By Clinton Caward

Hamish Hamilton, 297pp, $29.95

LIKE many writers, Clinton Caward lists all the interesting or unusual jobs he's had before publishing: bank clerk, plumber, barman, landscape gardener, pizza cook, flotation tank technician . . . But as his world-weary narrator, Spencer, observes in Caward's engaging debut novel, you don't usually include your time in a Kings Cross sex shop on your résumé.

Like Caward, who'd say he sold “marital aids”, I worked in a Cross “bookshop”. Catching me creeping in after a double shift, my mother asked me what kind of bookshop it was that closed so late.

“It's, ah, a porn shop,” I said, too tired to fib.

“Like Cash Converters?”

“More like Happy Hockers.”

I'd repeat it. Not because I was ashamed but because the conversation inexorably led to breathless questions about the pervs and weirdos. Like Spencer, I found that friends and "young men who came in off the street would tell me I had the best job in the world, watch[ing] porn 24/7. And getting paid for it."

But surrounded by the mechanics and economics of desire (the lurid DVDs, dildos and dog collars, dispensing lube and tissues and coins for the booths), it struck me all too often – like Spencer – that our deepest desires often mirror our darkest shames.

While Sydney, dazzled by the glistering harbour, turns its back on the factory-spoiled wastes out west, the Cross has always clutched at its shoulder: an ugly gremlin whispering dirty little secrets. Endlessly written and fantasised about, it is regarded by Sydneysiders with disdain and fascination: a shadowy maze where the usual rules don't apply. Not just propriety but decency.

Aimless, alienated Spencer spends his nights dealing with dealers, head cases, perverts; his obsessive, naturally dodgy boss, his surprisingly sweet co-workers and the complicated secrets of his past.

Wasting his days making creepy nativity videos with blow-up dolls and misshapen sculptures, he floats into a desultory affair with a complicated divorcee and, looking for something more, falls in love with a teenage prostitute, Livia.

Although steeped in the degeneracy around him, he has little insight. He's painfully aware of the "machine" emitting a jack-o'-lantern heat to attract and trap the venal and vulnerable:

"The more people rely on the machine for human connectivity, the less they need [it], even though that's the desire that leads them to the machine. Men brought in their bodies and tried to empty themselves of their loneliness in the booths . . . When technology joins minds, it separates bodies."

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/