Wendy James

Set in Sydney, Wendy James’s third novel, Where Have You Been?, an intriguing story of family, loss, memory and identity, is just as compelling as her previous ones, Out of the Silence (2005) and The Steele Diaries (2008).

Self-evidently, the short story demands precision. The term ‘short story’ more than likely brings to mind the magazine-length sprint or the rapidly delivered epiphany. John Updike was a master of this demanding form. In his Olinger and Tarbox tales, characters are assembled quickly and sent to their fate with little delay. Never cursory, this was writing performed under haiku-like restraint. In the short stories of Wendy James and Tom Cho, we are presented with similarly brief and precise tales of two different Australian landscapes: one as small as a kitchen, the other as capacious as an arena. Why She Loves Him is James’s first story collection after two well-received novels. For the most part, the stories are quiet and domestic affairs. Her characters are frequently repressed and restrained, filled with rage that is rarely given voice. If the short fiction of some novelists feels too constrained, James’s evocation of despair is perfectly suited to these short bursts.

This is a novel about a mother, daughter, and granddaughter. Two of these women are artists, and the third is a medical practitioner. Wendy James explores creativity and the price it exacts, especially if the artist is a woman. James is also interested in biography, its limitations and potentially destructive effects. The title, The Steele Diaries, refers to the journals of a celebrated book-illustrator, Zelda Steele. In the 1960s, Zelda is a young mother of two, temporarily living separately from her husband when, mysteriously, she dies by drowning in the local river. This occurs just as she is fulfilling her potential as an artist. The main narrative is a first-person account by Zelda’s (now adult) daughter, Ruth, a doctor who has spent her life resenting her famous mother and modelling herself on her beloved father, Richard, the respected GP of an outback country town. Ruth’s inner journey towards an adult understanding of her mother and, thence, herself provides the central narrative. The trajectory begins immediately after her father’s death in the late 1990s, when Ruth is contacted by Douglas Grant, an international art critic and biographer of her long dead grandmother, modernist landscape painter Annie Steele. Annie was the first wife of painter Ed Steele, Australia’s most famous modernist artist. Douglas Grant, a lover of Zelda’s when they were young, is aware that she kept a journal and now wants to base a biography upon it. Grant is convinced that it must have been in Richard’s possession during the years since Zelda’s death.

These two first novels are based upon events and people from Australian history. Noni Durack recasts the story of the pastoralists of the north-west of Australia in terms of an enlightened awareness of land degradation, but the narrative remains oddly captive to the legend of heroic conquest that she is trying to critique. Wendy James, on the other hand, has written an elegant feminist account of the lives of women in Melbourne at the time of the struggle for women’s suffrage.