by Adrian D’Ambra
A recent London Review of Books review of Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot (2017), raised the temperature of hope. Here was a writer from inside the academy, steeped in theory, who was prepared to signal its limitations and to celebrate what older readers still lovingly refer to as literary writing. And then I read Michelle de Kretser’s 2017 novel, The Life to Come. At last, a satire on the Australian literary establishment and on the social attitudes, cultural mores and theoretical poses it promotes at the expense of both writing and reading. I haven’t enjoyed an Australian cultural and social literary satire so much since the novels and at least one of the plays – The Season at Sarsaparilla – of Patrick White. And that, I might say breathlessly, is the point. This country couldn’t wait to bury Patrick White. They thought that they hated him because of his upper class Anglo-Australian accent and mannerisms, because he wrote books that were hard to read, because he came from the wealthy rural squattocracy rather than the miserable suburbs that the rest of us grew up in, because of his European sensibilities and his modernism. Possibly even because of his homosexuality. But really, Patrick White was hated for his intelligence; he was hated as a writer because he wrote literature rather than simply novels, short stories, plays; because he insisted that the kind of writing that really mattered was a sounding board for important aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual and psychological questions about art and about being human. Patrick White was hated because every novel also reminded us that we had not built Australia Felix in the Great Southern Land, but that – really – we were nothing more than Little Britain; Little Britain in our shuttered suburban minds, our English language inarticulacy, and – above all else – in our class-divided society. And once he was gone, he was best forgotten if not reviled. After all, ‘Intelligence’, observes Matt, one of de Kretser’s characters, ‘is unAustralian.’ (p. 145)
What de Kretser performs is partly an act of literary resuscitation, something akin to the rehabilitation of political prisoners once convicted of thoughtcrime. She champions Patrick White. She champions Christina Stead. She champions Shirley Hazzard. Stung by her supervisor’s antiseptic, post-structuralist criticism of her thesis, another character, Cassie, writes in her notebook about ‘The Problem with Shirley Hazzard’:
- She is a woman.
- She is a great artist.
- She is fearless.
- She has stayed away instead of coming home to be punished for 1-3. (p. 61)
De Kretser bravely genders the academic supervisor as a woman to ensure that the criticism levelled at Cassie cannot be read as a sexist attack on her or her subject matter by a male bully.
De Kretser’s novel is also in part an act of literary rebellion against the ideological constraints and the self-imposed insular limitations of the Australian literary establishment. ‘Everything changed in the Eighties,’ explains Pippa, de Kretser’s shadow-novelist, ‘The big division used to be between people who were born before the Second World War and people who were born after. Now it’s between people who know about post-structuralism and the rest of us.’ (p. 129) Ironically, Pippa becomes a commercially successful novelist without having read or being able to understand Foucault. However, her outlook on life and writing is beset by a moral blindness and emotional insensitivity which appears to have been shaped by the cultural landscape in which she operates. Pippa reflects both the sense of cultural inadequacy that comes with being an Australian and the moral and epistemological meaninglessness that comes with absolute relativism. Most of her co-characters have never read an Australian novel. Pippa appears never to have read a European one, let alone any of the world’s other literatures. Her shallowness is sometimes disarming, sometimes potentially deeply offensive to her friends and lovers as well as de Kretser’s readers. As a young writer, she aspires to write with beauty. As a mature writer, she aspires to write the truth. De Kretser allows Pippa’s own postmodern tech-savvy voice to suggest that she has achieved neither. Indeed, another of the significant achievements of the novel is the connection made between the decline in art and meaning and the rise of online inauthenticity.
At the beginning of the novel we are introduced to George Meshaw: ‘In Melbourne . . . he had wanted to write about modernism in Australian fiction for his PhD. After some difficulty, a professor who would admit to having once read an Australian novel was found. At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered something astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like “however” and “which” – words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute – had been deployed in ways that made no sense.’ (p. 5)
De Kretser’s resuscitation of the great Australian modernist novel is much more than an ideological stance. As she did in The Hamilton Case, she writes about characters who are complex, whose relationships with themselves and with each other are complex, sometimes baffling to themselves as well as to the reader. The various narrative threads in her novel – her shifting use of the free indirect style that appears sometimes almost simultaneously to affirm and condemn her characters – are also complex in their development and the connections between them. Existential anxiety is nestled in Pippa’s certainty, George’s resilience, Cassie’s disillusionment, Matt’s entitled sense of self-sacrifice, just as it is nestled in the multitude of familial, intimate, friendship and professional relationships throughout the novel. Revelations constantly collide with misunderstandings. Like the characters in a Chekhov short story or a White novel, great insights can be experienced by utterly ordinary people; hence the lengthy final section of the novel devoted to Christabel and Bunty. De Kretser understands life and writing to exist somewhere between the Chekhovian idyll that ‘We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams’ and Beckett’s dour observation that we, like Christabel, are always awaiting the life to come.
english literature teacher 