Speaker 1: From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones and this is seven
Speaker 1: AM's summer series. All this week we're bringing you conversations
Speaker 1: with our favorite critics telling us about their favorite arts
Speaker 1: and culture from twenty twenty four. Today, it's all about books,
Speaker 1: and no one knows books like Michael Williams does. The
Speaker 1: editor of the monthly has read hundreds of novels this
Speaker 1: year and interviewed dozens of incredible writers for his podcast
Speaker 1: Read This, and for him, the best books of the
Speaker 1: year are those that have bent genres, brought a sense
Speaker 1: of play to old tropes, and reminded him of the
Speaker 1: ultimate unpredictability of life in a good way. So today
Speaker 1: Michael Williams from the books that surprised and delighted him
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty four. It's Monday, December twenty three. Michael,
Speaker 1: Hello friend, how are you?
Speaker 2: Ruby Jones? I am very well, still conscious.
Speaker 1: Congratulations on a huge twenty twenty four. We're almost at
Speaker 1: the end.
Speaker 2: You say that, but honestly, it's the last few pages
Speaker 2: that you need to That's when a book proves itself,
Speaker 2: and that is when a year proves itself. I'm not
Speaker 2: counting it out until we're through.
Speaker 1: How many books do you think you read this year?
Speaker 2: I'd look at like friends and other people on social
Speaker 2: media who do their book counts each year, and I
Speaker 2: envied it seems very ordered and very methodical.
Speaker 1: Got on your stories? Did you even read them?
Speaker 2: I don't need to read performatively. Definitely I do lose count,
Speaker 2: but it would be an embarrassing Oh yeah, yeah, comfortably
Speaker 2: triple figures.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, let's try and narrow that feel down to
Speaker 1: a top four. I thought we could start with one
Speaker 1: of the books that I know is one of your
Speaker 1: favorites for the year, Helen Garner's new book This Season.
Speaker 1: I think that you and I had sort of similar
Speaker 1: thoughts going into this book, which was I love Helen Ghanner,
Speaker 1: but am I going to love a book that is
Speaker 1: about her grandson's amateur footy league. So tell me what
Speaker 1: your expectations were and how the book delivered.
Speaker 2: We are at a really funny point in time with
Speaker 2: Helen Ghana, where for years there were so many expectations
Speaker 2: around her and people had a kind of weird relationship
Speaker 2: with her books that one way or the other they
Speaker 2: decided she was for them or she Wasn't you know
Speaker 2: that they knew her, and yet now she's in her
Speaker 2: eighties and she suddenly hit this point where collectively, culturally,
Speaker 2: the name Helen Garanner is a name to conjure with,
Speaker 2: and the new Helen Garner book is an occasion. We've
Speaker 2: just had a decade of the only new Helen Garner
Speaker 2: books being the re release of her diaries or the
Speaker 2: release to the public for the first time. And those
Speaker 2: diaries show things that we always suspected about Helen, but
Speaker 2: now we know unequivocally she's one of this country's foremost observers,
Speaker 2: that she's incredibly funny, that she has an eye for
Speaker 2: detail and human forces, that she is unforgiving in the
Speaker 2: way that she writes about others, and even more brutally
Speaker 2: unforgiving when she writes about herself, all of which adds
Speaker 2: up to say that even a footy book is worth
Speaker 2: reading from Helen Ghana. And I am someone who by
Speaker 2: and large is like, you're going to be turned off
Speaker 2: by the idea that it's a book about football, But
Speaker 2: it's Helen Ghana, So it's not about football. It's about
Speaker 2: her relationship with her grandson, It's about what it is
Speaker 2: to be getting older, it's about different types of masculinity,
Speaker 2: it's about all these things at once, and it's beautiful.
Speaker 1: And she is known, as you say, for this kind
Speaker 1: of unflinching attitude that she has towards her subjects, including herself,
Speaker 1: and I found that particularly confronting in this novel, because
Speaker 1: she's talking about how she's aging, and she's talking really
Speaker 1: specifically about how her body and her mind are changing,
Speaker 1: and it does at times feel like, well, she thinks
Speaker 1: she's getting towards the end of her life and that
Speaker 1: this might be her last work.
Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more Ruby. It broke me all times
Speaker 2: in this book. It's this kind of note of melancholy
Speaker 2: that runs like a vein through proceedings. Here again and
Speaker 2: again she says she wants to get to know her
Speaker 2: grandson Ambrose Amby before it's too late, before he becomes
Speaker 2: a man, and before she is dead, and this is
Speaker 2: a refrain. Again and again Helen has no illusions her
Speaker 2: hearing's going, it's a little bit harder to get up
Speaker 2: and out of bed in the morning and in winter.
Speaker 2: All of this stuff is kind of conspiring to suggest
Speaker 2: that it's not just an evening in Melbourne. While the
Speaker 2: footy training is going on in the dead of winter,
Speaker 2: but it's that in life as well, and you do
Speaker 2: get a sense that you're watching someone kind of reckon
Speaker 2: with their own mortality.
Speaker 1: But it's not. I mean, it is sad in parts,
Speaker 1: but I don't think the overall tone of this novel
Speaker 1: is melancholic.
Speaker 2: Do you No, No, I think you're absolutely right. Or
Speaker 2: even if the tone is, it's offset by a phenomenal
Speaker 2: sense of joy. I think when people think about Helen,
Speaker 2: they often talk about or remember the spikiness or the
Speaker 2: moments of conflict or confrontation out I think if you
Speaker 2: read her work, actually what comes through is this kind
Speaker 2: of boundless capacity for joy and wonder and love. That's
Speaker 2: an incredibly generous book. I was lucky enough to interview
Speaker 2: her for the first ever episode of Read This. We
Speaker 2: went to her house and she was in the process
Speaker 2: of writing the book that would eventually become the season,
Speaker 2: and in that interview she talked about the fact that
Speaker 2: off the back of doing the diaries, she was pretty depressed.
Speaker 2: She thought she might not write anymore. She wasn't sure
Speaker 2: where that energy was going to come from, and she
Speaker 2: just found the spark taking her grandson to his under
Speaker 2: sixteens football training once a week, and that suddenly, sitting
Speaker 2: there on the boundary line watching that being part of
Speaker 2: that ritual, she found herself come to life again. And
Speaker 2: she found a through line from that activity to the
Speaker 2: classics that she loved to read, to the kind of literature,
Speaker 2: to the various men that shed grappled with throughout her
Speaker 2: career in thinking about the nature of power, thinking about
Speaker 2: the nature of the way people relate to one another,
Speaker 2: and the nature of community, and all of that converged
Speaker 2: on this big, joyous, beautiful She calls it a hymn
Speaker 2: at one point, and it feels like that it's a
Speaker 2: little song of love to her grandson, and we're very
Speaker 2: lucky to have it.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to your second pick for the year,
Speaker 1: Michelle Ducretz's novel, Theory in Practice. Before we talk about
Speaker 1: the book itself, could we talk about Dacretsa a little.
Speaker 1: I know that she's previously won the Miles Franklin been
Speaker 1: shortlisted for the Stella. Can you tell me a bit
Speaker 1: about her, her life, her writing.
Speaker 2: She's an amazing and beautiful novelist and she's kind of
Speaker 2: much lauded on the awards circuit, and she's always been
Speaker 2: a kind of deeply playful writer. She's very interested in
Speaker 2: the novel and it's formal, both constraints and the things
Speaker 2: that it makes possible, the ways in which has an
Speaker 2: art form. It has a kind of elasticity, if you like,
Speaker 2: and it means that you can approach big subject matter
Speaker 2: in different ways. She writes sometimes in a kind of
Speaker 2: realist mode, but then with these extraordinary capacity for formal
Speaker 2: experimentation and play. Michelle D. Kretza is not a writer
Speaker 2: who takes the job of writing a novel lightly. She
Speaker 2: takes it very seriously and yet produces this beautiful prose
Speaker 2: and this character stuff that Yeah, she's one of our best.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. I'm currently about halfway through Theory and Practice, and
Speaker 1: what I think I'm really enjoying about it is that
Speaker 1: there's this contrast between this very personal, almost kind of
Speaker 1: gossipy tone at times where she speaks about being a
Speaker 1: young woman, but that's mixed with this incredibly smart literary
Speaker 1: criticism and engagement with these very complicated ideas, and she
Speaker 1: sort of moves between these two modes quite seamlessly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, I think that's a beautiful description I
Speaker 2: mean she in theory and practice, her narrator is a
Speaker 2: writer and is grappling with the business of being a
Speaker 2: writer and at the same time grappling with memory, and
Speaker 2: as a consequence, the lines between what is essayistic and
Speaker 2: what is fictional, the lines between what might even be
Speaker 2: memoir from the cretsa or what is purely a work
Speaker 2: of imagination, those lines are incredibly blurred, and deliberately so.
Speaker 2: Her narrator is a huge fan of the work of
Speaker 2: Virginia wolf and the book in some ways mirrors one
Speaker 2: of Wolfe's very late books, called The Years, which was
Speaker 2: originally designed to be a combination of novel and essays,
Speaker 2: and then Wolf kind of blended the two into one,
Speaker 2: and so there are kind of big literary things, but
Speaker 2: as you say, the enjoyment of the book doesn't rely
Speaker 2: on that at all. Here you have a young woman
Speaker 2: who is grappling with, to put, in very base crest terms,
Speaker 2: a love triangle and sexual jealousy and a sense of
Speaker 2: what her identity is at UNI in Melbourne in the eighties,
Speaker 2: and she's kind of recounting that in ways that I
Speaker 2: think will be immediately recognizable to readers in whatever stage
Speaker 2: of their life.
Speaker 1: Through After the Break, the book that lit up a
Speaker 1: million group chats. So, Michael, let's talk about your third
Speaker 1: pick for the year. James by Persval Everett. So this
Speaker 1: is the retelling of Mark Twain's classic book from eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But it's written
Speaker 1: from the point of view of Jim, who is the
Speaker 1: slave who run away and joined Huck on his journey
Speaker 1: done the Mississippi River. So my first question about this
Speaker 1: is how well acquainted do you need to be with
Speaker 1: Huckleberry Finn the novel to appreciate this book?
Speaker 2: Not at all would be my first and most straightforward answer.
Speaker 2: This book reads like a kind of wonderful, lively, page turning,
Speaker 2: funny historical novel, and you could have no acquaintance at
Speaker 2: all with Huck Finn except for a vague, lingering sens
Speaker 2: as you read it that you were missing out on
Speaker 2: jokes that you didn't get, or there were resonances that
Speaker 2: didn't mean anything to you. Everett described in the process
Speaker 2: of writing James, he reread The Adventures of huckle where
Speaker 2: if in something like thirteen times back to back, he
Speaker 2: would get to the end and then flip straight back
Speaker 2: to the start and read it again, to the point
Speaker 2: where it just kind of embedded in his brain in
Speaker 2: a way like a song or a refrain, that he'd
Speaker 2: read it so many times in rapid succession that it
Speaker 2: almost transcended meaning. And then he put the original book
Speaker 2: aside and he wrote, James James was a story that
Speaker 2: he wanted to tell, that he felt the need to tell.
Speaker 2: He wanted to do justice to the earlier book. But
Speaker 2: it's not a retread. It's not a retelling, it's not
Speaker 2: a sequel, it's not a reclamation. It's a kind of
Speaker 2: companion piece. And so it stands very nicely on its own.
Speaker 1: And so it just won the National Book Award and
Speaker 1: it was shortlisted for the Booker. So the buzz around James,
Speaker 1: I think, has been pretty phenomenal. I know that you're
Speaker 1: a fan of Percival's writing. So how does this novel
Speaker 1: stack up against his other works.
Speaker 2: It's interesting in some ways, it's one of his straightest,
Speaker 2: most conventional books. Yet he is I mean talking about
Speaker 2: Michelle Decretsa being a writer who likes playing with form.
Speaker 2: That's also true a personal eva. Some of his books
Speaker 2: are utterly batchet not to put too fine a point
Speaker 2: on it, Like he comes up with an idea and
Speaker 2: then he kind of teases it out in as many
Speaker 2: different ways as he can. He wrote a book called
Speaker 2: The Trees, for example, that functions almost like it's beats
Speaker 2: as similar to a crime novel, its resonances are like
Speaker 2: a zombie novel, and ultimately it's about slavery and the
Speaker 2: legacy of Emmett till Now, if those four elements don't
Speaker 2: make sense to you in a single work of literature,
Speaker 2: add the fact that it's at times screamingly funny, and
Speaker 2: you get a bit of a sense of what personval
Speaker 2: ever it's like. So his books are endlessly experimental and
Speaker 2: endlessly playful in a way that means that a book
Speaker 2: like James can feel very straight. But I think that
Speaker 2: would be a misread. Part of what's so great about
Speaker 2: James by telling the story from the perspective of a
Speaker 2: character who's a little bit kind of culturally and historically problematic.
Speaker 2: To revisit the Mark Twain book now and read the
Speaker 2: voice of an enslaved man who in many ways reads
Speaker 2: like a zeotype of the time. Part of whatever it's
Speaker 2: saying in James is code switching is a crucial part
Speaker 2: of understanding their historical record. That the way in which
Speaker 2: James may have spoken around Huker, around the white characters,
Speaker 2: or indeed around it write like Mark Twain wasn't a
Speaker 2: true representation of who he was, in his family, in
Speaker 2: his community, how he really spoke. And to make text
Speaker 2: rather than subtext that play around identity, around your safety,
Speaker 2: being about how you presented and who you were in
Speaker 2: the world. That seems to me to be rich and
Speaker 2: funny and weird and very very personal. Ever it it's
Speaker 2: lots of fun, all right.
Speaker 1: Well. That brings us to the final book of the year,
Speaker 1: which was also one of my favorites, the book that
Speaker 1: lit up a million group chats, the first great Perry
Speaker 1: menopause novel, All fours. Miranda July, tell me what you
Speaker 1: loved about it.
Speaker 2: You say that I'm not convinced after reading this book
Speaker 2: and talking to Miranda July on an episode of Read This,
Speaker 2: that there haven't been other peri menopause novels before now
Speaker 2: that just haven't been diagnosed as such. I believe, and
Speaker 2: this is my big theory. My big theory is that
Speaker 2: Anna Karenina is the first great Perimenopause novel, and we
Speaker 2: understand her and Vronsky and everything that goes on in
Speaker 2: that book much better if we understand it to be
Speaker 2: Leo Tolstoy's portrayal of what perimenopause was like for Russian
Speaker 2: women of its time. That's my theory.
Speaker 1: Okay. Well, even being in conversation with that novel would
Speaker 1: be a great way to have your your book framed.
Speaker 1: So tell tell me what you liked about all fours.
Speaker 2: Look, I think it's a wonderful novel, and I think
Speaker 2: you're right. It has set the book groups of the
Speaker 2: English language speaking world a light over the past six
Speaker 2: months since it came out. I'll wager that more than
Speaker 2: a few kind of marriages in inner city Australia are
Speaker 2: in peril off the back of people reading this book,
Speaker 2: because it is a book about the kind of ways
Speaker 2: in which the approved social structures that we all live
Speaker 2: under might constrain us, but might limit us, might make
Speaker 2: us feel like we haven't fulfilled our best version of ourselves.
Speaker 2: And July rites really beautifully about a woman, an artist
Speaker 2: of a particular age, who suddenly feels suffocated by those
Speaker 2: constraints and can't take them anymore and tries actively to
Speaker 2: make some changes. But this is a book that is
Speaker 2: incredibly playful with ideas of sexuality, of identity, of the
Speaker 2: ways in which we move in the world, and particularly
Speaker 2: the ways in which women of a certain age are
Speaker 2: expected by our society to conduct themselves, and what might
Speaker 2: happen if they don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One thing I loved about all four is was
Speaker 1: that every time I thought I knew where it was going,
Speaker 1: it completely upended my expectations. I mean, I don't think
Speaker 1: it's much of a spoiler to say that there is
Speaker 1: an affair of sorts contained within it, And I think
Speaker 1: I thought I knew where the story of an affair goes.
Speaker 1: We all know what happens with an affair, But it
Speaker 1: turns out I had absolutely no idea where that was going,
Speaker 1: and that sense of surprise was so delicious.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it looks It's a bit of a common thread
Speaker 2: of all four of these books that I have so
Speaker 2: loved and relished reading this year, which is that they
Speaker 2: are books by writers, by artists who understand the conventions
Speaker 2: and the traditions into which they're working and then want
Speaker 2: to say, well, then what happens if I don't follow
Speaker 2: those If I'm surprised as a writer, what does that
Speaker 2: mean for my readers? And what does that give them?
Speaker 2: And Miranda July, you know, her artistic practice extends beyond
Speaker 2: the written form. This is only her second novel, but
Speaker 2: she takes a form that can be very conventional, can
Speaker 2: have the kind of familiarity of beats, as you say,
Speaker 2: and July is not satisfied with just following that path.
Speaker 2: Like her protagonist, she is determined to say, but what
Speaker 2: if we didn't? What if we asked a question instead
Speaker 2: of made a declarative statement. What if we explored possibility?
Speaker 2: And for me as a reader, reading something that truly
Speaker 2: surprises me still is one of those kind of greatest
Speaker 2: joys of reading and the thing that you look at
Speaker 2: for every time you pick up a new book.
Speaker 1: We'll be back with some honorable mentions after this, So, Michael,
Speaker 1: do you have any other recommendations, any other books that
Speaker 1: you secretly can't wait to spend an afternoon with at
Speaker 1: the beach.
Speaker 2: One book that I am looking forward to reading over
Speaker 2: the summer is the new Hruki Murakami. It's called The
Speaker 2: City and it's uncertain walls, and like Murakami, is now
Speaker 2: enough of a kind of hipster phenomenon that he's much parodied.
Speaker 2: People are like, oh, yeah, it's going to have a
Speaker 2: jazz bar and a magical cat and a man who's
Speaker 2: very bad at talking about his emotions. And I'm sure
Speaker 2: all those things are true, but there is something about
Speaker 2: the way Murakami writes. There's something about the translations from
Speaker 2: his longtime translator Philip Gabriel, where just the use of language,
Speaker 2: the relationship between the kind of mundane every day and
Speaker 2: the kind of magical weirdness of a Morikami book is
Speaker 2: a good time. So I am definitely going to give
Speaker 2: that a go over the summer. Also, they're massive bricks,
Speaker 2: so I don't have to run back and forth from
Speaker 2: the banana lounge to the bookshelf to get other books.
Speaker 2: I can just sit and wallow in that one for
Speaker 2: a little while.
Speaker 1: Sink yourself in, always with a big toll drink.
Speaker 2: Yes you know something medicinal.
Speaker 1: Obviously, Michael, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 2: Today, Absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1: Ruby have a great summer you too.