Love Stories by Trent Dalton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m going to go right down the middle with a middling rating of this book, with the stars mostly for the intention. It is clear that Dalton is a lovely man with a great big heart and the genesis of the book and many of the stories are truly heart-warming. But Dalton turns sugar into saccharine. He’s so in love with the idea of love, so excited about the project of capturing people’s love stories by sitting on a corner in Brisbane with a typewriter, that everyone sounds the same, with similar dialogue, language and opinions, as if they are all under the same spell.
Dalton loves to capture Aussie vernacular – sorta, kinda – and makes descriptions bigger than big: ‘heart the size of the Indian subcontinent’; ‘Mike Tyson meets Mad Max meets a meteorological phenomenon’; ‘more valuable to the United States of America than all the gold in Fort Knox’.
To my taste, this is distancing, rather than engaging, and basically, all too much. And yet, I could be annoyed by a paragraph and suddenly feel a tear coming on, which Dalton would love, since many of his protagonists cry because they are so happy (or in love, or touched, or sad). As most readers of the book loved it, I certainly won’t begrudge them this burst of positivity and love, written as an antidote to the confines of the COVID pandemic. And who am I to argue with the power of love?