Fiction

The Sitters by Alex Miller

Item: The Sitters
Author: Veronica Brady

by Veronica Brady •

May 1995, no. 170

Viking/Penguin, $16.95pb

Fiction

The Sitters by Alex Miller

by Veronica Brady •

May 1995, no. 170

Intimacy, someone has said, is ultimately unintelligible. Yet this novel suggests that intimacy, to the self and to others, may well be all we have. Miller’s three previous novels move in a similar direction. But in them there was a good deal still of the world of the likeness, of the external world as it seems to be. The Sitters, however, is about drawing a portrait of an ‘art of misrepresentation’, which interrupts our historical consciousness and unmasks the pretentions of rationality, taking us out into the dark beyond common sense, touching something else beyond words.

Veronica Brady

Veronica Brady (1929-2015) was an Australian religious sister, writer, and academic. She was an authority on Patrick White and also wrote a biography of Judith Wright (South of My Days,1998). Her criticism was published widely in Australian magazines and newspapers and her books included The Future People: Christianity, modern culture and the future (1971), The Mystics (1974), A Crucible of Prophets: Australians and the question of God (1981), Playing Catholic: Essays on four Catholic plays (1991), Polyphonies of the Self (1993), and Caught in the Draught: Contemporary Australian Culture and Society (1994).