TIME MAGAZINE CALLS him the 'deity of disappointment'. The Los Angeles Times says he 'reminds us what it is to be human, and reminds us to be proud of our humanity'. He has twice made the Booker Prize short-list and is among Australia's leading writers. But to his neighbours near Fremantle, Western Australia, Tim Winton is the hairy bloke who never seems to leave the house. Suspicions only fell away when he started to appear on television in the 1990s.
'They thought I was a drug dealer,' Winton says in a Sydney hotel. 'I had no visible means of support. I had long hair, a big vegetable garden. I just didn't go to work. Everyone else was a fisherman, and what was I doing?'
Winton, 44, has ventured east for the Australian release of The Turning (Picador), a collection of 17 short stories that will appear elsewhere in March. Each tale is full of Winton's customary bleak realism.
In the title story, Raelene, a trailer park housewife, suffocates in an aluminium caravan. She weeps when looking at Max, her paunchy other half, as he snores in bed. She takes her daughters through the rain to the outside toilet and, while they sit swinging their legs, tries to light a joint that proves too soggy. So she swallows it and promptly throws it back up. Later, she feels so low it hurts to breathe and she wonders whether she will ever have the courage to kill herself.
Long, Clear View follows a teenage gun nut called Vic, who wonders what it feels like to kill other people, repelled by the world beyond his window, where people cheat, thieve and worse. 'They're starving their pets and flogging their kids and letting them hang in their wardrobes and burn in cars and choke to death in beachside toilets,' he says.
Winton says the book's inhabitants do a lot of 'useless spinning on the spot'. But they also make reassessments and detours and have changes of heart, he says. Raelene finds God or at least a 'ripped' snowdome figurine of Jesus equipped with defined abs and pecs, which excite her.
