Andrew Pippos’ The Transformations: a touching story of love, loss and newspapers

In Andrew Pippos’ successful epic migrant family saga, Lucky’s (2020), the characters were often larger than life and violence never far from the picture. His new novel, The Transformations, takes a psychologically darker, slower and more internal trajectory across a narrative that encompasses the online transformation of newspapers and journalism during the last decade, but goes much further.

The novel pursues transformations consequent upon divorce, parenting a teenager, recovery from childhood sexual abuse, struggles with alcoholism, emerging queer identity, managing the complexities of an open marriage, workplace romances and generational change among the wealthy.

Review: The Transformations – Andrew Pippos (Picador)

The range of issues raised is extraordinary, and makes for a rich reading experience. Inevitably, however, some of the scenarios are dealt with too summarily, because they are not central to what is at the passionate heart of the book.

At the book’s centre is a lonely man, George Desoulis, who, in an echo from the earlier novel, is the son of a Greek migrant cafe-owning family. George is a subeditor at The National, a newspaper run out of Sydney and owned by an old-style broadsheet magnate – a rival to the Murdochs.

The point of this fiction is not to create a roman à clef about the Packers or the Fairfax family, but to document the transformation of a workplace as the usual business and vocational models for newspapers and journalists collapsed around this time.

There are many highly detailed, nostalgic and even loving accounts of newsrooms, printing presses, conversations and the pub-centred community around the production of physical daily editions of a newspaper. As an extension of this context, the novel is also an homage to the city of Sydney.

For George, the newspaper is a kind of home and family. It is the place where everyone likes him, where his expertise is appreciated, and where he can more or less put aside the currents of fear, shame, doubt and withdrawal that flow through him as a result of being repeatedly abused by a Marist brother as a schoolboy.

It is no surprise that he finds himself a lover in the newsroom. Cassandra is an older married woman, more skilled, knowledgeable and experienced than George at making sexual encounters work for both partners, better at communication, and perhaps at love.

Early in the novel George tells a story from his childhood about learning to ride a horse. His uncle put him on an old horse and entered him in the Goulburn rodeo without offering any lessons in riding or dressage. The horse was a veteran, he knew what to do, the uncle said.

And sure enough, George took out the children’s prize on his uncle’s horse. The story becomes emblematic of George’s path through life. His early sexual encounters with girls and his latest love affair with Cassandra all follow this pattern of a boy being taken in hand by a practised partner.