An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life by Paul Dalla Rosa
Capitalism, nihilism and the futility of existence all lie firmly within the crosshairs of Paul Dalla Rosa’s An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life (2022). There are nine standalone stories in the Melbourne writer’s debut short story collection. They are at times bleak and laced with a sense of fatalism, but there is also a thread of tenderness to Dalla Rosa’s work – and, of course, a searing sense of irony and skewering wit. Dalla Rosa infuses his collection with a casual queerness that feels refreshing; the character’s queer identity is never treated as anything more than a simple fact, requiring neither justification nor excessive discussion.
Each of these characters are in some way familiar to us: whether we’ve seen them, dated them or even in darker moments been them. They are modern, young or at the tail end of what society considers young. Dalla Rosa himself told novelist Marlowe Granados during an interview on his Substack that many of the stories come from “obsessively trying to figure out the problem of being young.”
One problem, it seems, is capitalism. The futility and monotony of eat-sleep-work-repeat echoes throughout each of the stories. There is a sense that jobs are where dreams go to die and where life goes to stagnate. This feeling is most encapsulated in the story “Contact”, which follows an unnamed woman at her job in a call centre. Around her, the call centre company rapidly modernises and transforms into an increasingly dystopic landscape wherein technology replaces humans in all aspects. But the woman remains almost robotically passive throughout and resigned to her endless routine, focusing on what all office workers can relate to being obsessed with – annual leave:
“She sits back at her desk and refreshes a webpage while calculating her annual leave.”
Dalla Rosa also taps into the innate fear of every creative; that whatever art they create will be regulated to the sidelines so they can simply make ends meet. Like academic and writer Emma in “Charlie in High Definition:”
“It often seemed like Emma was working and none of it was art. There hadn’t been a point at which Emma decided she wasn’t making art anymore, she just wasn’t making art at this time. This time has been the past three years.”
In “Comme,” the protagonist believes that meeting the elusive founder of the fashion label where they work will propel him to greater heights. In “Fame”, our unnamed wannabe star karaoke and believes they will be discovered. The college student in “An MFA Story” sends their short stories to their neighbour and waits (and waits and waits) to hear what they think of it. We are all seeking validation outside of ourselves, Dalla Rosa seems to say. Such is the curse of the creative.
There is a sly hint of something more to this as well, a thread of self-delusion that ties each of these characters together. Does every artist, writer, actor think they are the next big thing? Do we all have that little voice inside us that says that we, above all else, deserve the next break? Dalla Rosa delights in holding a mirror up to these uncomfortable truths.
Dalla Rosa also uses his stories to explore the modern obsession with perfectly curated lives. We have the character of Sam of “Short Stack” who leads a lonely and isolated life, clinging to the idea of his co-workers being his friends whilst being self-aware enough to recognise, somewhere deep down, that any relationship with them is purely forced through close proximation. Sam lives spectacularly beyond his means, with rising debts and declining credit cards, all to meet the image in his head:
“Sam imagined everyone kicking on to his apartment, where people would comment on his things and say, That’s a cool TV, or, Wow is that the expresso machine George Clooney uses?”
And none so truly sums up the idea of image and appearance than the protagonist of “Comme” who’s grotesque problem (think bodily fluids) exposes the frailty of the human condition, and the failures of the body to meet up to the expectations of the outside world.
Dalla Rosa has a talent for lacing humour in his words, and it’s often subtle enough to catch you off-guard:
“They went on a yacht and took photos of one another on the yacht. The yacht was stationary, docked in the marina. This wasn’t apparent in the photographs.”
It’s this humour that eases the tension. I won’t lie: there will be stories that have you twisting into a full-body cringe, where the actions of the protagonists make you want to bang your head against a wall. But you keep reading anyway – like a car crash, you just can’t look away.
I am drawn to the title of the collection, which appears as a line in “Contact:” “My psychologist thinks I am a T-Rex. Later at home, she thinks, I have an exciting and vivid life.” What drives each story truly is the inner life of every narrator; the unique perspective they bring. To me that line is a streak of hope; there is bleakness, repetition and monotony in life, yes, but minds are not caged. Like Sam, who finally steals a plane in Grand Theft Auto and flies it high above the streets:
“The city was below him, all its freeways and fast-food restaurants and shitty apartment towers like Sam’s shitty apartment tower, and a calm came over him.”
There is a freedom we can enter in our minds, a limitlessness we can tap into. Of course, it is a double-edged sword; Dalla Rosa’s work also reminds us not to lose ourselves to this unreality.
Whether it’s a story about a cat with a grudge against a roommate, or a writer who doesn’t write, the stories in this collection will stick with you, particularly their unflinching prose, whip-smart wit and crackling dialogue.
Shaeden Berry is a writer from Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia who has written for Refinery29, MamaMia, Fashion Journal and Oody Koo the Journal. When she’s not writing or reading, you can find her staring adoringly at her two cats. For more, and for content of said cats, follow her on Instagram @berrywellthanks