Literary Criticism & Cultural Commentary
“…something about Strout’s project has curdled in the last two books. What used to feel revelatory and humane now feels insistently – almost patronizingly – sentimental: all these New England boomers squelching around in their own upper-middle-class agonies, lamenting a “world gone crazy” from the comfort of their beach houses.”
After sixteen years and eight volumes of fiction, Elizabeth Strout’s indelible heroines – Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton – have finally made it on to the same page. Review of Tell Me Everything, The TLS, Friday 4th October, 2024.
Sally Rooney’s new book is out in a few days. So, is it any good?
“Here is my dilemma: how much grace can – should – you extend to a work that feels so grotesquely curdled? I don’t have a good answer. But this is not the first time Rooney’s gender politics have felt ripped from an op-shop copy of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”
Sally Rooney joins the long literary tradition of chess-as-metaphor in her fourth novel, Intermezzo. Reviewed for The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 20th September, 2024.
“The problem with Rodney Hall – the big, insurmountable problem – is that he is too interesting. The last time I interviewed the Queensland novelist, a “quick 30-minute chat” ballooned into a whole afternoon. Hall has a polymathic heart and stories to tell.”
Delighted to share my interview with Rodney Hall: poet, musician, librettist, director, actor, editor, photographer and extraordinary novelist. Guardian Australia, Tuesday August 27th, 2024.
Outback noir: A collection of stories set at the scene of the crime
“There has been an ethical shift in crime writing over the past few years – particularly in non-fiction and screenwriting. It’s a move that has taken us away from tales that turn serial killers into blood-speckled rock stars and towards something more humane: stories that honour the lives of victims, rather than gawk at their ruined bodies.”
Fiona McFarlane’s latest book - Highway 13 - joins a new, socio-culturally rich subgenre of “cultural whodunnits”. Review in The TLS, Friday August 9th, 2024.
Hurdy Gurdy by Jenny Ackland review – a toothless abortion tale
“Sometimes a piece of art comes along that crystallises all of your cultural misgivings. That is what has happened here.”
Jenny Ackland’s new novel is a tropey dystopia that will “change no minds and shake no certainties”. Reviewed for Guardian Australia, Friday June 14th, 2024.
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry review – cosmic strangeness
“When a telescope is used for the first time – tilted up into the dark – what the astronomer sees that night is called “First Light”. It’s as if a new consciousness is born in that moment, a new eye opened. At her best, that’s what Perry has managed to capture in Enlightenment. The joy of first light.”
Sarah Perry’s new novel “has its neck cricked upwards, its eyes full of moonlight”. Review in The Guardian, Thursday May 2nd, 2024.
Is this debut novel a sly satire, or just an earnest train wreck?
It is easy to mock Bri Lee’s debut novel, The Work. There’s a great deal of sex, for starters, and the line between the erotic and the ridiculous is thin. I’ve spent a week trying to shake Lee’s image of a pair of middle-aged breasts dangling “like panna cottas”.
It is gutsy to change genres mid career. Bri Lee’s first novel deserves to be taken seriously. Review in The SMH, Friday April 5th, 2024.
Appreciation by Liam Pieper review – a tart satire of cancel culture and the art world
“Forget your 15 minutes of fame. “In the future,” writes Liam Pieper, “everyone will be cancelled for fifteen minutes.” We’re a censorious bunch; hubris has long been weaponised here. But the locus of power is shifting. New cohorts have the means and hunger to scold. Our cultural hierarchies – and cruelties – are no longer predictable. That is the true terror of “cancel culture”: unfamiliar rules.”
Pieper’s third novel is a smart art-market satire concealed in a culture war wrapper. Reviewed in Guardian Australia, Friday 29th March, 2024.
The ultimate summer reading list: 15 great celebrity memoirs, from Patrick Stewart to Britney Spears
Whether you’re after a gossipy tell-all, or an inspiring personal story, your beach reads are sorted courtesy of Guardian Australia’s staff and critics.
The last delicious installment of the The Guardian’s summer reading series. Friday, Jan 12th 2024. To access the whole series, click here.
The ultimate summer reading list: 15 crime thrillers and mysteries to keep you guessing
From Mick Herron’s Slow Horses and Ian Rankin’s Rebus to new books from Bret Easton Ellis and Emma Cline, your beach reads are sorted courtesy of Guardian Australia’s staff and critics.
Crime fiction is my favourite downtime genre. Check out my dark-hearted picks for The Guardian’s summer reading series. Monday, Jan 8th 2024.
The ultimate summer reading list: 15 funny books to make you laugh
From hilarious fiction by Terry Pratchett and PG Wodehouse to memoirs by Patricia Lockwood and Adam Kay, your beach reads are sorted courtesy of Guardian Australia’s staff and critics.
Such a delight to revisit four of my favourite comic novels for The Guardian’s summer reading series. Friday, January 5th, 2024.
The ultimate summer reading list: 15 sci-fi and fantasy novels to escape into
From Douglas Adams and Liu Cixin to Terry Pratchett and Claire G Coleman, your beach reads are sorted courtesy of Guardian Australia’s staff and critics…
So hard to narrow down my beach-read picks for The Guardian’s summertime celebration of world builders and inter-galactic dreamers. Monday 1 January, 2024. (See also my book of the year, the magnificent In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes).
The ultimate summer reading list: 15 novels about love, lust and sex to devour
From classic romance to steamy romps, your beach reads are sorted courtesy of Guardian Australia’s staff and critics…
Check out my swooniest picks in The Guardian’s gleeful, genre-celebrating summer reading series (published Friday, 29 December, 2023). It’s a wonderful series, but the romance list is particularly lovely.
Helen Garner, Diana Reid, Nam Le and others: Australian books to look forward to in 2024
“Australian literary talent is extraordinary – and extraordinarily undersung. Take this year, for instance: a bumper year for Australia letters, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at international best-of lists, or the pool of Booker prize contenders…”
Searching for a joyful New Year’s resolution? Make 2024 a year of Australian reading. Next year’s publishing calendar is jam-packed with Ozlit brilliance. Seek out some of these coming titles and revel in the exuberant variety – and global quality – of Australian storytelling. (Guardian Australia, Thursday, 28 December, 2023).
“I have an editor (not this one) who scrubs the word “liminal” from reviews. He thinks it’s a gauzy wank-word and most of the time he’s right. But not here. The In-Between is a tale of halfway places and emotional purgatories: of middle age, middle politics and the middle classes. This novel is liminal in content but also in craft: evidence of a writer making the transition from cage rattler to elder statesman.”
Christos Tsiolkas’ new novel may be his best. “A humble book. A generous book.” Review in Guardian Australia, Friday 24 November, 2023.
Blackouts by Justin Torres review – a queer-gothic dreamworld
“Blackouts arrives a dozen years after Torres’s much-loved debut, We the Animals, a semi-autobiographical tale of the wild and clamorous hungers of three young brothers. That book had its teeth bared: it was raucous, linear and determinedly realist. Blackouts is a very different animal. It slips in the door like some soft-footed night creature: paratextual, meta-fictional, multimedia, form-slippery.”
Review of Justin Torres’s glorious second novel. Reviewed in The Guardian, Thursday 9th November, 2023.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff review – a survival story
“I’ve heard the novel described as “Cormac McCarthy for girls”, presumably referring to the fact that it has an actual girl in it, as opposed to some manic pixie dream nihilist. It’s a provocation, but also an apt comparison. Like McCarthy’s arid-hearted westerns, The Vaster Wilds is a novel of sin and deliverance, monstrosity and awe, and the dark rapacity of the American soul.”
Lauren Groff’s new novel is “a hymn of endurance, and it takes some enduring”. The Guardian, 21 September, 2023.
Buffoons and the empire: Zadie Smith has fun with an Aussie conman
“In 1871, the most famous man in London was a ruddy-faced butcher from Wagga Wagga. His name was Tom Castro – or perhaps Arthur Orton – but he claimed to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to a venerable English fortune. It was a brazen deception, a great Aussie swindle…”
Review of Zadie Smith’s fifth novel, The Fraud, a faux-Victorian novel of truth and its conjurers; in The Age and SMH, 11 September, 2023.
The mysterious absence of George Orwell’s first wife
“Can we – should we, must we – separate the art from the artist? Weaponised in the wake of #MeToo, this question has become a battleground in the ever-tedious “Culture Wars”. Combatants on the far right decry the cancel-happy vandals of the left; combatants on the far left decry the great white apologists of the right. The rest of us watch on as a bunch of straw men play with fire.”
Worthy intent and chaotic execution in Anna Funder’s Wifedom. Reviewed for The Age and The SMH, Tuesday, July 4th 2023.
Inner space odyssey: Martin MacInnes’s tender novel for a climate-ravaged age
“Earnestness is a volatile compound; it can decay into mawkishness or explode into polemic... But in the right hands, earnestness is potent. In Ascension finds as much poetry in the human microbiome as it does in the grand revolutions of the planets. It is a love letter to life, to “the stuff of the world”.
Review of Martin MacInnes’s wondrous new novel in The TLS, Friday, February 24th, 2023.
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy review – a slow-motion study of obliteration
“If you turned Stella Maris into a drinking game – a shot of Appalachian moonshine for every eye roll – you’d be hammered before the end of chapter one”.
As the Best of the Year book lists are assembled, here’s my pick for the opposite end - my least favourite novel of 2022 by a walloping margin: Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy’s 12th (and likely final) novel. Reviewed in The Guardian, Wednesday December 7th, 2022.
Australian Book Review, Books of the Year 2022
“Her title is preposterous – The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies (Swift Press) – but I defy you to read the first page of Jo Lloyd’s short story collection and not marvel. There’s an antiquated magic in her prose. A man drowns and his bones are watched by the ‘untalkative actuaries of the deep’. Sorcery! I was also bewitched by Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose (Fourth Estate), an ink-hearted fable of a literary hoax and its lifelong repercussions. It’s the kind of novel that makes you ravenous. After I read it, I sought out everything Li had written. I wanted it all. And finally, the brilliant Aussie writer and critic Anwen Crawford has produced a zine about author income, Decorum Serves the Rich (available as a PDF on her website). It has never been harder for Australian writers to forge sustainable careers. Crawford pins the big, cruel, exploitative mess to the page. Essential reading.”
It’s my favourite time of the year - the great December list-a-thon. To see the picks of more than 30 of Australia’s best literary minds, check out ABR’s bumper December Issue.
Love across the lines, and it can be so cruel
“In lieu of an epigraph, Yumna Kassab’s new novel, The Lovers, opens with an instruction: “Let fate have its hand.” Surrender, it bids us, to the machinations of the cosmos. But the “weight of fate” sits heavily on this book, with its tarot deck title and multifarious portents. Here is a tale of dark dreams, shapeshifting creatures and pacts with the moon; of stormy seas, lurking sharks and captive songbirds with human souls. A tale of doomed love, quiet cruelties and ever-jostling metaphors.”
Yumna Kassab’s third novel is an ethereal creature, “most alive when it is most tangible”. Review in The SMH, Friday Nov 4th, 2022.
“Yiyun Li begins her new novel, The Book of Goose, by conjuring a knife – sharp enough to sever an umbilical cord, wound a friend or slice through the pages of a book. “Not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife”, our narrator, Agnès, muses. “Why not, I wonder.” That question feels like a dare to carve this story open and rummage through its guts. Agnès is a farmer’s daughter; she knows that beautiful creatures are raised for slaughter.”
Yiyun Li’s magnificent, shapeshifting fable - reviewed in The TLS, Friday Oct 28th, 2022
Savour the snark in this delicious story of a summer love triangle
“The snark is delicious, like the bright, citric fizz of popping candy. It’s a welcome reprieve from the novels of middle-class malaise that have been so painfully fashionable of late – all torpor and wallow. Those sad, listless books with sad, listless covers: young women faceplanting into furniture, or propped against the wall like exasperated ladders.”
Review of Diana Reid’s second novel, Seeing Other People; a caustic rom-com reviewed in The Age and The SMH, October 14th, 2022.
Lessons by Ian McEwan review – life-and-times epic of a feckless boomer
“McEwan’s 17th novel is old-fashioned, digressive and indulgently long; the hero is a gold-plated ditherer, and the story opens with a teenage wank (few books are improved by an achingly sentimental wank). But Lessons is also deeply generous. It’s compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical. Can earnestness be a form of literary rebellion?”
Ian McEwan’s 500-page “chronicle of our times” - reviewed in The Guardian, Wednesday September 7th, 2022.
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell review – bravura investigation of grief
“If there’s an emerging theme to the art of these crisis-racked times, it’s time itself: multiverses, parallel lives and wormholes; groundhog days and grandfather paradoxes; time-travellers and their ever-patient wives…The more inevitable the future seems, the more we dream of one that can be averted – of a past that can be undone.”
Namwali Serpell’s new novel has the most riveting first chapter you’ll read all year. The Guardian, Wednesday, 17th August, 2022.
Oliver Mol on surviving a 10-month migraine: ‘If I didn’t tell this story it would rot inside me’
“I have been dogged by chronic migraines for 30 years, and it’s an almighty myth that the body forgets pain. Remembering is half the torment, the anticipatory terror. I think about how it feels to be mired in the long middle of an attack, those cruel hours when I ache for oblivion. The boredom of it. The fury. To be stuck in that hell-space indefinitely would be a slow-motion death of the soul.”
It was a delight to speak to writer, Oliver Mol, about his new memoir, Train Lord, a tale of pain, repair and the railway. Guardian Australia, Saturday, July 30th, 2022.
Murder in the Brain-Broiling Heat and Red Dust of the Outback
“There’s no denying the narrative elegance of outback noir: like the grand country house in English whodunits, the bush town allows a small cast to be trapped in place as secrets and vendettas are unsnarled. But it’s telling that the places Aussie writers are inventing are often so geographically vague – so generically featureless, so uniformly desolate – they could be plonked almost anywhere on the national map.”
Review of two new tales of little girls swallowed by the big bad bush. Wake, by Shelley Burr and Dirt Town, by Hayley Scrivenor. In the New York Times, Thursday, July 21, 2022.
Boys vs girls: Why we need to get beyond tales of worlds without men
“Banished, vanished, plague-blighted, hunted to extinction, rendered obsolete: for more than a century speculative fiction has been inventing and reinventing ways to divest the world of men. It is one of the genre’s most durable thought experiments: what might women do – what might they dare to want or build or inflict or demolish – if they were freed from all that patriarchal deadweight?”
Reviewing the bookends of the gendercide trope: Sandra Newman’s new novel, The Men alongside its 1913 counterpart, A World of Women, by J.D. Beresford, in The TLS, Friday July 22nd, 2022.
“The tricky thing about prophecies is that they’re only accurate in hindsight: a prediction averted is a prediction disproved. That thorny little paradox didn’t stop Dr Barker and his saviour fantasies. With the help of a science reporter at The Evening Standard, he sent out a public call for visions and forebodings. For over a decade, these lay prophecies would be collected, catalogued and fact-checked. A tiny handful of them would prove unnervingly – bewitchingly – accurate. In The Premonitions Bureau, essayist Sam Knight tells the story of this bizarre data bank, and the trap it laid for the man who built it.”
Sam Knight has lucked onto a killer story, and boy does he know it. Reviewed in The Weekend Australian, June 25th, 2022.
A tropical atoll lies in prospect: twenty TLS writers share their summer reading
“I love the punctured idealism, contained savagery and ever-lurking farce of campus novels, and there are some delicious new additions to the genre…”
You can read about my “summer” reading picks in this week’s TLS, alongside some marvellous company (in case your too-read pile isn’t quite vertiginous enough).
‘One publisher called my book repellent’: the first self-published author up for the Miles Franklin
“The boxing ring has always been a potent metaphorical – and metaphysical – space, a world of contained brutalities and ferocious ecstasies; a grotesque mirror of our own grotesqueries. In Grimmish, it also becomes an allegory for the torment of the page. “I’ve written for decades and never had much success,” Winkler tells me. “There were very good reasons for me to feel that my whole creative career had been a failure. That’s very painful.” And so, after years of banging his head against a creative wall, the 56-year-old has written a novel of exquisite pathos about a man with a notoriously thick skull.”
Michael Winkler's “batshit bonkers” novel, Grimmish, is - by far - my favourite Aussie novel of recent memory. Such a delight to talk to Michael about the book’s trajectory from self-published gamble to cult hit to lit-prize contender. Guardian Australia, 21 June, 2022.
Horse by Geraldine Brooks review – a confident novel of racing and race
“Brooks cut her journalistic teeth on the racing beat, and she knows her way around a horse. This book returns the Australian-American novelist to the terrain that won her a Pulitzer prize with March, her 2005 tale of the war-absent father from Little Women. She brings the same archival confidence and sensory flair to the antebellum racetrack…Horse is exactly the novel you’d expect: bloodlines and broodmares; farriers and knackeries; wild gambles, wild gallops and plantation-era grotesqueries. A dollop of civil war valour. And at the centre of it all, love story: a boy and his horse.”
A quite predictable tale about a quite astonishing stallion. Reviewed in Guardian Australia, Friday June 10th, 2022.
How to talk to children about life - and death
“Storytelling is a kind of sorcery – everyday magic. Consider how the language of narrative is steeped in spell-craft. Stories bewitch and enthral us; they curse us, transform us, and light the way home. “Just as wizards, by naming things precisely, can control them,” Chloe Hooper writes in Bedtime Story, “a writer who finds the right set of words for what grieves them can pin the grievance down, fixing it in place.”
I thought I was the wrong reader for Chloe Hooper’s new book. How wrong I was. The Weekend Australian, Saturday, 21st May, 2022.
Lost in the bowels: Recasting Helen Garner as an MFA craft seminar
“…it is hard not be cynical about Black Inc’s Writers on Writers series, in which Australian authors extol their home-grown literary heroes. The series is produced in dinky, impulse-buying form; a paragraph to a page. We’re meant to collect the whole set, like literary Pokémon; ten so far, and another waiting in the wings. It’s shrewd profiteering: why sell one volume when you can sell a rainbow-hued shelfful? But as the latest instalment finds its way to bookshop countertops – Sean O’Beirne on Helen Garner – I yearn for the adult-sized anthology that could have been: a rowdy love-letter to Aus-lit, rather than a series of parallel venerations. I yearn for the alchemy of conversation.”
My antipathy for cutesy gift-books collides with the latest addition to the Writers on Writers series in Issue 442 of ABR, Sunday May 1st, 2022.
You can listen to my review here, in Episode #105 of the ABR podcast, where I also discuss the challenges and bruising realities of writing a negative review.
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan review – new tech, old wounds
“The near-future America Egan conjures is numbed and festering: a country full of opioid dreamers and pill mills. But the most irresistible and dangerous drug of them all – the ultimate brain-rotting candy – is nostalgia…”
Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to A Visit From the Goon Squad is a strangely mournful creature, a novel of searchers. Reviewed in The Guardian, Thursday 28th April, 2022.
Safer to stay indoors: Novels of nasty sex and female repair
“…it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman, possessed of sexual recklessness, must be in want of a reckoning.”
Triple review of Ella Baxter’s New Animal, Imogen Crimp’s A Very Nice Girl, and Lynne Tillman’s Weird Fucks, in The TLS, Friday 22nd April, 2022.
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson review – irksomely quirky whodunnit
“How dreary it is to be the critic who hates the bright shiny thing. How miserly it feels to heckle a homegrown success story. And yet, how this novel grates.”
The immoderate hype is doing this meta murder novels no favours. Despondently reviewed in Guardian Australia, Friday April 1st, 2022.
“The cover of Anonymous Sex features abstracted writhing bodies, the promise of an orgiastic feast. Yet there is a primness to this new anthology – the brainchild of its editors, Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan – a sense that literary folk need their sex with the lights off.”
A new anthology is proof of “how hard it is to move us beyond euphemism and giggles and render the sensual sublime, or even simply joyful”, reviewed in the TLS, Friday 25th March, 2022.
Loveland by Robert Lukins review – two women reckon with unvoiced terrors in Nebraska
“When The Everlasting Sunday arrived – a tale of outcast boys and a formative 1960s winter – it felt like the book had slipped through some fissure in the space-time continuum, less a new release than a rediscovery. Lukins’s new novel, Loveland, tears the fabric of time open for itself: the past reaches forward; the present reaches back. Reckonings collide.”
Robert Lukins’s new novel is a compassionate, inter-generational tale of “coercive control and erosion”. Reviewed in Guardian Australia, Friday March 4th, 2021.
Breath of fresh air
“After wading through the first wave of pandemic novels – tales of weaponised loneliness, and wheeling anguish – I was in need of some top-shelf escapism. Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth might do the trick, my editor suggested, a natty literary thriller. “I inhaled it,” she told me, “but I think it has a major plot hole”. Pencil at the ready, I set off to find out for myself.”
Review of Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth, a trope-heavy, but delightfully cruel diversion - The Weekend Australian, Saturday February 26th 2022.
New collection finds legendary writer Margaret Atwood caught in a bind
“Atwood is unfailingly good company – pithy, self-deprecating, generous and ever-hopeful – so if this collection fizzles, it’s less a failure on her part, than a failure of the form. It’s hard to know how to engage with these knobbly assortments, where each piece is stripped of its context and then bathed in the glow of hindsight.”
Review of Burning Questions, Margaret Atwood’s new non-fiction collection - an “affable hodgepodge” - in The Age, Friday February 25th, 2022.
No end to the trauma and indignity
“To Paradise has been hailed as a “masterpiece for our times” and derided as the empty teasing of a literary dominatrix. For every breathless critic who compares the novel to War and Peace, there’s another who questions if it is really a novel at all, or just a handful of narrative kittens thrown into the same obliging sack.”
Grappling with Hanya Yanagihara’s latest polarising doorstop in The Weekend Australian, Saturday 29th January, 2021.
‘Those shelves have power’: Three women with a vision for Egypt
“The booksellers of Diwan filled my hands with stories of Cairo – raw-hearted, past-bound el-Qahira – and those stories helped me to understand my transitory place within it. I left Australia with two boxes of books; I sent home more than a dozen. But I never said goodbye. I left Egypt as the pandemic hit – a rush of packed bags amid rumours of airport closures. I intended to return. Now, with those intentions scuttled, it is a quiet delight to be able to revisit my favourite Zamalek haunt in Nadia Wassef’s bittersweet memoir...”
The founder of my favourite Cairo bookstore tells her story in Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller. Read my review in Australian Book Review, January 1st, 2022.
“The Fell is so attuned to the banalities and anxieties of lockdown that one is tempted to argue, as many critics have done, that the novel belongs to future readers, like a literary time capsule. The notion is intriguing, but it raises questions about what pandemic fiction might, or should, do that other archival material cannot; questions about the relationship between the real and revelatory.”
Review of Sarah Moss’s novel of lockdown listlessness, The Fell in The TLS, Dec 24th, 2021.
The 25 best Australian books of 2021
“It was a life-threatening surfing accident that prompted tsunami scientist, Dr Kaya Wilson, to come out as transgender – but bodies don’t tell linear stories and neither does his remarkable memoir. Instead, Wilson considers the things that mark us – death, grief, rage – and what a joy it is to watch his compassionate mind at work…“Once the question of being alive had been answered, I had to figure out how I wanted to live,” Wilson writes. His book invites us to answer that mighty question for ourselves.”
The Guardian is a unswerving champion of new Aussie lit and new Aussie critics, and their 2021 highlights list is a literary feast. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to sing the hefty praises of Kaya Wilson’s memoir, As Beautiful as Any Other.
In January, I read two magnificent novels back to back: Grimmish (Westbourne Books) by ABR alum, Michael Winkler, and Painting Time (MacLehose Press) by French writer Maylis de Kerangal. It’s been a bountiful reading year, but I’m still raving about these early favourites. Painting Time is a tale of trompe-l’œil artists, painters of 3D trickery. De Kerangal revels in the sensuality of artistic mastery; hers is a novel of rich pigments and capable hands. Grimmish, meanwhile, is a feral, unpinnable creature. Ostensibly a biography of the thick-skulled boxer Joe Grim – a fighter most opponents could beat, but none could knock out – Grimmish takes the little that’s known of Grim’s life as an invitation to riff. Winkler’s ‘exploded non-fiction novel’ is a bruised and bruising vaudeville, complete with talking goat. It’s dissonant, doubt-ridden, grotesque, and entirely sublime. Twin novels of ecstasy: the pain of art, and the art of pain.
Time to restock to the too-read pile! Australian Book Review’s eventful December issue includes Best of the Year picks from 38 of its marvellous contributors. ABR, Issue 438.
“Tsiolkas doesn’t want to write about beauty, he wants to be seen to be writing about beauty. “It is the great scandal of contemporary fiction,” he tells us, “that novelists think beauty unworthy of their efforts”. Behold his righteous antidote. His chiding manifesto.”
My (somewhat strident) review of Christos Tsiolkas’s disappointingly sour-hearted new novel, 7 1/2 in The Australian, Saturday November 20th, 2021.
Tech regulation is rich fodder for a canny satirist. What we get from Dave Eggers is “testicular cleavage”.
My review of The Every: the capacious, wearying, sanctimonious, limp-joked sequel to Dave Eggers’s tech satire, The Circle, in The TLS, Friday November 19th, 2021.
Hannah Kent and the irrepressible truth of fiction
“Hannah Kent describes her new novel, Devotion, as “a gift to my younger, queer, closeted-as-hell self”. If only we all knew how to be so kind to our former selves, to salve old wounds with such grace and light. For Kent has written herself a love story: a death-defying, God-toppling love story.”
Review of Hannah Kent’s big-hearted love story, Devotion, in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday November 5th, 2021
Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi review – a hurtling hothouse of a novel
“Helen Oyeyemi is a bamboozler, a discombobulator, a peddler of perplexity. She crushes fables and fairytales down to a powder and then laces her fiction with it like some kind of literary hallucinogen. Her novels should come with pharmaceutical warning labels: do not operate heavy machinery under the influence. Symptoms may include slurred realism and a persistent allegorical itch.”
It’s a queasy, juddering, gleeful train journey in Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel - near Dadaist chaos. Review in The Guardian, Wednesday November 3rd, 2021.
Class borders: Elizabeth Strout’s under-celebrated boldness
“Elizabeth Strout is an elegist for a particular kind of small-town Americana: those straight-backed, hard-headed places north of the Mason–Dixon line; pockets of Protestant forbearance. She writes about towns that are as claustrophobic as they are lonesome; about the ascetic chilliness of New England and the tut-tutting busybodies of the rural Midwest. Strout tells quiet, unfussy stories of these quiet, fussy places, but there is a venturesome streak in her fiction often concealed by its surface calm.”
Review of Oh William! Elizabeth Strout’s third dalliance with the ever-lonely, ever-lovely Lucy Barton; on the cover of this week’s TLS. Friday, 29th October, 2021.
Helen Garner’s Reasonable Doubts
When we describe Helen Garner’s work, we seize on its candour: she’s unflinching, unsparing, a scrutineer. But honesty is not the same as certainty. Garner appears in a long-awaited special conversation, speaking with writer and critic Beejay Silcox about the role that doubt plays in her life and work, the literary power of ambiguity, and the art of unknowing.
A Melbourne Writers Festival & Cheltenham Literature Festival special event - and incontrovertible career highlight.
Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser review – duelling novellas of charged, peerless writing
“Scary Monsters is a two-headed creature: two stories, two front covers. In her seventh novel, the author turns the proverb into a dare: just try to judge this book by its cover. And how will you choose? Will you trust your eyes? Seek the linear comforts of chronology, or run the clock backwards like a capricious little god? Flip a coin and surrender to the odds? Even no decision at all – a blind grab – is its own kind of decision.”
The magnificent Michelle de Kretser, who always leaves room for her readers. Review in Guardian Australia, Tuesday 19th October, 2021.
A bad boys’ club: The endemic misogyny of Australian politics
“A decade on, the policy legacy of the Gillard government is still obscured by the fact of her femaleness. The lesson we Australians seem to have learned from those years is not that the glass ceiling can be breached but that misogyny is bloody effective. And it is hard not to draw the same resounding conclusion from these two books, despite their rhetoric of empowerment. For the case they make most forcefully is simply that women belong in the room. “Only when parliament is reflective of our community can it best prioritise and act on the issues that impact us all”, Ellis writes. It is a monstrous indictment of Australian politics that such a concept still requires so much intellectual propellant.”
Combined review of Sex, Lies and Question Time by Kate Ellis, and Power Play by Julia Banks - two political memoirs, both alike in indignity - for the TLS, October 15th, 2021.
The mighty human mess: a double helix of fraught romance
“Sally Rooney (the literary product, not the person), has become a kind of shibboleth. To profess a grand love or distaste for her novels, or even – perhaps especially – a lofty indifference to them, has become a declaration of pop-cultural allegiance, a statement that’s almost entirely about ourselves. It’s a fate that too often befalls precocious, art-making women: they’re turned into straw men and set publicly alight.”
Review of 2021’s literary mega-event, Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You (no question mark), in the October 2021 issue of ABR - Issue 436.
To listen to me read my review in full, and discuss the complexities of adding to the cultural noise around Rooney, tune into this week’s ABR podcast:
Brilliant grit and grot
“It is a strange pleasure, in these locked-down, hard-bordered days, to lose yourself in a cloistered novel. But, like the never-ending house in Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi, there’s something magnetic about Groff’s abbey with all its medieval grit and grot: the polished cow-horn window panes; the lice-ridden clothes hung in the privy (“the ammonia of the piss kills the beasties in the night”); the garden of medicinal herbs; the scriptorium with its vellum and ink. It’s the lure of immersion…”
Review of Matrix, Lauren Groff’s magnificent novel of enormous nuns, cloistered power and sensual heresies - in The Weekend Australian, Saturday 18th September, 2021.
Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty review – pyrotechnic family drama drawn low
“Everyone is listening. Cafe waiters are eavesdropping from behind their ordering pads; baristas over the hiss of the espresso machine. Cleaners are mopping up secrets in house after house. Uber drivers can’t help but overhear; pedicurists too. And loyal hairdressers have decades of stories to share – all that tactile intimacy. In Liane Moriarty’s new novel, Apples Never Fall, a mystery unfolds in snippets and whispers – a suspected murder, a missing body – but every witness has their own story: exams to sit, bills to pay, Tinder dates to preen for, the loneliness of widowhood. They hear what they hear because, in service jobs, they’re treated as invisible – as inert and functional as furniture. Our loose-lipped cast might not notice them, but Moriarty sure does.”
Review of Liane Moriarty’s ninth novel - a tale of weaponised gossip - in Guardian Australia, Friday September 17th, 2021.
Scattergun Approach
Trauma is the watchword of this approach to crime writing. Such novels are as much – if not more – about private reckonings as they are about grand whodunnits; a chance to unsnarl a long-held knot of the soul…Tales of trauma offer their readers a dual catharsis: a salve as well as solve. Healing becomes its own kind of justice, more visceral and immediate than the bureaucratic faffing of police reports and courtroom verdicts.
Review of I Shot the Devil, Ruth McIver’s novel of revisited wounds, in The Weekend Australian, September 4th, 2021.
“Along with echoes of J. M. Barrie, Shakespeare’s The Tempest also hangs over this well-patrolled isle, where the water is clear and the cruelties clearly hidden. The dialogue in What Strange Paradise is theatrical, aphoristic, every exchange a sharp-edged reckoning. It is the kind of didacticism that befits a fairytale – fierce and unequivocal…”
Review of Omar El Akkad’s “fairy tale upturned” in The TLS, Friday September 3rd, 2021.
“Maggie Nelson is a mess maker. Ever-wary of binaries, shibboleths and dogmatism, the American poet and cultural theorist is a smasher of certainties, a merchant of doubt. Her new work, On Freedom, is a continuation of a career-long project to honour our unruly lives.”
Review of On Freedom, Maggie Nelson’s new theory-heavy brainbender, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday August 27th.
“Putatively, 12 Bytes is a volume for readers with a technological blindspot, a genial primer for the transhuman future. As such, it is an enterprise reminiscent of an earlier era when the internet fizzed with egalitarian possibility and ontological doubt, rather than urgent regulatory questions about big tech tax evasion, cryptocurrency trading, data ownership, deep fakes and fact-checking.”
Review of Jeanette Winterson’s new essay collection, 12 Bytes, a “techno-evangelist sermon” in The TLS, Friday, 6th August, 2021.
“When we talk of cultural power in Australia – of class and cash and cachet – we seldom talk about imagination. But the capacity to dream is a fundamental tool of change. “Poverty, in our family, was not only the absence of money or land,” Heyman writes, “but a poverty of the imagination.” A handful of used paperbacks from the Op Shop were as cheap as a bag of mixed lollies and, in books, Heyman could conjure a different future for herself: “a ladder to get me out of here”. In Fury, she puts in place strong rungs for others to follow her up.”
Review of Kathryn Heyman’s, defiantly joyful memoir, Fury, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday July 30th, 2021.
On writing ‘Façades of Lebanon’
On 4 August 2020, Theodore Ell was living in Beirut, Lebanon, when an explosion erupted at the local port, killing more than 200 people and injuring more than 7,500. Ell and his wife, a diplomat, survived, but were badly shaken. At the encouragement of his close friend Beejay Silcox, Ell turned his experience into the essay ‘Façades of Lebanon’, a harrowing, intimate piece of reportage, and the deserving winner of the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. In today’s episode, listen to Ell in conversation with Silcox about the inception of his prize-winning work, the balancing act of writing trauma and place, the historical complexities of Beirut, and more.
It was a pleasure and an honour to talk to my dear and talented friend Theo Ell about his prize winning essay in this week’s ABR Podcast. I recommend you listen to Theo read his magnificent essay before you tune in to our conversation - it’s the first and only time Theo has revisited his work since he wrote it, and it’s a soul-shaking, performance. You can find his reading here.
Or you can watch Theo and I in conversation at ANU’s School of Arts & Social Sciences.
Animal is crafted in the mould of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, with yoga pants and medical-grade marijuana in place of power suits and cocaine. And just like Easton Ellis’s ultra-violent provocation, it is at once repellent and riotous, electric and tedious, slyly brilliant and about as subtle as a brick: a grotesque novel of power to reflect our culture’s grotesqueries of power.
Review of Lisa Taddeo’s fiction debut, Animal - a “blood slicked cabaret” - in The TLS, Friday, 23rd July, 2021 . Featured as recommended reading on Bookmarks: ‘Five Reviews You Need to Read This Week’.
Family trip of a lifetime journeys to places not on any map
After Story simultaneously celebrates and interrogates the exalted texts of English literature – the illustrious, capital C Canon. It’s a canny feat of novel-craft as well as a testament to storytelling (and storytellers): the stories we inherit, the stories we internalise, and the stories we choose to value.
Review of Larissa Behrendt’s new novel, After Story, in The Age, July 23rd 2021.
Wartime debut novel shows the real power of taking a stand
Are principles worth defending in the face of barbarity, Wright’s novel asks. It’s the oldest of our questions, but ever urgent. The resounding message of this book is that resistance is as much of an apparatus – a deliberate, effortful machinery – as oppression. The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend towards justice, it is bent.
Review of Small Acts of Defiance, my first piece for The Age & The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday, 9th July, 2021.
“I’m itching to start The Absolute Book, by the New Zealander Elizabeth Knox, a novel that seems to have ensorcelled everyone who’s read it. In non-fiction, Sarah Sentilles’s Stranger Care is waiting for me. I was asked to review her last book, Draw Your Weapons (2017), early in my critical career. Before I’d read a word, I’d written it off as idealistic tosh. I went in, pencil sharpened, ready to toss around some inventive invective. But it was so compassionate, so soul-rattlingly clever, so humbling. I left a different reviewer. A different reader.”
My picks for this (European) summer, in the new issue of The TLS, Friday, June 25, 2021.
Who Gets to Be Smart by Bri Lee review – gutsy but unfocused interrogation of academic privilege
“As Lee dismantles her rote-learned scripts about intelligence, accomplishment and self-worth, she asks ever-urgent questions about the Australian education system and its gatekeepers. “In the Australian context it’s not always true to say ‘knowledge is power’,” she writes. “What’s much more true is to acknowledge that whoever has the power shapes the knowledge.” It’s not a new insight, but one that bears remembering when the federal government treats the classroom as a partisan battleground, and philanthropic cash is used as a cultural cudgel.”
Bri Lee’s new book, “a coming-of-age story… cloaked as a cultural reckoning”. Guardian Australia, Friday 11th June, 2021.
The Great Mistake by Jonathan Lee review – the man who shaped New York
“Central Park, Lee explains, is a “careful fraudulence”. The waterways, the rocky outcrops, the wooded glens: all manmade. Landscaping the park required more gunpowder than the battle of Gettysburg. But none of that artifice matters once you’re walking there; you’re too grateful for the sheer glorious fact of it. The Great Mistake is the literary equivalent of that too-cultivated wilderness. Go wander awhile.”
Jonathan Lee’s grand New York novel is “pure literary comfort food”. Book of the Day in The Guardian, Wednesday, 9th June, 2021.
Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss review – a mighty and generous heartsong
“Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray is a book that families can share; a book that belongs in every high-school classroom in the country. It’s a simple story, simply told: a young woman searching for herself and home. Yet there is nothing simple about that search on the colonial frontier. In granting such intimate access to Wagadhaany’s mind, and to her anguished heart, Heiss invites readers to feel rather than watch her journey, and through her, to trace some of the old wounds in our country’s story.”
Review of Anita Heiss’s essential new novel, Guardian Australia, Friday 21st May, 2021.
It’s always a delight to talk to Krissy Kneen, but it’s quite special to be able to share our story with ABR listeners on this week’s podcast.
Throughout her childhood, Krissy Kneen was surrounded by make-believe. At the centre of this enchanted world was her grandmother Lotty, whose prodigious fabulations not only kept her family in thrall, but also hid painful memories of poverty and forced migration. In her new memoir, The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, Kneen retraces her grandmother's journey from Slovenia to Australia. In today's episode, Kneen sits down with her friend Beejay Silcox, a past ABR Fellow and longtime contributor, to discuss their serendipitous meeting and Kneen's journey to uncover her family's history.
Painting Time by Maylis de Kerangal review - a bravura achievement
“Painting Time is a celebration of mastery, which is nothing more, De Kerangal writes, “than an aptitude for failure, a consent to the fall, and a desire to start over”. But how exhilarating that fall can be, how heady that desire. The book finds the sensuality in proficiency: the way a new skill feels as it settles into your body, the way a new language feels on your tongue. As she has so often done, De Kerangal shows there is poetry to be found in our jargon, and stories embedded in our tools.”
A magnificent novel of trompe-l’œil illusion. Book of the Day: The Guardian, Friday 7th May, 2021.
"The dauntless aviator is a grand archetype in the pantheon of American heroes, and in Marian Graves, Shipstead has created a character who can shoulder that cultural weight. Rescued as an infant from a burning cruiseliner and raised in the wilds of Montana by a gambler on a losing streak, Marian is imperious, androgynous and mettlesome. She bestrides the page in her reindeer-fur flight suit, glittering with the sheen of legend: the snow-haired twin, the bootlegging teen, the gangster’s wife, Alaskan hermit, Spitfire delivery pilot and vanished adventurer.”
Review of Maggie Shipstead’s glorious, wide-wing-spanned delight, Great Circle in The TLS, Friday May 7th, 2021.
Angela O’Keeffe on Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles – and engaging with the art of awful men
“Blue Poles has always seemed frenetic to me, a wheeling violence barely contained by its cobalt fence. “No, no, no, I don’t think it’s anger,” O’Keeffe is adamant. “Pollock said – and I wish I’d put this in the book somewhere – but he said something like: ‘When I’m painting, I’m happy. It’s the rest of the time that’s the challenge’.” The consciousness she conjures in Night Blue is calm, wise and observant; possessed of an enormous capacity for empathy. After listening to her talk with such reverence about the possibilities of art – of life – it strikes me that the painting she’s conjured is more like a mirror. Perhaps all paintings are.”
Interview with Angela O’Keeffe about her magnificent novella, Night Blue, for Guardian Australia, Saturday May 1st, 2021.
Car Crash by Lech Blaine review – a bruisingly insightful memoir of two wreckages
“Blaine’s memoir and debut, Car Crash, is a study in Australia’s larrikin brand of toxic masculinity, with all its flamboyant insouciance and cast-iron silences. How can you grieve when you’ve been taught to stare down heartbreak? How can you heal when you can’t admit you’re wounded? Car Crash is the tale of two wreckages: the first, a tragic overcorrection on a dark highway; the second, a lifetime in the making. For trauma is its own kind of collision: a snarl of cultural, community and self expectation; of pain and its public performance.”
Review for Guardian Australia, Friday April 9th, 2020.
Beware the many tentacled beast of empire
“As Australia’s sons and daughters of empire grapple with their dark inheritance, it’s powerful to see a writer connect the grand sweep of history to her own; to trace it’s echoes in the language she loves, and give names to our shared monsters.”
Review of Alison Croggon’s memoir-hybrid, Monsters: a reckoning, an aggrieved and grieving book reviewed in Guardian Australia, Friday March 12th, 2021.
“Like Fiona Mozley’s Booker prize-shortlisted debut, Elmet, Hot Stew is a novel of ownership and kinship, domain, dominion and dirt. But where Elmet was quiet and clenched, Hot Stew is gregarious. Mozley has traded Yorkshire gothic for West End burlesque.”
Review of Fiona Mozley’s novel of gentrification villainy, in The TLS, Friday 5th March, 2021.
“As a nuts-and-bolts dystopian, Ishiguro is unremarkable, but there are few authors who can capture our private frailties with such intricacy and humility (in gentle contrast to his contemporaries – Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie – those peacocking egoists). Ishiguro is our poet of ontological doubt, our bard of unbelonging.”
Review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, the first novel the author has published since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. ABR, Issue 429, March 2021.
You can listen to me read my review in the latest episode of The ABR Podcast.
Larrikin maximalism and undergraduate snicker
“You do not have to look hard to find absurdity in Australian politics: the revolving door of national leadership; Tony Abbott and his onion; Bob Carr and his steel cut oats; Scott Morrison and his coal. Bob Katter. This is the country where the deputy prime minister issued a televised death warrant for Johnny Depp’s toy poodles, and a state politician had to publicly deny interfering with a quokka. It’s a politics over-ripe for literary skewering.”
Review of Martin McKenize-Murray’s political burlesque, The Speechwriter, for Guardian Australia; Friday Jan 29th, 2021.
“Sudjic’s book begins and ends behind the wheel. It is a caustic, claustrophobic – and distinctly European – reinvention of the road novel. There are no limitless horizons here, only old (and new) borders, and Anya’s cache of true-crime podcasts to muffle (or perhaps muzzle) the ever-growing silence; a soundtrack of butchered women to lighten the mood.”
Review of Asylum Road, Olivia Sudjic’s “resolutely interior novel of a resolutely interior woman”. The TLS, Friday 29th Jan, 2021.
Intricate study of grief
“It’s unsettling to find that the reservations you have about a novel, the novel holds about itself. There’s a fizz of excitement, too – the possibility that the author is using our discomfort wisely, cleverly. But simply making a book’s cruelties visible does not defuse them, nor does it make them inherently useful or transgressive. It just makes them intentional, and intention can make them crueller.”
Review of Daniel Davis-Wood’s “breathlessly verbose” novel of fatherly anguish, At the Edge of the Solid World, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday January 9th, 2020.
Which critics most impress you? Ones that hand me some great big knot of a question I didn’t know to ask and then leave me – trust me – to go and untangle it…
A mighty honour to be ABR’s Critic of the Month, and a glorious way to start the new year. To read the rest of my interview, grab a copy of the latest issue, #428 Jan-Feb 2021.
Crafty lens is cinematic
“Twin tales of doomed films: Boyd’s, penned with a screenwriter’s knowledge of the chaos and skulduggery of film production; and Coe’s, a literary fan letter four decades in the making (legend has it that Coe wrote an actual fan letter to Wilder as the director was dying, and received a reply dictated from bed).”
A double review of William Boyd’s Trio and Jonathan Coe’s Mr Wilder and Me, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday Jan 2nd, 2021.
“There are adjectives I could heap upon this book: exigent, excoriating; a call to arms, an almighty wallop. But I’ve used them all before. In these post-#MeToo years, I have read and reviewed dozens of books about sexual violence, and they just keep coming. Book after book after book. And they’re all necessary. And they all hurt. I read them and I shake, and I can’t tell if it is fury, grief, fear, or impotence. Or perhaps it is a fierce catharsis – relief at seeing the unsayable truth in print.”
Review of Louise Milligan’s, Witness, a “fire-hardened” account of the ways our criminal justice system fails its victims. Book of the Week in Australian Book Review, Monday, 21 December, 2020.
To listen to my review, tune in to the ABR Podcast:
“Davies’s fretful ex-librarian is the very model of that timeworn trope: the hapless Englishman abroad.”
Review of Carys Davies’s deliberately old fashioned novel of contemporary India, The Mission House, in The TLS, Friday 18th December, 2020.
The 20 Best Australian Books of 2020
“It’s hard not to drown Song of the Crocodile in awed praise but this book deserves every skerrick of hype. That it is Simpson’s debut feels like a magnificent question: what else might she bring us? For now, just surrender to her storytelling, rich with Yuwaalaraay language and song.”
Such a pleasure to sing the praises of Nardi Simpson’s brilliant multi-generational novel alongside Rebecca Giggs’ Fathoms in Guardian Australia, Thursday 17th December 2020.
Australian Book Review: Books of the Year 2020
“When you’re lucky enough to meet a twelve year-old girl who loves books as ferociously you do, and they rave about their new “best-most-favourite-ever novel”, go buy a copy! That’s how I learned about Jessica Townsend’s utterly glorious Nevermoor series, the third of which Hollowpox: the Hunt for Morrigan Crow has just been released. Townsend’s books balance sophisticated menace, gleeful morbidity and guileless wonder. And they’re just getting better…”
To read the rest of my 2020 picks, alongside the choices of 32 marvellous Aussie critics, track down the December Issue (#427) of ABR.
And to hear me fizz with enthusiasm, tune in to the latest episode of the ABR Podcast, where I discuss 2020’s literary offerings with editor Peter Rose, and historian Billy Griffiths.
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam review – an X-ray of America
“When faced with the prospect of world-altering calamity – its moral exigencies and necessary sacrifices – we’re unlikely to do much at all except break out the hummus. It’s less an accusation than a grotesquely banal human truth.”
Review of Rumaan Alam’s trope-heavy third novel, in The Guardian, Thursday December 3rd, 202
The mystery of how Australia forgot a true luminary
“What a pleasure it is to encounter the right book at precisely the right time – to be in need of some unknowable, unnameable remedy and find it waiting. The relationship we develop with such books is intimate, but it’s an intimacy that can be shared. And so we rhapsodise and proselytise and press copies into the hands of friends (some of us may even accost open-faced strangers in bookstores).”
Review of Gabrielle Carey’s Only Happiness Here, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday Nov 28th, 2020.
“Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is the stuff of half-remembered dreams. It begins with a house, immense and abandoned; an infinite tangle of passageways and marble halls, swept by the tides of a captive ocean. Seabirds nest in the rafters, waterlilies bloom in the rain-flooded depths, and in one high-ceilinged chamber a storm is forever thundering. Every room, every grand vestibule and apse, is lined with ornate statuary, pair after pair of unblinking eyes. There is a skeleton in a biscuit tin, and a resident albatross. And two living humans.”
Review of the allegorical play space of Susanna Clarke’s wonderful and wondrous second novel, in The TLS, Friday 30th Oct, 2020.
“[Elena] Ferrante’s novels are whetstones; her narrators are knives. When we meet twelve-year-old Giovanna Trada in this novel, she is a meek and dutiful creature…Four years later, when Ferrante is finished with her, Giovanna’s heart is a shiv. Here is womanhood, Ferrante shows us once again: a relentless abrasion, a sharpening.”
Review of Elena Ferrante’s viciously brilliant The Lying Lives of Adults. Book of the Week, Australian Book Review, Monday Oct 26, 2020.
“It is a monstrous irony, but in a culture of single-use plastics and built-in obsolesce, to use less, you often need more: more time, more energy and more stuff. In short, more wealth.”
Review of Jennifer Howard’s anti-junk manifesto, Clutter: an untidy history, in The TLS, Friday 23rd October, 2020.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams - a wrenching response to a devastated world
“Is translating experience into words any achievement at all?” Flanagan asks. “Or is it just the cause of all our unhappiness? Writers the world over are grappling with a version of this question: in the face of so much devastation, so much terror, what can fiction possibly achieve?
Review of Richard Flanagan’s solastalgic fable, in The Guardian Australia, Friday October 16th, 2020.
Untangling the Story of a Deadly Blaze and ‘The Arsonist’ Who Lit It
“Hooper takes us into the belly of the beast: birds falling from the sky with their wings burning; beehives combusting from the radiant heat; farewell texts escaping from fire-ravaged homes (“Dad im dead I love u”). The elemental terror of Black Saturday requires little embellishment, only the quiet dignity of witness.”
Review of Chloe Hooper’s propulsive investigation of the Black Saturday bushfires, in The New York Times, Tuesday October 6th, 2020.
“…this generation’s punks don’t wear mohawks and safety pins but MAGA hats and Hawaiian shirts (that their anti-establishment posturing supports autocrats, plutocrats and corporate oligarchs is an inconvenient truth).”
Review of Hari Kunzru’s willfully puzzling Red Pill in The TLS, September 11th, 2020.
“Out of the wreckage of two merciless wars come two stories of what Alice Achan so gracefully calls “restoration in action”, hope revived by doing. Twin tales of the elemental courage – and freedom – of forgiveness, and the world-remaking power of narrative ownership, of finding the words to tell your own story. As Aminata Conteh-Biger emphatically writes, “The time for secrets is over”.
Double review of The School of Restoration, by Achice Achan and Philippa Tyndale, and Rising Heart by Aminata Conteh-Biger with Juliet Rieden, in The Weekend Australian, August 27th, 2020.
Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan review – a compassionate tale of homecoming
“This is a novel of the Ireland of Ryan’s childhood – the hermetic rhythms, ceaseless scrutiny and class hierarchies of village life. The wider world may be changing fast…but in Knockagowny, the only thing that moves with any haste is gossip.”
Review of Donal Ryan’s sixth novel in eight years, in The Guardian, Wednesday September 2nd, 2020.
“An era-defining Egyptian feminist activist, El Saadawi (born in 1931) is also a fearless diagnostician of the ills of the body politic. And there is no disease more noxious and infectious, she has long argued, than despotic patriarchy. In these novels, newly reissued in their original translations by Saqi Books, El Saadawi funnels her cultural reproval into nightmarish parables.”
Double review of Two Women in One and The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El Saadawi. The TLS. Friday August 23rd, 2020.
“…the opening chapter of MacInnes’s second novel is not Genesis but Revelations. Oblivion is brewing. And so is a literary wallop.”
Review of Martin MacInnes’s Gathering Evidence, which “invites us to watch watchers watching”. The TLS, Friday, July 31st, 2020.
“There is a word for the grief we feel – the elemental distress – as bushfires rage and the Great Barrier Reef bleaches and the Murray Darling chokes; as we learn that 46,000-year-old Pilbara antiquities have been fecklessly blasted to rubble. The word is solastalgia: homesickness for a home we have not left, but lost.”
Anchored in the Australian landscape - in Country - two new books demonstrate the power of reconciliation in action: Landscapes of Our Hearts by Matthew Colloff, and Amnesia Road by Luke Stegemann, reviewed in The Weekend Australian, Saturday, July 25th, 2020.
“With all of our increasingly elegiac talk of the “death of truth”, it is easy to forget that the disinformation economy has an infrastructure – a terrain – that is as real as it is virtual (and existential), and as inhabited as any other human landscape.”
Tumbling through the dezinformatsiya looking glass with Rory Maclean’s Pravda Ha ha, and Peter Pomerantsev’s This is Not Propaganda. Double review in The TLS, Friday July 10th 2020.
“If conservatives believe in the sanctity of life, Mumford asks, why don’t they support gun control? You could buy bumper stickers in the 1980s posing that question.”
Review of James Mumford’s Gladwell-inspired, but preachy Vexed in The TLS, Friday July 3rd 2020.
The TLS Summer Books List 2020
“It’s the cusp of whale season here in Albany, on the southernmost tip of Western Australia, and it feels like the whole city is waiting, watching for those first triumphant spouts in the harbour. Vicki Hastrich’s Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya and the singular life (Allen & Unwin), is the perfect reading companion for waterside reverie, an account of the memories made and remade along the author’s favourite stretch of Aussie coastline. Hastrich knows how to pay attention. Her memoir is the literary equivalent of a glass-bottomed boat, a frame for wonderment…”
To discover my other “summer” reading picks (or as it’s called in WA at the moment, “winter”), check out the 26th June issue of The TLS.
“How easily, this novel shows, the language of forgiveness can become “a costume for forgetting”. And how much there is to forget in this dreamscape American South, with its ever-wakeful history of violence. “We know we haven’t always been fair to everyone”, an elder reflects, “but we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time.”
Review of the “world rattling silence” of Catherine Lacey’s brilliant third novel, Pew. Reviewed in The TLS, Friday 12th June, 2020.
The Lightness by Emily Temple review – fetishising girlhood
“And so let us play a round of The Secret History bingo. An ungainly cipher of a narrator; check. A sleek clique of gorgeously broken young people; check. An ethereal bubble of unfettered privilege; check. A quest for transcendent oblivion that turns menacing; bingo.”
A novel of nihilistic Buddhists on a quest to master the dark and furtive art of levitation, reviewed in The Guardian, Wednesday June 10th, 2020.
“Hillary… has been so relentlessly projected-upon – so demonised, heroised and vivisected – that she’s become a kind of pant-suited Rorschach test.”
Review of Curtis Sittenfeld’s, Rodham, the author’s latest adventure in political ventriloquism; imagining a Hillary without Bill. The Weekend Australian, Saturday 30th May, 2020.
“Reconciliation is the challenge of our age, A Pure Heart quietly argues: containing our multitudes, finding a whole in the sum of our parts, whether in our selves or our politics. Hassib’s grand metaphor – a mighty god in pieces – suggests that the challenge is as old as human storytelling.”
The Osiris myth looms large in Rajia Hassib’s second novel, A Pure Heart; reviewed in The TLS, May 8th, 2020.
The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel review – haunted visions of a global crisis
“All contemporary novels are now pre-pandemic novels – Covid-19 has scored a line across our culture – but what Mandel captures is the last blissful gasp of complacency, a knowing portrait of the end of unknowing. It’s the world we inhabited mere weeks ago, and it still feels so tantalisingly close; our ache for it still too raw to be described as nostalgia.”
Review of The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel’s spectral sequel to Station Eleven. Book of the Day in The Guardian, Saturday May 2nd, 2020.
“Is re-enactment the antidote to our “vast and infinite” amnesia? It’s a question that haunts the art of the #MeToo era: can (must) we hurt women to prove how women are hurt and hurting?”
Review of Evie Wyld ferocious, metaphor strewn novel, The Bass Rock in The TLS, April 17th, 2020.
Bina by Anakana Schofield review – 'for every woman who has had enough'
“When the high priestess of commodified minimalism, Marie Kondo, encouraged her followers to gut their book collections and keep only the handful of volumes that “spark joy”, Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield led the bibliophilic counter-insurgency. “Literature does not exist only to provoke feelings of happiness or to placate us with its pleasure,” she wrote in the Guardian in January. “Art should also challenge and perturb us.”
Is Schofield’s “novel in warnings” beguiling, cantankerous irony or irksome quirk? You decide. Book of the Day in The Guardian, Sunday March 29th, 2020.
“Instinctively, Sebatsian Barry understands that stories speak loudest when they speak only for themselves – when they make no grand claims of universality or decisiveness (as Jeanine Cummins’s ill-conceived American Dirt did recently). A Thousand Moons is not a narrative stretched across the frame of a treatise, it is Winona’s story, rendered with dignity in jewel-studded prose.”
Review of Sebastian Barry’s mirror-twin sequel to 2016’s glorious Days Without End, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday 28th March, 2020.
“At this ominous time, as we all hunker down, hoping for a cure, perhaps only poetry offers true insight and consolation, if we lean on it, as we’ve always done in past crises. In this episode, 18 fine poets and close associates of ABR…read some favourite poems, works that seem to resonate in these anxious times.” - Peter Rose, Editor and CEO of Australian Book Review.
A joyful privilege to contribute to ABR’s life-affirming poetry project. You can hear my reading of Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’ at 33:20. (Fun fact: the chirruping you can hear if you listen closely is not some exotic Western Australian bird, but a sonic vermin repeller).
What to read in self isolation
Forget Proust, quarantine calls for laughs. Here’s my recommendation for Covid-19 lock-down reading…
Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat is the patient zero of genteel literary deadpan; the source-code of the most joyful of quarantine companions, from PG Wodehouse to Douglas Adams. It begins with a diagnosis: three indolent hypochondriacs who decide they are pathologically overworked. The only possible cure: an extended water-adjacent vacation. And so they head to the Thames, with too much baggage and a terrier whose singular ambition is “to get in the way and be sworn at”. Published in 1889, and famously never out of print, Jerome’s meandering masterpiece alternates between uproarious, feckless chaos and bucolic reverie. Its earnestly ridiculous and utterly timeless.
You can peruse more brilliant recommendations from some of Australia’s top writers and critics in The Australian, Friday March 20th, 2020.
“Sydney is choking in Aravind Adiga’s Amnesty, the sky “darkened by a film of wind-borne woodsmoke” that has coiled its way down from a bushfire in the Blue Mountains. The smoke is a grey wraith, haunting the city, triggering fire alarms in shops and houses as it sweeps across the harbour. It is a quiet background detail in Adiga’s fourth novel. But as Australia burns, it feels consequential: not prescience so much as a kind of monstrous inevitability. With Amnesty, Adiga captures the breathless grief of stepping into a future that has already been written. It is equal parts elegy and indictment.”
Review of Aravind Adiga’s interrogation of Australian “fairness” in Amnesty: The TLS, Friday, 6th March, 2020.
“There are few contemporary writers as generous as Erdrich; few who throw open the doors so wide and so warmly. Each of her novels feels like an invitation. But they are more than invitations, they are the pieces of a grand argument: you can only understand what is at stake, her books tell us, if you take the time to listen.”
Review of Louise Erdrich’s The Nightwatchman - a fictionalised account of her grandfather’s political activism - in ABR, March 2020, Issue 419.
In Episode Four of the new and improved ABR Podcast, I read my review of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize co-winning coda to The Handmaid’s Tale; a novel carrying three decades of expectation and the literary epi-centre of “a mighty collision of Zeitgeist”.
“Red at the Bone could so easily have become an elegy for thwarted expectations; that’s the punitive arc we have come to expect from tales of unplanned pregnancy – the tragedy of squandered potential, mitigated only by the redemptive purity of a child’s love. But Woodson – beloved by YA readers for her non-judgemental fiction – has never been interested in such didacticism.”
Review of Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson’s elegant second novel for adults in The TLS, Friday, 8th Feb 2020.
“Sex and consequences: that old script is tenacious, a corrosive source code. These twin novellas valiantly go to battle with it…”
A double review of Nina Leger’s The Collection, and Lauren Aimee Curtis’s Dolores, for The TLS, Friday, 17th Jan, 2020.
American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins review – a desperate Odyssey
“All the elements are in place for a slick cartel thriller: a relentless villain; an improbable attraction; a clock-ticking chase to safety; a conveniently precocious child…But despite its flamboyant and breathless first act, that’s not the novel American Dirt aspires to be.”
Review of the “immoderately hyped” American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins, in The Guardian, Wed 15th Jan, 2020.
Great Tech-Spectations: the communal project of contemporary fiction
“…in focusing on what fiction should look like in the digital era, we’ve spent much of the decade overlooking what it does look like.”
As this nameless, tech-slavish decade comes to a close, I consider the currents, preoccupations and forms that have given shape to the last ten years of fiction. Deepest thanks to my editors at the TLS for trusting me to wrestle these slippery years into some sort of intelligible shape. Available in the Christmas Double Issue of the TLS, December 20-27, 2019.
“It is hard not to be cynical about whimsical quotation collections at the best of times. Far too often, such books are designed as throwaway novelties – as gag gifts and stocking stuffers – destined to languish on bathroom floors as aids to contemplative digestion, or clog op-shop shelves.”
Double review of The Truth Will Set You Free, But First it Will Piss You Off! A Lifetime of Quotes by Gloria Steinem, and This is What a Feminist Looks Like, by Emily Maguire, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday December 20th 2019.
“Cities under cities, Paleolithic art galleries, bronze-age tombs, warehouses of toxic doom, and a forest internet powered by empathetic mushrooms…”
Can you guess my pick for book of the year? Read my contribution to ABR’s yearly round-up - alongside wonderful musings from Australian writers and critics - to find out. ABR, Volume 417, December 2019.
“Like a sprung trap, once the central conceit of The Need is revealed, the tension of the novel snaps. But what begins as a hyperventilating domestic noir, morphs into elegant speculative fiction, and then into a grand hymn to motherhood…”
Review of Helen Philips’ existentially terrifying new novel The Need in The TLS, Friday, 22nd November, 2019.
During the federal election campaign, Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenburg – both fathers of young children – were never asked how they cope with the competing demands of parenting and politicking. They were never prompted to explain how they juggle cabinet decision-making and bedtime story-telling, or quizzed about child-care pick-up schedules and weeknight dinner prep.
Review of Men at Work, Annabel Crabb’s latest contribution to the Quarterly Essay series, penned with “characteristic no-bullshit conviviality”. The Weekend Australian, Saturday, November 9th, 2019.
“Sometimes you need the clarity of a cultural bommy-knocker, but The Cockroach never transcends the feeling that it began life as a self-satisfied joke at a dull dinner party.”
Review of The Cockroach, Ian McEwan’s hastily penned Brexit novella in The TLS, Friday, November 8th, 2019.
“Financial settlement is an ugly proxy for emotional settlement, and Will and Testament is a fittingly ugly book, mired in the petty mundanity of internecine squabbling: furious late night emails, Facebook unfriending and virtuoso passive-aggression.”
Review of Will and Testament, Vigdis Hjorth’s controversial auto-fiction in The TLS, Friday November 8th, 2019.
“The Clothesline Swing is a hymn to the resilience of queer communities across the Arab world and Ramadan dedicates it to the children of Damascus. “This is what I did with my heartache”, he writes. “What about yours?” As the author knows, stories are the only places we can keep all the things we have lost.”
Review of The Clothesline Swing, Ahmad Danny Ramadan’s rightly-lauded debut novel, in The TLS, Friday October 25th, 2019.
The First Arabic Novel to Win the International Booker Prize
“Caught between the earth and the heavens, between “the sublime and the filth of creation,” the moon is, Alharthi writes, “the treasure house for what is on high and what lies below.” “Celestial Bodies” is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secrets.”
Review of Jokha Alharthi’s “evocative and evasive” Celestial Bodies, The New York Times, October 21st, 2019.
Fragile friendships at mercy of grief
Our culture erases aging women, relegates them to grandmotherly softness, or doddery cat-lady madness – biddies, busy-bodies and old bats. There is nothing lavender-scented about this caustic and humane novel. The Weekend exposes the pitiful flimsiness of our clichés with the simple (yet radical) act of fore-fronting well-written septuagenarian women.
Review of Charlotte Wood’s brilliant new novel, The Weekend, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday 19th October, 2019.
“It is a particular curse, to get exactly what you ask for. In our culture of entertainment maximalism – of reboots, sequels, reunions, and peak television – we seldom question the notion that every space should be filled. If we love a cultural product, surely we should have – we deserve – more of it. But there’s a fine line between cultural glut and cultural gluttony.”
Review of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s “giddily hyped and fiercely embargoed” coda to The Handmaid’s Tale. ABR Book of the Week, Monday 7th October, 2019.
“Each of the 14,000 volumes in Daraya’s collection had been hard won, saved from burning apartments and municipal wreckage under threat of sniper fire and preserved in a hidden basement. In Daraya’s final hours as a living city, the university students who had established the library worked frantically to safeguard its treasures by sealing over the entrance. A capsule of hope.”
Review of Syria’s Secret Library, by Mike Thomson, Australian Book Review, October 2019, Issue 415.
From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, the Ku Klux Klan detonated so many bombs in Birmingham, Alabama – a pyromaniacal campaign of hatred against black churches, homes, and businesses – that the city earned itself the ignominious nickname “Bombingham”.
Review of Bending Toward Justice by Doug Jones (with Greg Truman), in The Weekend Australian, Saturday 14th September 2019.
“Why did Saul Adler cross the road?”
Review of Deborah Levy’s “fastidiously-crafted (and crafty)” new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, in The TLS, Friday, 13th September, 2019.
“There is an allegorical hunger to our literary age – this age of dystopias – a yearning to devise some sort of explanatory myth to give shape to our multifarious fears (and tentative hopes).”
A plague on both your novels - double review of James Meek’s gorgeous new book, To Calais, in Ordinary Time, and Oisín Fagan’s fanged and feral debut, Nobber, in The TLS, Friday, September 6th, 2019.
“Cynthia, the simpering, scheming, covetous emotional sinkhole of New Zealander Annaleese Jochems’s assured debut novel, Baby, is alive and squirming; a memorable addition to the growing coterie of unapologetic antiheroines (dis)gracing the pages of contemporary fiction.”
Review of a fellow antipodean in The Guardian, Thursday 15th August, 2019.
“Both David Leser and Stephanie Wood are senior Australian journalists – professional critical thinkers and inveterate story hunters – yet they were soul-rattled by information hiding in plain sight. They didn’t ask the questions they were trained to ask. They’re asking them now.”
Double review of Stephanie Wood’s courageously graceful Fake, and David Leser’s Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing, in The Weekend Australian, Saturday August 10th, 2019.
“The story we tell about Vivian Maier usually begins at the end. The gifted American photographer took more than 150,000 pictures in her eight-decade lifetime: achingly human street scenes in Chicago and New York, where she worked as a nanny, never leaving the house without her Rolleiflex camera…”
Review of Vivian, Christina Hesselholdt’s collage portrait of the elusive photographer, Vivian Maier. The TLS, Friday July 26, 2019.
800-pound gorillas: American Conservatives, the media and the internet
“Two decades of left-wing derision and contempt have done nothing to dent the power and influence of the Fox News network. Quite the opposite: such reactions have merely served to insulate it from sustained and thoughtful scrutiny…”
Triple Review of Fox Populism, by Reece Peck; The Branding of Right Wing Activism by Khadijah Costley-White; and The Revolution that Wasn’t by Jen Schradie - TLS, Friday July 5th, 2019.
“How better to mock the idiots who take Twitter too seriously than by forensically relitigating a sexist joke you posted during the first Obama administration.”
Review of White, Bret Easton Ellis’s honey trap for outrage, in The Australian, Saturday 15th June, 2019.
Australia according to early man
“Ernest Hemingway’s fish wrangler, John Updike’s Rabbit, John Williams’s Stoner: 20th-century literature is a diligent and exhaustive catalogue of male senescence raging against the dying of the light. It’s hard to get excited about another eulogy to virility.”
Review of Thomas Keneally’s 33rd novel, The Book of Science and Antiquities (Two Old Men Dying in Australia) - Book of the Day in The Guardian, Friday 31st May, 2019.
“When truth is stranger than fiction, fiction is a potent source of truth. In the first week of the Trump administration, sales of 1984 increased by 9,500 per cent, catapulting George Orwell’s sexagenarian novel to the top of global bestseller charts. As Kellyanne Conway recast White House lies as ‘alternative facts’, Orwell’s tale of doublespeak read like a manual. Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the brave new world.”
Is there a future for dystopian fiction, when the real world feels so absurd? Find out in the final essay of my ABR fellowship series - a double review of Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha and John Lanchester’s The Wall. Available in Issue 411 of ABR, May 2019.
“There are writers who lead their readers into the fantastical with the reassuring equanimity of a tour guide. Helen Oyeyemi is not one of them. In her latest novel, a young girl leaps into a well and emerges – inexplicably – with two pupils in each eye. “What were you doing down there, anyway?” a friend asks. “I thought there might be a point of view down there”, she responds. It’s hard to conjure a better description of the bedevilled logic of the author’s fiction: you don’t walk into an Oyeyemi novel, you plummet and emerge transfigured, bleary-eyed.”
Review of Helen Oyeyemi’s sixth novel, Gingerbread, in The TLS, Friday 5th April, 2019 (paywalled).
A Debut Novel Probes the Difficult Lives of Arab-American Women
“Etaf Rum’s debut novel is a dauntless exploration of the pathology of silence, an attempt to unsnarl the dark knot of history, culture, fear and trauma that can render conservative Arab-American women so visibly invisible.”
Review of A Woman is No Man, by Etaf Rum, in The New York Times, Friday 29th March, 2019.
No denouement, only knots: Valeria Luiselli’s linguistic archaeology
“The southern border of the United States is many things: political battleground; vigilante magnet; graveyard; strip of historical scar tissue.”
Review of Lost Children Archive, Valeria Lusielli’s ferociously human new novel, in The Times Literary Supplement (paywalled), Friday 22nd March, 2019.
“As an (elder) millennial, there is nothing more tedious than the inter-generational blame game; and nothing more disheartening than watching your heroes play it. So it is with a weary heart that I write of Merchants of Truth, veteran reporter, Jill Abramson’s, necessary, yet flawed, chronicle of the decline of American journalism in the smartphone era. “
Review of Merchants of Truth, by Jill Abramson, in the Weekend Australian (paywalled), Saturday March 16th, 2019.
Trials of Thoughtful Feminists
“For women, as with so many of our desires, the desire to be taken seriously is ignored, ridiculed or thwarted. Two new volumes of cultural critique, Accidental Feminists, by ebullient social commentator, Jane Caro, and The Thinking Woman, by Vogel-Award winning novelist, Julienne van Loon, strive to redress the balance. Twin accounts of unsung women, these books accord their subjects the dignity of visibility.”
Double review of Accidental Feminists, by Jane Caro and The Thinking Woman, by Julienne van Loon, in the Weekend Australian (paywalled), Saturday March 9th, 2019.
“In the final years of the Spanish Inquisition, Franciscó Goya produced a series of disquieting etchings, “Los Caprichos” (“The Caprices”), each a scathing critique of the “common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual”. Goya’s sepia-inked world is a compendium of everyday horrors: the socially monstrous rendered as monsters. He depicts a world of cruelties, humiliations and fears; bat-winged, ass-headed, owl-beaked…”
Review of Layla AlAmmar’s debut dazzler, The Pact We Made, in The TLS (paywalled), Friday March 8th, 2019.
Turn-of-the-century tale of romance and revenge
“Arriving now, at a time of insular nationalism, of Brexit and the migrant crisis, it’s hard not to read Boyd’s new novel as more elegy than a love story – an elegy to the grand dream of Europe, borderless and polyglot. There is a terrible poignancy to watching our past imagining its future, a future that we know will not – did not – arrive.”
Review of William Boyd’s 15th novel, Love is Blind, in the Weekend Australian (paywalled), Saturday January 5th, 2019.
“Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Unsheltered, is a novel of ideas. It has questions to ask and arguments to make, and is valiantly unashamed of those ambitions – urgent and raw; the vanguard of American fiction’s impending reckoning with the Trump era. It’s also an object lesson in how difficult it is to pen idea-driven fiction that transcends the polemic.”
Review in the Weekend Australian (paywalled), December 14th, 2018.
It’s still not a women’s world
“Summers’ book is fearlessly unapologetic, but why do we still measure a woman’s bravery against the yardstick of contrition? Summers should not need to apologise for her reproductive choices, her fashion choices, or her honesty about the cruelties (and crudities) of powerful men. She should not need to apologise for being proud of her successes and candid about her failures. It should not be remarkable that she doesn’t. It’s a testament to the circularity of progress that it is.”
Reckoning with the legacy of Australian second-wave feminism in a double review of Anne Summers’ new memoir, Unfettered and Alive, and Germaine, Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s biography of Germaine Greer in the Weekend Australian (paywalled), Saturday November 30th, 2018.
The Art of Pain: Writing in the Age of Trauma
“How did we get here? How did trauma become our literary watchword? How did staring down (or at) suffering become synonymous with authorial heroism, and a cultural virtue? And what does it mean to read – to simultaneously consume and bear witness – in an era of beautiful (or beautified) pain? Many of these questions are unanswerable. They should still be asked.”
Wrestling with the ethics of readership and the literature of ornate pain, in my penultimate piece for ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellowship. Australian Book Review, cover essay November 2018, Issue 408.
“As a reader, opening an anthology is akin to entering a room of strangers; we arrive hopeful but nervous, ears pricked for conversation, camaraderie and conflict.”
Review of UTS Writers’ Anthology, in Mascara Literary Review, Wednesday November 7, 2018.
“For millennia, reactionary political groups have laid claim to ancient Greece and Rome to imbue their agenda with the heft of antiquity. But when we look to history for validation, we find mirrors.”
Review of Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, in the Weekend Australian, Saturday October 27, 2018.
"The problem with On Rape is not that it aspires to provoke, it’s that it doesn’t seem to care to do much else; it’s not a catalyst, it’s an echo chamber."
The painful, provocative conversation about sexual violence is one we have to have, but is Germaine Greer the one to lead it?
Review of On Rape, by Germaine Greer and Not That Bad (ed) Roxane Gay, in the Weekend Australian, Saturday September 1, 2018.
"Michael Ondaatje’s effulgent new novel is a story of half-lights and half-truths – a novel of matchlight, gaslight, limelight and moonlight, sodium light and storm light, bonfires and bomb-fires. A novel in chiaroscuro."
Review of Michael Ondaatje's Warlight in Australian Book Review: September 2018, Issue 404 ($).
"Like all nations, America is built on fictions: from its founding fathers to its middle-class dreams. Some would argue that is all the country has even been: a stars-and-bars fiction wrapped around fifty separate countries, wearing ever more threadbare. How these fictions work – how they are made, and for (and by) whom – is a potent reflection of how the country works.
From my long-form essay on the rise and rise of American creative writing programs - the cover essay of ABR's August 2018 issue (403).
Press Coverage:
Australian Financial Review (extract)
The Hub on Books (radio interview)
This piece - personal and political - is the second of my contributions as the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow, and I am indebted to the magazine and its supporters for this extraordinary opportunity.
Modern Odyssey with no Ithaca still sustains hope
"Stories heal and nourish, kindle hope and bind us to one another. They are portals of escape and of empathy. In a time of unprecedented human displacement, when more than half of the world’s 25.4 million refugees are younger than 18, we need stories like Juba’s more than ever."
Review of Majok Tulba's When Elephants Fight - the Weekend Australian, July 21, 2018 (paywalled)
President Very Much Still Here
"He has the wits of an action hero, the liberal heart of an Aaron Sorkin daydream and the hardboiled vocab of a Raymond Chandler detective ... He prays when he needs to, and shoots when he must."
Review of The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson - the Weekend Australian: July 7, 2018 (paywalled)
Beejay Silcox reviews 'Census' by Jesse Ball
"The terrain of this strange country is surreal and somnambulant, as if imagined by Dr Seuss and populated by David Lynch – a Vaseline-lensed kingdom of convivial menace."
Australian Book Review: May 2018, Issue 402
Reflections on an American Divide
"The Civil War is in no danger of being forgotten; some would argue it never truly ended. As the contemporary arguments about its statues and symbols demonstrate, there is scope — need — to look beyond the brass-buttoned generals and big speeches on small hills."
Review of Kevin Powers' A Shout in the Ruins - the Weekend Australian, May 18, 2018 (paywalled).
Reckoning with ancestral ghosts
"Trauma is alchemical. The changes it wreaks in us are not well understood, nor — we are learning — generationally containable. There is growing evidence that trauma creates an inheritable echo that can sound in those who never knew it: an epigenetic haunting. When we tell stories of trauma, we are telling ghost stories."
Combined review of Anne Connor's Two Generations, and Cynthia Banham's A Certain Light - the Weekend Australian, April 21, 2018 (paywalled)
"When talking about the future of Australian magazines, it is too easy to get caught in the narrow furrows of old debates: print versus digital, public versus reader-funding, emerging versus established writers, fiction versus non-fiction. These are unanswerable questions, because their dichotomies are lazy … What’s more vital is a conversation about how the minds behind our cultural magazines approach their evolving role in a national conversation that is fractured, fickle, and fractious."
Read the first of my ABR Fellowship essays on Australian magazine culture in the magazine's 40th birthday issue - it's 400th! Featuring interviews with the editors of some of the country's most vital and respected cultural magazines: The Monthly, Meanjin, ABR, Overland, Archer, Kill Your Darlings and Peril.
You can hear me talk about the essay, and my fellowship, with Peter Rose in the ABR Podcast.
Robert Manne, On Borrowed Time: fallibility as courageous as fidelity
"It’s not often that Australia’s public thinkers — its commentators, experts and politicians — admit to changing their minds. In a political climate where the accusation ‘‘flip-flopper’’ is potent and damaging, it’s not surprising."
Review of On Borrowed Time by Robert Manne - the Weekend Australian, March 3rd, 2018 (paywalled)
Australian Book Review - Fortieth Birthday Fellowship
I am delighted and honoured to have been selected as ABR’s Fortieth Birthday Fellow.
As an ex-pat Australian writer, who has spent the last four years in the United States, and will spend the next four in the Middle East, I am particularly excited at the prospect of working with Peter Rose and the ABR team to tell responsive, international stories.
On accepting the fellowship, I explained:
"‘The faults and fault-lines of our political moment offer profound opportunities for literary and critical insight. Below the dysfunction and rage, a new generation of authors is writing the stories that will come to define our time, and us. They’re writing to make sense of the tumult, to unmask dark grievances, lurking cruelties, and wellsprings of change. ABR has an increasingly global reach; it showcases Australian culture to the world, and brings the world back home. The magazine is also a powerful moral compass in Australia’s cultural landscape, from environmental conservation to same-sex marriage to its ongoing support of young writers. It is a privilege to be involved with ABR as it enters its fifth decade, eyes to the future.’
I'll be publishing a number of literary essays and reviews across the year - the first of which is due to appear in ABR's 400th issue.
Media Links:
Dread is a safe bet for rising writers
"The watchword of the collection is dread. Something dark slouches across these pages; the air is heavy with menace. Uninvited strangers knock at doors. Indignant birds peck each other to death. Symptoms appear for un-diagnosable illnesses. Student debt looms. The voices of long-dead girls whisper. Friendships are rice-paper thin."
Review of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists 3 - the Weekend Australian, December 28th, 2017 (paywalled)
"Had I not been asked to review Sarah Sentilles’ Draw Your Weapons for these pages, I wouldn’t have read it; I would have skimmed the blurb and scoffed at its idealism..."
A pleasure to be included, once again, in the 2017 reading round-up in the Weekend Australian, December 22, 2017 (paywalled)
" My literary heart belongs to the rule breakers – to the form smashers and narrative knotters..."
See my picks for this wonderful reading year, along with almost 40 Australian writers and critics in Australian Book Review's survey of 2017's finest - December 2017, Issue 397
Beejay Silcox reviews 'Border Districts' by Gerald Murnane
"Australians often struggle with strangeness: we do not easily surrender to the unconventional, the wilfully eccentric, or the unapologetically clever. It’s hard to know what to do with a writer who is all three."
Australian Book Review - December 2017, Issue 397
" There are books that capture their readers slowly, like stepping into the quiet pull of quicksand. Sing, Unburied, Sing is not one of them. Jesmyn Ward’s third novel, which won the US National Book Award a week ago, opens with the inescapable force of a bear trap."
Review of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing - the Weekend Australian, November 25th, 2017 (paywalled)
"As has been often said, history is not the past, it is the story we tell about the past. As these novels show, fiction provides the freedom, and power, to tell that story in profoundly human terms."
Double review of Sara Dowse' As the Lonely Fly, and Bram Presser's The Book of Dirt - the Weekend Australian, November 18th, 2017 (paywalled).
"Readers who adore Dan Brown’s books will buy it; readers who despise them will not. Both sides will sneer at each other. Nobody will change their mind. In the face of such trenchant thinking, it is tempting to leave it at that."
Review of Dan Brown's Origin - the Weekend Australian, October 28th, 2017 (paywalled)
Beejay Silcox reviews 'The Life to Come' by Michelle de Kretser
"Humans are narrative creatures. We tell stories to make sense of ourselves, but our stories – be they historical, political, fictional, or personal – shape us as much as we shape them. In the service of narrative expediency, we often sacrifice nuance. We turn chance to prophecy, and accidents into choices. We justify and excuse ourselves. We anoint heroes and villains. As novelist Michelle de Kretser warns, it is ‘frighteningly easy’ to turn the people around us into characters and to forget that: ‘The only life in which you play a leading role is your own.'"
Australian Book Review, October 2017 - Issue 395.
"In this era of insular nativism, [James] Baldwin’s words seem to carry the terrible weight of prophecy: ‘I’m terrified at the moral apathy, at the death of the heart that is happening in my country,’ he lamented more than thirty years ago; he could have been speaking yesterday."
Review of Madman Film's I Am Not Your Negro, Directed by Raoul Peck and Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. Australian Book Review - online September 11, 2017 and in print, Issue 396.
"Racism is a word held behind glass: we won’t break it out in Australian public discourse unless there is an unambiguous emergency, unless there can be no other explanation but wilful bigotry."
Double review of Toni Morrison's The Origin of Others, and Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race - the Weekend Australian, September 9th, 2017 (paywalled)
"Photographs can be engines of empathy and apathy. They can exploit and protect, illuminate and obscure, criticise and valorise. They can break stereotypes and entrench them. They can tell the truth and they can lie. What is clear is that photographs “generate a new kind of citizenship”.
Review of Sarah Sentilles's Draw Your Weapons - the Weekend Australian, July 8th 2017.
"There are few writers who are as able (and willing) to empathetically portray the American underclass as Sedaris. And while he largely ignores major world events and geopolitics, the politics of the everyday is here, with all of its monstrous hilarity. Sedaris is an eavesdropper, not a commentator."
Review of Volume One of David Sedaris's Diaries Theft by Finding - the Weekend Australian, July 1st 2017.
Beejay Silcox Reviews The Idiot by Elif Batuman
"Email is a chimeric beast, an uneasy mix of intimacy and distance – unlimited time and space to say precisely what we mean, coupled with the unnerving promise of instant delivery. When it first arrived, email seemed to invite a new kind of writing – deliberate, earnest, vulnerable. We tried to sound smarter and wittier than we were, and it showed."
Review of Elif Batuman's debut novel, The Idiot - Australian Book Review - May 2017, Issue 391
"Talese is a poet of the periphery; he specialises in minor characters and hidden quirks."
Review of High Notes, by Gay Talese - the Weekend Australian, April 29th 2017.
Beejay Silcox Reviews '4321' by Paul Auster
"When a novel is as thick as it is tall, size is assumed to be a corollary for ambition. The question is whether 4321, seven years in the making, is excellent or simply enormous."
Australian Book Review - April 2017, Issue 390
Beejay Silcox Reviews George Saunders' Debut Novel
"From the outside, America seems defined by its brutal polarities – political, racial, moral, economic, geographic. The Disunited States of America. From the inside, the picture is more complex; American life is not lived at these extremes, but in the murky, transitional spaces between them."
Review of Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders: Australian Book Review - March 2017, Issue 389.
Rebecca Huntley's Still Lucky: an optimistic view of Australia's future
"In this global climate of division and populism it is vital to be clear-eyed about the faults and fault lines of our own nation."
Review of Still Lucky, by Rebecca Huntley - the Weekend Australian, February 4th 2017
"In a year bursting with vibrant new fiction, I almost feel guilty admitting my top pick is five decades old: this year’s reissue of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel The Power of the Dog..."
An honour to contribute to The Australian's annual round-up of the year's literary delights - the Weekend Australian, December 25th 2016.
"Politics is personal in the United States, far more private than it appears from outside. When political allegiance becomes tied to character, revealing one reveals the other. More importantly, if you critique the former, you impugn the latter."
A dispatch from Trumpland - Australian Book Review September 2016, Issue 384
Families first in John Freeman's second literary anthology
"Stories are custodians of history and incubators of hope. It is the act of storytelling that makes it possible for families to look forwards and backwards at the same time, to keep both their traditions and aspirations alive."
Review of Freeman's: Family - the Weekend Australian, August 27th 2016
Megan Abbott's You Will Know Me: focus shifts to adults
"Abbott stands out because she does not prettify or sanctify girlhood, her characters are forceful, sexual, and capable. Their bodies may be battlegrounds, but their minds are knives."
Review of You Will Know Me, by Megan Abbott - the Weekend Australian, August 20th 2016
Racism in Australia: Maxine Beneba Clarke writes from experience
"It is not easy to talk about racism in Australia. As a nation we tend to talk around it, or behind it, or shout it down. Mostly we don’t talk about it at all, for there are few words in the national lexicon as loaded as 'racist'."
Review of The Hate Race, by Maxine Beneba Clarke - the Weekend Australian, August 6th 2016
Obama's legacy: claims bin Laden raid was built on web of lies
"As the Obama presidency winds down, the machinery of legacy building is winding up. Legacies demand narratives, stories that are simple, smooth and easily passed from one hand to another."
Review of The Killing of Osama bin Laden, by Seymour Hersh - the Weekend Australian, June 18th 2016
Choice writing curated by Granta ex-editor
"Arrival is not a gimmick; it’s a heartbeat. Listening for its pulse from one page to the next encourages dual enjoyment, first with each individual piece, and then the pieces in conversation."
Review of Freeman's: Arrival - the Weekend Australian, November 7th 2015