“And this, he thinks to himself and not for the first time, this is what is good about alcohol. Its rare amplification of aggression notwithstanding, its preference for addiction and the steady erosion of vital organs aside, alcohol can at least make the sheer gnawing inexplicability of life seem very funny indeed.”

Afternoons With Harvey Beam is the first novel by Australian journalist, author, tutor, mother and timid surfer, Carrie Cox. Talk-back radio host Harvey Beam is on a plane from Sydney to his hometown, Shorton. Work hasn’t been going well and Trudi at HR is pushing him to accept “the offer” and make way for the rival he despises, John Jackson. Harvey doesn’t have much time for many of the contemporary talk-back hosts, who see themselves, instead of the listeners and callers, as the ‘talent’.

Basically, Harvey is pretty cynical “He had long hoped HR managers would go the way of quality assurance consultants and organisational change facilitators and other such experimental workplace creations fired in the kiln of corporate wankery. But like its equally unproductive cousin, IT support, HR doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Its ‘people people’ keep employing each other. Always the last left standing.”

But he’s on the way to Shorton, after leaving twenty years previous, because his father is dying: a father he doesn’t love or even like, a father he left town to escape. And returning of course means interacting with his family: a brother who doesn’t speak to him and sisters who seem to be at war with each other; and a town that seems less than impressed with this big city radio star.

The only respite from it all is the woman he met on the plane: a fly-in-fly-out nurse who seem willing to spend her free time in his company. Oh, and the casual spots he’s been convinced to do on Shorton’s local radio which was, back then, his first paying job, and a nose-thumb at his academic father.

The reason for his estrangement and his apparent failure as a husband and father becomes more evident as the events of Harvey’s past are gradually revealed. While the narrative does jump around in time quite a bit, dipping into Harvey’s immediate past as well as his childhood and adolescence, from the context it is easily clear to which time these chapters refer. And if the start feels perhaps a little slow, then the reader’s patience is amply rewarded as the story picks up pace and all the earlier tidbits of fact fall into place.

Some of Cox’s characters surprise and delight; others disappoint. On air, Harvey has a way with words that seems to fail him en famille, when he excels at cringe-worthy foot-in-mouth utterances. Cox gives many of her characters wise words about a myriad of subjects: parenting, forgiveness, and whether it’s really possible to go back home. “Expectations can feel like unfair demands to someone who just can’t deliver.”

Harvey muses “It should be easier to be a father when you do actually love your kids, but it’s not. Affection is a difficult thing to start with confidence in your twenties” and, about his indifference to his father thinks “Surely the anger and the love and the disappointment and the joy and the terror that spins at the core of a family can be summoned at any age; wrest us back into our bodies, awaken old bones.”

Cox has some marvellous turns of phrase: Harvey refers to his sisters’ “bristly circling game that is their discomfort zone”; to family as “This quagmire of owed apologies and frayed endings and stupefying bullshit.” Later, he realises “The idea no longer sat in the dark part of his brain that couldn’t make a decision.”

Some readers may find the use of expletives unnecessary but they are a natural fit for the characters who use them. Cox manages to have the readers eyes welling up with tears, gasping in amazement and laughing out loud all on the same page. Quite hilarious are Harvey’s account of his failed blind date, the siblings’ selection process of songs for the funeral, and parts of the son-in-law’s impromptu speech at the funeral.

Cox gives the reader a believable cast, natural dialogue and a plot with a great twist towards the end; there’s a sweet irony in where Harvey ends up. Funny, sad and ultimately very moving, this is a brilliant debut novel and readers will be impatient to see what Cox does next.