Speaker 1: Picture an Australian novel about a young woman in inner
Speaker 1: city Melbourne in the early eighties, navigating a burgeoning intellectual
Speaker 1: and cultural life and expanding sense of the world from
Speaker 1: her studies, but also an explosion of friends and lovers,
Speaker 1: of sexual jealousy, and anxious navigation of social and personal boundaries.
Speaker 1: It's a slender book, and many critics seem to be
Speaker 1: bogged down in questions of form and content, asking how
Speaker 1: much of it is fiction and how much is just
Speaker 1: based on the author's own life. I suspect if you
Speaker 1: are setting up a drinking game for read this, one
Speaker 1: of the more dangerous prompts for drinking would be mentioned
Speaker 1: of Helen Ghana, our first guest, the patron saint of
Speaker 1: this show and also part of the inspiration behind our
Speaker 1: annual pilgrimage to fitzro Paul. So it would be natural
Speaker 1: for the above description to immediately prompt the eager listener
Speaker 1: to hit their imaginary game show buzzer and shout monkey Grip.
Speaker 1: It's Monkey Grip. But the novel in question isn't that
Speaker 1: classic debut. It's almost more than fifty years old now.
Speaker 1: The novel I'm talking about today is a new release,
Speaker 1: one that came out late last year by one of
Speaker 1: Australia's most accomplished and admired litterary novelists. Despite making a
Speaker 1: name for herself with sweeping maximalist novels, Michelle du Kretsa
Speaker 1: is an author who has never been afraid of formal experimentation.
Speaker 1: Her seventh book, Theory and Practice, supports this idea. It's
Speaker 1: bold and once again there's a heady mix of serious
Speaker 1: intellectual inquiry with beautifully observed characterization and then formal play.
Speaker 1: It's a novel, but the front cover carries a photo
Speaker 1: of a young Dacretsa, presumably at the age of the
Speaker 1: book's protagonist, a writer who is ostensibly narrating the book.
Speaker 1: A handful of pages in after the opening of what
Speaker 1: reads like a naturalistic historical novel, the narrator chips in.
Speaker 1: At that point she writes, the novel of us writing stalled.
Speaker 1: It's really hard not to read this interjection as Decrets's own.
Speaker 1: The confessional, inquiring voice is belonging, unfiltered to its author.
Speaker 1: This blurring between fiction and memoir, between narrative and essay
Speaker 1: is the prevailing mode of the book, and the product
Speaker 1: is thrilling. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read. This
Speaker 1: the show about the practice we love and the theory
Speaker 1: behind it. I love this novel, and its sense of
Speaker 1: intellectual curiosity and structural playfulness only enhance the human story
Speaker 1: at its heart. But that cheekiness about category about how
Speaker 1: it should be read, those aren't incidental pleasures. They're front
Speaker 1: and center of how the book's were been published, and
Speaker 1: the obvious starting point is its front cover, the striking
Speaker 1: design by Text Publishings designer Chong Wing Ho, and the
Speaker 1: books author looking out at us as we begin, I
Speaker 1: thought I might begin by asking when you knew you
Speaker 1: were going to be comfortable with or you wanted your
Speaker 1: own photo on the cover of this novel?
Speaker 2: Okay, well, Cheong asked me for photos of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: I sent him a selection, a small selection, because I
Speaker 2: don't have many photos full stop. He came back with
Speaker 2: that one and said, how would you feel if I
Speaker 2: made this famous? I said frightened. He said why. I said, well,
Speaker 2: I don't want this novel to be taken for a
Speaker 2: memoirle and he said no, we'll take care of that,
Speaker 2: don't worry. While he was working on the layout. I was,
Speaker 2: of course, still frightened of that misreading, and I was
Speaker 2: talking it over with my partner, who but the very
Speaker 2: salient pointer, as he often does that whenever a woman
Speaker 2: writes a novel with the first person narrator, it's taken
Speaker 2: as sort of biographical. So he said, you know, you
Speaker 2: could have put a photo of anything on the cover
Speaker 2: and it would still be read as autobiography. And I
Speaker 2: certainly had this experience with my last novel, one half
Speaker 2: of which had a young female narrator. So I thought
Speaker 2: that that was a good point. And when the cover
Speaker 2: came back, well, of course under the photo were the
Speaker 2: words the new novel underlined twice, and as I looked
Speaker 2: at it, I thought it gestured at the hybrid nature
Speaker 2: of the novel. It was saying, this is not straight fiction,
Speaker 2: but it's not memoir either, And the more I looked
Speaker 2: at it, it all fell into place for me when
Speaker 2: I looked at the photo, and it reminded me of
Speaker 2: Madrid's famous photo realist painting of a pipe captioned this
Speaker 2: is not a pipe. In other words, reality and its
Speaker 2: representation and art are not the same thing. I don't
Speaker 2: know whether that was what Chong was channeling, but I
Speaker 2: do know that certainly towards the end of the novel
Speaker 2: a character specifically warns against mistaking realism for reality, so
Speaker 2: perhaps that also played its part in Chong's decision. And
Speaker 2: I am really pleased we went with that cover because
Speaker 2: I think it's very striking visually, and I think it
Speaker 2: has meant that a lot of young women in particular
Speaker 2: have picked up the novel, and that is of course
Speaker 2: extremely gratifying.
Speaker 1: You mentioned several times about the reading that it invites,
Speaker 1: and it seems to me that it invites a particular reading,
Speaker 1: but perhaps more than that, and not just to cover,
Speaker 1: but moving into some of the choices made within the
Speaker 1: book itself, it provokes a particular reading more than it
Speaker 1: invites it that there is a sense of challenge and
Speaker 1: play here that is designed not just to passively let
Speaker 1: the reader come to it on their own terms, but
Speaker 1: actively to unsettle or to just just to force them
Speaker 1: to do a little bit more work.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, I quite like unsettling readers. Why not. I
Speaker 2: like novels set on set for me my expectations that
Speaker 2: play with my expectations, and so yes, absolutely, I think
Speaker 2: that's fair to say that it does, let's say, strongly
Speaker 2: encourage a certain reading, which is there not necessarily followed through.
Speaker 2: We don't want to have any spoilers.
Speaker 1: But now I love it, and there is a palpable
Speaker 1: sense that I have felt this across your entire body
Speaker 1: of work. Your appetite for play and your desire not
Speaker 1: to allow the constraints of convention to hold you back
Speaker 1: seems to be more acute with each book. Is that
Speaker 1: a reasonable summation, Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2: I'm flattered by that, of course, But I would say that,
Speaker 2: for instance, my second novel, The Hamilton Case, very much
Speaker 2: plays with the expectations set up by the conventional who
Speaker 2: done it. So I guess that grows back a fair
Speaker 2: way that kind of interest in form and narrative convention,
Speaker 2: certainly with this one. And I you know, as you say,
Speaker 2: I've had this interest in destabilizing the realist novel, and
Speaker 2: so I wanted to write what I have come to
Speaker 2: call the hyperrealist novel, the novel that doesn't read like
Speaker 2: a novel, and hence the start of Theory and Practice,
Speaker 2: which presents a completely conventional realist novel. And if I
Speaker 2: might say so without sounding boastful, or anything, I think
Speaker 2: quite efficiently, for given the length it is, sets up
Speaker 2: an intrigue, a plot, a miscarriage of justice, a possible
Speaker 2: romantic entanglement. In quite a few pages it does that
Speaker 2: equssion play, and then it changes completely. And the reason
Speaker 2: for doing that is, you know, it's like placing black
Speaker 2: and white, and both colors come up shopper when they
Speaker 2: are placed next to their antithesis. So I wanted what
Speaker 2: followed to seem as the narrator say she wishes to
Speaker 2: be telling the truth, to seem utterly and completely truthful
Speaker 2: and not like a novel. And one of the other reasons,
Speaker 2: for sort of secondary reason I suppose for having that
Speaker 2: realist extract at the start, is that you know, the
Speaker 2: narrator is a novelist, and when you get to the
Speaker 2: end of the novel, you see how little events and
Speaker 2: little details that have happened to her in her life
Speaker 2: are reconfigured in the fiction that proceeds that starts theory
Speaker 2: and practice, so it's kind of like the theory and
Speaker 2: practice of the novel as well. I had in mind
Speaker 2: that instruction you get in Matt's exams to show your workings.
Speaker 2: So if you like the whole of the hyperrealist novel
Speaker 2: is kind of the workings showing how those little beds
Speaker 2: make it into fiction in disguised form, transformed, made fictional,
Speaker 2: often out of recognition. So that was of interest to
Speaker 2: me as well, you know, how to demonstrate how little
Speaker 2: facts from one's life get turned into fiction.
Speaker 1: When I finished reading, I went up and got myself
Speaker 1: a copy of Virginia Wolf's The Years, which I have
Speaker 1: to confess I had never read. I mean, wolf obviously
Speaker 1: is very important to this book and to you as
Speaker 1: a writer, But did you talk for a moment about
Speaker 1: The Years in particular and what it is that piqued
Speaker 1: your interest about that particular book.
Speaker 2: So in the novel, the narrator is writing a thesis
Speaker 2: on Virginia Wolfe's late fiction and on the three last novels,
Speaker 2: namely The Waves, The Year's and Between the Acts. I'd
Speaker 2: actually read both The Waves and Between the Acts, and
Speaker 2: I hadn't read The Years. It was Wolfe's bestseller in
Speaker 2: her day, and it's really underread now. So I read
Speaker 2: it because I wanted the late fiction, because everyone writes
Speaker 2: about the you know, the missus Dillaway into the Lighthouse.
Speaker 2: I wanted something different, and I've read it, and I
Speaker 2: read about it in Wolfe's diaries, her composition of it.
Speaker 2: I was quite surprised when I read it, because it's
Speaker 2: a very conventional novel, largely realist really, and coming after
Speaker 2: the extreme modernist example experiment that was The Waves, it
Speaker 2: was strikingly different, and I understand a writer's wish to
Speaker 2: do something different, but this seemed almost like a return
Speaker 2: to Wolfe's first to pre modernest novels. So what I
Speaker 2: found out about her original plan for the novel was
Speaker 2: that she wanted to do something very distinctive and different.
Speaker 2: She wanted to write a novel made up of alternating
Speaker 2: chapters of fiction and nonfiction, so a novel about an
Speaker 2: English family that would cover about fifty years, and in
Speaker 2: between those fictive chapters, she would have an essay commenting
Speaker 2: on the social changes that had taken place in Britain
Speaker 2: at that time. She wrote an awful lot. She wrote
Speaker 2: about one hundred thousand words and then discarded it, which
Speaker 2: is sort of heartbreaking thing for a writer to have done,
Speaker 2: but she didn't. She discarded the plan. I should say,
Speaker 2: she used fiction to write the novel that became The Years,
Speaker 2: and she used some of the essaystic material her book
Speaker 2: Three Guineas. So I liked that idea. I thought that
Speaker 2: was a really fabulous idea, actually, the sort of mix
Speaker 2: of fiction and non fiction. But I also felt that
Speaker 2: the reason Wolf abandoned it, And I don't know why
Speaker 2: actually abandoned it, but I felt the reason must have
Speaker 2: been that it's terribly schematic, you know, chapter fiction, chapter
Speaker 2: of nonfiction, chapter of fiction, essay, and Wolf the least
Speaker 2: schematic of writers. I don't feel could have sustained that
Speaker 2: very long. And I suddenly felt that if Virginia Wolf
Speaker 2: couldn't do it, I couldn't. And it seemed much more
Speaker 2: satisfactory to me to have kind of tangle of fiction
Speaker 2: and nonfiction, whether that was essay or a little bit
Speaker 2: on memoir, and for the reader to not necessarily always
Speaker 2: be able to tell where one ended and the other began.
Speaker 1: I'm really glad you made that point about how schematic
Speaker 1: that plan was, because it strikes me hearing you talk.
Speaker 1: You know, that desire to write a novel that doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like a novel. You know your narrator in theory
Speaker 1: and practice makes the same point. But she says, I
Speaker 1: wanted to form. It allowed for formlessness and mess and
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I think part of the real
Speaker 1: achievement here is to do something that is so kind
Speaker 1: of intellectually robust and rigorous and curious on the one hand,
Speaker 1: but also messy and complicated like human beings and tells
Speaker 1: a kind of novelistic story on the other. And I wonder,
Speaker 1: did you have to consciously go in and mess it
Speaker 1: up at intervals? Did you find yourself did you find
Speaker 1: yourself going one, No, this is too rigid, or these
Speaker 1: modes are too self evident, and I have to have
Speaker 1: to just blur the edges a bit more.
Speaker 2: No, not really, not as far as form was concerned.
Speaker 2: But the mess I was interested in was much more
Speaker 2: human mess. So that you know, for the narrator as
Speaker 2: well as for many of the of the other characters,
Speaker 2: there is this messy gap between theory and practice, between
Speaker 2: our ideals and our actions. I'm always interested in that
Speaker 2: when it comes to character. And I would say that
Speaker 2: art really is energized by that mess because it's complex
Speaker 2: and contradictory, and those are things that art feeds on.
Speaker 2: Those are things that the novel feeds on, or maybe
Speaker 2: I just I feed on them as a writer and reader,
Speaker 2: and so that was the kind of mess I was
Speaker 2: interested in. And as for the formlessness, well, just because
Speaker 2: sometimes you can't tell what is fictive and what isn't.
Speaker 1: When we return, Michelle discusses sexual jealousy, feminism, and what
Speaker 1: it means to be a writer in the public eye,
Speaker 1: we'll be right back the gulf between theory and practice,
Speaker 1: between who we want to be and who we are.
Speaker 1: It might be best served by the novel artistically. Is
Speaker 1: that best embodied by our twenties in a life? Is
Speaker 1: that what that period of bigger university in your twenties
Speaker 1: is four?
Speaker 2: Not really, I think, you know. I mean, I'm sure
Speaker 2: there's I'm still quite out of mess between my theories
Speaker 2: and my point.
Speaker 1: Now you're reconciled as a human being at this point.
Speaker 2: But I do think that, you know, in one's early twenties,
Speaker 2: one is asking the question, you know, how should a
Speaker 2: person be? So it's an attractive period for a novelist
Speaker 2: because you're still trying to figure out what life is
Speaker 2: for and what it will hold for you and how
Speaker 2: you can get there and what you should do. So
Speaker 2: I think there is a lot of energy and a
Speaker 2: lot of mess when you are in your early twenties
Speaker 2: as the narrator is I think that you know, Wolf,
Speaker 2: for instance, there's someone who went on being contradictory and
Speaker 2: messy right to the end of her life, and we
Speaker 2: all do that.
Speaker 1: I think, do you think culturally we're at a low
Speaker 1: point for capacity to process those contradictions in the people
Speaker 1: and in particular in the artists who we admire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's such a good Christian, isn't it. I mean
Speaker 2: it is a very topical one what we do with
Speaker 2: the failings and flaws of writers we admire. The emblematic
Speaker 2: writer for me when that comes up, isn't Wolf, it's
Speaker 2: v Snipol. I mean, the man was a monster. You
Speaker 2: know what can you say? Racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, Brahminist, you
Speaker 2: name it. He's been there, he's done that, He's got
Speaker 2: it on a T shirt. And yet an extraordinary, brilliant writer,
Speaker 2: really brilliant and really really important for hundreds of thousands
Speaker 2: of diasporic writers. So you know, there's the man and
Speaker 2: there's the work. I really understand someone who's young and
Speaker 2: hasn't read one ipail and says, I don't want to
Speaker 2: read those people I really understand that, I really get that,
Speaker 2: or an older person it says, I don't want to
Speaker 2: read those people totally. But for me, you know, I
Speaker 2: did read them and they are part of who I am.
Speaker 2: So well. Remember McCaulay, you know, he says judgment is
Speaker 2: simply trying to reject a part of what we are
Speaker 2: because it hurts. The living cannot call the dead collect
Speaker 2: they won't accept the charge, and it reverts.
Speaker 1: Oh that's fantastic.
Speaker 2: I don't expect artists of any kind to be saints,
Speaker 2: you know, to be without feelings and flaws and shortcomings.
Speaker 2: But I think it is part of our moment that
Speaker 2: artists are so much in the public gaze now because
Speaker 2: of social media, for instance, and so there is increasingly
Speaker 2: this request, one might almost say, a demand that the
Speaker 2: artist's private life must conform to an ideal in the work.
Speaker 2: That if the artist is a prominent person, that then
Speaker 2: their private life must be equally flawless. I mean, if
Speaker 2: the what am I trying to say, I think if
Speaker 2: they're getting accolades for their work, then their selves should
Speaker 2: also deserve accolades.
Speaker 1: It's also the point that you make so well in
Speaker 1: theory and practice about truth about the artist who professes
Speaker 1: to tell law, share a truth, or illuminate a truth
Speaker 1: that otherwise goes unremarked upon. Is that then that holds
Speaker 1: them to some kind of moral standard if they're an
Speaker 1: arbiter of truth.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And I so, I mean for Wolf, obviously she
Speaker 2: wrote quite brilliantly about women's lives and took the patriarchy
Speaker 2: to tusk on that score. And therefore, you know, there's
Speaker 2: the expectation that she has to also be virtuous when
Speaker 2: it comes to matters of race, for instance, or anything else.
Speaker 2: And really she wasn't you know. I mean, she was
Speaker 2: horrible about pretty much everyone in her diaries, which are great,
Speaker 2: wonderful literary documents. And she was gossipy, she was often hatty,
Speaker 2: and she was human.
Speaker 1: I do like the way in which, in theory and
Speaker 1: practice you do put forward a case that it's perhaps
Speaker 1: in sexual jealousy that we best see the illustration of
Speaker 1: our idea of ourself and how we live our lives
Speaker 1: being diverging. You know, it's a particularly a cute example,
Speaker 1: particularly for a young feminist, to identify sexual jealousy in oneself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, I mean, I think in the world there
Speaker 2: are many ways in which the gap becomes evident politically,
Speaker 2: for instance. But you know, I was writing about a
Speaker 2: young woman. In any young person's life, you know, sex, desire,
Speaker 2: romantic entanglesments loom particularly large at this point in one's life,
Speaker 2: and so that was the narrative I chose to tell.
Speaker 2: There is the wish on the narrator's behalf to be
Speaker 2: a good feminist and her inability to follow through when
Speaker 2: it comes to the woman she constructs as her rival,
Speaker 2: who is her lover's official. And I thought it was
Speaker 2: good to write about jealousy because it is such a
Speaker 2: source of shame, and shame is an interesting emotion because
Speaker 2: it has tremendous silencing power, and what is being silenced,
Speaker 2: what cannot be expressed, is always of interest to a novelist,
Speaker 2: isn't it. Yeah, you know, you want to express it.
Speaker 1: Just at a technical level, at a level of form
Speaker 1: and process. The sense of play and the sense of
Speaker 1: fun in this book runs all the way through it.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious about whether that was the experience of
Speaker 1: writing it as well.
Speaker 2: That's a good question. I look it undertok me a
Speaker 2: year to write, which is probably on average half the
Speaker 2: time it takes me to write a book, but it's
Speaker 2: half as long. There were many times of just work,
Speaker 2: and you know the kind of dart that visits any writer, thinking,
Speaker 2: I don't know where this is going, who will want
Speaker 2: to read this rubbish? Et cetera, et cetera. I mean,
Speaker 2: all the things that you know wake you up at
Speaker 2: three in the morning. But I would say that when
Speaker 2: I had finished the first draft, actually even when I
Speaker 2: finished the book, I mean, there's always just a sense
Speaker 2: of a little adrenaline rush because you've just actually made something.
Speaker 2: So there was that, but beyond that, I think I
Speaker 2: really felt a sense of exhilaration. I felt I had
Speaker 2: made something different and that was very pleasing to me.
Speaker 2: And I would say that again without in any way
Speaker 2: trying to diminish the amount of work and revision that
Speaker 2: any novel requires. I felt, with this bookcast with no
Speaker 2: other that it was somehow all ready inside me and
Speaker 2: I just needed to be able to get it out there,
Speaker 2: to give it a form for system world.
Speaker 1: Michelle Decretz's latest novel, Theory and Practice, is out now.
Speaker 1: Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've
Speaker 1: been reading this week and almost a year ago to
Speaker 1: the day we had on as a guest, Geraldine Brooks.
Speaker 1: She gave her life sentence and she spoke movingly about
Speaker 1: her writing career about Horse, her most recent novel, but
Speaker 1: she also talked about her late husband, and she's just
Speaker 1: brought out a beautiful memoir called Memorial Day that deals
Speaker 1: with the grief and shock that came upon his unexpected
Speaker 1: death a few years ago. It's an absolutely beautiful memoir
Speaker 1: as you would expect, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
Speaker 1: You can also go back to the archive and listen
Speaker 1: to that conversation with the peerless Geraldine Brooks. That book, again,
Speaker 1: is called Memorial Day. You can find that in all
Speaker 1: of Geraldine Brooks's books, and Michelle de Cretz's books, and
Speaker 1: Virginia Wolf's books. In fact, lots of books can be
Speaker 1: found at your local independent bookstore or library. That's it
Speaker 1: for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell
Speaker 1: your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot.
Speaker 1: On next week's show, I'll be in conversation with the
Speaker 1: brilliant Rachel Kong discussing her latest novel, Real Americans, and
Speaker 1: what luck means to her as a writer.
Speaker 2: Luck is I think really at the core of this
Speaker 2: book this question of what creates our lives essentially, is
Speaker 2: it luck? Is it chance? Is it the actions that
Speaker 2: we take? Is it free will? Right? And that's just
Speaker 2: a question that I've thought about for all my life.
Speaker 1: I think read this as a Schwartz Media production, made
Speaker 1: possible by the generous support of our A group. The
Speaker 1: show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing
Speaker 1: by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zolten Fetcher. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening, See you next week.