copy.

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Christine Mathieu, Goodbye from Vanilla, Littlefox, Fremantle, 2006. 372pp

The title relates to the sorry fact that if you want to sample all the flavours in the ice cream parlour then you might have to say goodbye to the one constant, vanilla.