Andrew Pippos, the author of Lucky’s, shares a similar ancestry with me: our families originate from the Eptanisa, a series of seven islands in the Ionian Sea. I have not met him, but true to the rules that police Greek diaspora, I was bound by an unspoken cultural protocol to write about this book – a multigenerational family saga set around a restaurant chain in Australia.
The book centres the character of Lucky, a second-generation Chicago-born clarinet-playing Greek man who finds himself in wartime Australia in the 50s, escaping service by impersonating “king of swing” Benny Goodman to the rubes of the colonial outpost. He represents the entrepreneurial streak common among Greeks, and his story shows the complexity of the community. Lucky eventually comes into money through personal tragedy, and uses it to run a successful franchise of cafe diners – the type of which were popular in the 50s and 60s in Australia.
Local Greek diners were in every suburb and country town of Australia. They saluted camp Americana with booths and soda fountains and names like “The Niagara” and “The Californian”, and played an important role in Australia’s casual dining landscape before pub counter meals took over. They were also the place Anglo Australians had their first encounters with us wogs.
Documentary photographer Effy Alexakis and historian Leonard Janiszewski have published a book dedicated to these diners. Flick through it and you’ll find a picture of the Cafe De Luxe in Brewarrina, which was run by the Pippos family. There’s no indication that Lucky’s is autofiction, but the personal history of the writer and his family seems to have been a jumping-off point for his imagination.
Set in different time periods, the novel follows characters who have their fate linked with this mini dining empire. Lucky himself follows a classically tragic arc, rising from the 1960s onwards before his hubris leads to a fall in the 90s. There is another Greek family that is headed by Achilles, their lives decimated because of this man’s toxic ambitions and inability to read emotions. And then there’s Emily, a young journo from an Anglo British background who is trying to find out how and why her family is intertwined with this chain of cafes.
Novels tell us hidden stories. So many of the hijinks in Lucky’s sound like overheard gossip and banter that’s been narrativised into a fictional saga. Reading the parts about the Greeks, I think about the author as a child playing under the counter of his family’s diner, listening to chatter about a certain aunty or uncle.
Written in third person, the prose is journalistic. Its commitment is to story, and Pippos writes without embellishment or ego in a way that makes the characters pop. I found myself thinking about these people as I drove to work, passing Greek venues like halls and churches. Would I see Lucky at one of the gambling dens in Belmore?
The middlebrow satire of Franzen can be found in Emily, a failed fiction writer turned reporter. “I’m a storyteller,” Emily proclaims – aren’t we all – but in fact, she is one of the most interesting characters, with sympathetic daddy issues, professional frustration and a wretchedly broken heart. Her journey overlaps with Lucky’s terrifically, and traumatically.
The rendering of my community sings to me: toxic men who are bound by southern European masculinity, and the savagely intelligent women. I can see those women in my mind’s eye, alert and daring; reading this novel, these characters unleashed a storm of melancholia.
You would think a rendering of the internal machinations of a migrant community would be too niche, but the pathos of this story will grip a broader audience. What this novel proves is that to make a story universal, it needs to be specific and authentically told. Lucky’s also dips into different genres: sometimes the family saga becomes a forensic crime investigation, dealing with public violence and reading with the harrow of true crime writing. Another character, the author Ian, partakes in the lovely and long tradition of Australian literary fraud: a riff on Ern Malley slash Helen Demidenko, with thwarted ambitions that lead to a false identity. Fabulous.
And then we get to the food. The promise of a diverse cuisine (we could put tzatziki on our lamb roasts!) was a sprong of legitimisation for the post-second world war settler migrants, and one of the ways the project of multiculturalism was sold to Australia. Lucky’s speaks to this time, with all the promise and hope of what neo-battlers would contribute to the cultural fabric of the nation. Food is the lacquer of a diverse and cosmopolitan society. I keep this in mind because in the novel Lucky’s, food takes on a new meaning
There is a moment when an angry old wog Achilles is beating down a customer in his diner. For no reason he yells “Giouvarlakia!” – the meatballs in a special egg lemon soup (the word made my mouth water; I googled the recipe immediately). But the scene represented something of a subversion: food is a weapon in this book. Perhaps it never was the big unifying aspect of our cosmopolitan society, but an aspect of identity that has been deployed violently to grant my community access and position in Australia. In reflection, Lucky’s – the novel – welcomes us to have conversations about how a diaspora settles into a country, and what tools it uses for settlement.
A book is many things to many people, and such is the novel Lucky’s. It’s a paper monument to the old Greek diaspora. A fictionalised account of an awfully specific phenomena in Australian history. It’s a saga that encapsulates elements of family drama, true crime and Greek tragedy. Most of all it’s a must-read from a new favoured son of the Eptanisa.
Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos is out now through Picador
