Review: God Forgets About The Poor by Peter Polites

There’s something geological about this novel about a woman. Perhaps is the the crumbling limestone of the Greek island of Lefkada where she is born. Perhaps it is the sense of deep and ancient forces turning, of vast histories coming down the ages. It begins in 2021 in Sydney with a mother instructing her son how to write her story. “Try and write something good this time,” she says, “You can’t keep writing your gay things,” drawing a parallel with the person she is talking to and author Peter Polites, whose two previous novels are very gay things. Over this first chapter, which unfolds as continuous speech with the occasional interjection to berate her son, the woman urges him to start with her birth and follow the passage of her life as she migrates to Australia, marries and raises two children.

Subsequent chapters revisit the story that the woman, whose name we learn is Honoured, has sketched in, now in third person, indicating perhaps they are feats of imagination, gesturing to the impossibility of access to another person’s being, perhaps especially for those we closest to. Each joins Honoured or her family at a particular moment — the village, a bus to the airport in Athens, a morning in a Sydney home, and later a hospital, a car ride home. This is a migrant story, but not one that cannot be reduced to tropes. “People will love my suffering,” Honoured says with glee, but God Forgets About The Poor stands out for its encompassing of all life experiences, from the spiritual to the material, the historical to the philosophical. Indeed some of its darkest moments are elided, a narrative choice taken perhaps to avoid furthering harm and to return a little agency that has been taken away. This is the story of a life, a full one, full of suffering great and small, plenty of aches and flashes of joy and stark humour. What impresses is the utmost care with which Polites tells his tale; you can feel it in everything from the narrative choices to the sentences. Even when writer and subject trade barbs there is affection. The penultimate chapter in particular is an achingly stunning piece of writing.

Honoured is the source of consternation for her father Spirit as the third daughter in a patriarchal society. Spirit is initially bereft that she isn’t the long-awaited son and seeks to change his family’s fortunes. Although he eventually makes a break with tradition, he comes to understand his lack of gratitude as the inciting incident for generations of pain. “It was his vanity that had caused this,” he realises in a moment of self-awareness, and throughout God Forgets About The Poor Polites sets men’s hubris against the generational forbearance of women, particularly in its stinging punch of a final chapter. Honoured, warned of vanity by experience, is nevertheless enchanted:

Opals. The Australian stone. From the confines of her hospital bed, Honoured thought about how everyone in Australia had these stones. Back then, she had seen them on a man’s finger and linked the pretty glitter to the sparkling Sydney Harbour. Now, when she thought about that galaxy-looing rock, she lamented the limestone mountains of her homeland, the dull rock that occasionally glittered. She hadn’t seen anyone wearing opal in the longest time. They had lost their lustre when they became associated with tourists. If only she hadn’t been enamoured by the black rock on his pinky, if only she had realised she was being distracted by something shiny.

As in his previous novels, Polites has an incredibly defined sense of geography, mapping out space, whether outside or inside, with a rare kind of attention. The English names of characters — not just Honoured, but Resurrection, All Holy, Very Foreign — suggest the whole novel is an act of translation, a technique that gathers force as it progresses. Like all good translation it allows as much to be said in the words on the page as in the gap between them and the original text.

Gay rating: 3/5 for queer characters and themes.