The latest novel by multi-award-winning Australian author, Michelle de Kretser, is an innovative blend of fiction, memoir and non-fiction. To what extent this is memoir is up to the reader to figure out, but given its front cover photograph of a young de Kretser, we should assume some autobiographical influence, if not content. De Kretser claimed in an interview that her aim with this hybrid form was to achieve a more truthful rendering of life than would be possible in a traditional novel.
Set in 1986, a Sri Lankan-born young woman moves from Sydney to St Kilda where she’s undertaking postgraduate studies on the novels of Virginia Woolf. Her busy social life leads to her becoming involved with Kit, another woman’s boyfriend. Increasingly afflicted by feelings of jealousy, rivalry with, and animosity towards the other woman, she begins to visualise petty acts of vengeance. A vocal and committed feminist herself and deeply influenced by Woolf’s feminist principles, she’s worried that in aggressively pursuing Kit, she’s betraying her own values. Her anxiety is exacerbated by her troubled co-dependent relationship with her mother, which is portrayed through excerpts from her mother’s letters. Set within the framework of Woolf’s sometimes flawed legacy, the protagonist’s quest to balance her own desires with principles she aspires to gives the story an intriguing dimension.
One of the characters says at one stage, ‘I’m going to focus on making art that doesn’t look like art’, which is what de Kretser has successfully achieved. Her spare, deceptively ingenuous prose works to convey the character’s inner world of conflicting ideologies, cultural contradictions and longing, with authority.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka. She lives in Warrane/Sydney on unceded Gadigal land. An honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney, she has won several awards for her fiction. Theory & Practice is her seventh novel.
0 Comments