Rocks in the Belly / Jon Bauer

What makes you pick up and read a book? Recommendations from trusted friends and colleagues probably count the most. But sometimes all it takes is a single sentence read by chance in a newspaper.Writing in the Australian last month, Stephen Romei said of debut author Jon Bauer’s Rocks in the Belly that “… it is one of the most unsettling novels I have read in a while, with an emotional sharpness that hurt.”

Unsettling. That intrigued me. I had to read this book.

And be warned, Rocks in the Belly is unsettling. Also confronting, unpleasant and laced with anger. It is also beautifully written, sensitive and wise, intensely sad and even funny at the right moments.The novel is told in two distinct voices that narrate events in alternate chapters – that of an 8 year old boy living with his parents, and that of the same boy, but 20 years later, now a grown man returned home to Australia to care for his dying mother.

The boy is an only child, his parents are passionate foster carers, particularly his mother. It becomes evident in the early chapters that this little boy, although quite sensitive and intelligent, is struggling to cope with the attention given to the foster boys that he is forced to share his parents and his home with. He disobeys, misbehaves and self-harms. His sense of hurt is overwhelming. Pressures build to breaking point when Robert, the latest foster boy, arrives and forms a close bond with the mother. A terrible event ensues, shattering the family and forever scarring the emotional life of the boy.As a man, he is returning home to the truth of what that eight year old child has made him into. Coming home brings out his anger and his darkest compulsions, all at a time when he is confronting the responsibility of being carer to his mother, the very same woman who was carer to him in those fraught years of his childhood.

Rocks in the Belly did unsettle me. But there is much skill and beauty in Bauer’s prose, particularly the amazing job he has done of voicing an 8 year old boy, source of much of the unexpected humour. I even shed a tear (I thought I was in the clear, until page 275).

This book makes you think about the deep persistence of childhood within our (supposedly) mature adult selves, and I thought it offered a fairly authentic insight into some of the darker currents lurking within the male psyche.

Rocks in the Belly / Jon Bauer