A novel in disguise: Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser, reviewed

Michelle de Kretser, of a Sri Lankan family living in Australia, is an exceptional novelist – perhaps among the ten best at work in English today. She has been recognised with literary prizes, but it’s surprising that she hasn’t made quite the impact on the public she deserves. She is one of those writers who one presses upon intelligent acquaintances and whose books reward rereading.

One of her regular subjects – she is a novelist of bookish, intelligent lives – is the inability of the Australian intelligentsia ever to read an Australian novel. As the author of The Life to Come, perhaps the best Australian novel since Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, she does well to present this worrying disengagement with amusement. If Australian readers could only turn away from their exhausting preoccupation with Virginia Woolf, for instance, the well-funded academic industry might notice that one of the cleverest and wittiest writers of the age is worth their attention. And on the other side of the world, we might notice her excellence in greater numbers, too.

De Kretser returns repeatedly to the place of the immigrant in an established culture, dominated by European principles but not altogether confident in those values. It is not a new subject. Fiction has always been drawn to individuals not quite sure of their place, who are going to work to establish their presence against repressive forces. The novel as a form loves individuals fighting to get on in the world. These may be disadvantaged by sex (Jane Eyre) or by class (Moll Flanders), or by race, nationality or any number of things. The novel doesn’t often waste time bemoaning the fact that people have challenges in society to overcome.