HOPSCOTCH
By Jane Messer. Picador. 335pp. $29.99

Jane Messer has published three books previously, but has timed, weighted and judged this book particularly well. Despite the title, this story of family life in Sydney during the global financial crisis resembles hopscotch less than it does a game of snakes and ladders – but with few ladders supplied.

Hopscotch is notable for many rather charming, winning qualities, but especially for Messer's slightly cock-eyed, off-on-a-tangent take on life. The acknowledgements, for instance, include thanks to her mother for tying the author to a sandstone boulder in a national park. Similarly, when Messer introduces her fictional family (it is October 2008, in Lane Cove), she has them harmonise their singing of "Happy Birthday", off the father's note, as though a family could operate as a choir. Family harmony then leaches away as financial hardship bites, with Tim Tams being the first staple dispensed with.

Hopscotch takes getting used to. Messer brings in an extensive cast of characters, all of whom spend a fair bit of time musing, reflecting, fretting and fiddling about what is going on. Theirs are not so much lives of quiet desperation as lives of considered, resented frustration. Most of the cast are self-aware, but in an awkward, incomplete way.

That can be fun. One person enjoys stirring the ingredients for panna cotta, savouring "the opportunity to do just the one thing well". Another "realised she was a problem for herself far more than others". A scene where a would-be swimmer is shamed and put off by the established competition at the Milson's Point pool is so detailed and exact as to be disconcertingly focused. So, too, is Messer's account of a first lesbian kiss, prompted by a girl wandering into her bedroom in search of her ugg boots. By contrast, a scene at a cremation is, if not played for laughs, down-played in the most laconic, matter-of-fact fashion.

Hopscotch is emphatically episodic, and should therefore be judged by episodes like the swim and the kiss. There are many first-rate incidents, anecdotes and asides, as Messer's characters go about "exploring ideas, investigating possibilities". An excursion to Dubai is a bit flaccid; not even Joseph O'Neill (with The Dog) could make much out of that city as a setting. On the other hand, a road trip down to Goulburn is memorable for an encounter with a granny, so old that little matters to her in life other than a good bridge hand and the biscuits she still bakes.

A lot of Messer's characters are pretty down on the world. One of them reckons that words of self-criticism are "pasted like Post-Its to her forehead". She might well be speaking for much of the cast in this knowing, cleverly intimate novel. As Messer's characters unravel, so her plot winds up and tightens up. That is no mean feat.

Mark Thomas is a Canberra reviewer.