Fiction

Grief and love in America are the subjects of Lorrie Moore’s new novel, which is part surreal road trip, part love story, and partly made of letters from a woman to her late sibling. Finn, a school teacher suspended for some of his unorthodox ideas about history, attends the bedside of his dying brother, Max, but is then drawn away by his fatal attraction to a suicidal ex-lover, Lily, right around the time of the 2016 election. His story is interspersed with letters written by Elizabeth, an innkeeper, to her dead sister in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Clever, cranky, bitter, and witty, Elizabeth describes herself as ‘unreconciled to just about everything’. The two parts of the narrative are themselves unreconciled, mostly; the connections between them remain oblique, with a lot of space for the reader to imagine different points of association.

In Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville weaves a fictional narrative around her grandmother, a woman she remembers as ‘aloof, thin, frowning, cranky’, and knew through her mother’s stories as ‘uncaring, selfish, unloving. Even a bit mad.’

In his essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud observed that fiction writers have an unusual privilege in setting the terms of the real, what he called a ‘peculiarly directive power’: ‘by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions’, and ‘often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’.

At a time when the world strains under the pressure of multiple crises, it stands to reason that coming of age might no longer hold the same literary value it once did. This ‘polycrisis’ encompasses not only the convergence of myriad catastrophic events – climate change, war, Covid-19, the resurgence of fascism, etc. – but also the failure of metanarratives or belief systems to mitigate against these. Amid all this unprecedentedness, the rise of an anti-Bildungsroman sentiment hardly surprises. In different ways, both Brendan Ritchie’s Eta Draconis and Roanna McClelland’s The Comforting Weight of Water attend to the central question: how does one come of age in a collapsing world? It’s a line of enquiry that just so happens to reflect Franco Moretti’s critique of the Bildungsroman genre in The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European culture (1987), articulating how the novel of youth upholds the myth of Western modernity and progress.

The relationship between artists and their sitters has long been a topic of fascination and enquiry – not least for artists themselves. The study of portraiture is often informed by investigations of this relationship as well as that with a third party: the viewer.

Briohny Doyle’s third novel, Why We Are Here, threads together just about every literary, philosophical, and pop culture perspective on death and aftermath there is. But nothing represents the heart of the book better than its exploration of both/and thinking. Embraced by the fields of business, psychology, and beyond, both/and thinking is a method of overcoming paradoxes, not by solving them but by honouring how two apparently contradictory truths can co-exist. There’s no explaining the singular effect of this book without it. 

British sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote that ‘there is no landscape without the human figure’. Similarly, there is no human without the landscape in which they are situated, human and landscape mutually shaping, resisting and defining the other.

Dennis Glover’s third novel centres on the much-mythologised British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13 that saw Captain Robert Falcon Scott attempt to reach the geographic South Pole for the first time in history. Scott and four companions arrived at the Pole too late (five weeks after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen) and would later succumb to the brutal conditions encountered on their return journey to Cape Evans. As Glover alludes to in the preface (and dramatises throughout the novel), details of the Scott expedition – possible causes of the tragedy, potential alternatives – as well as its historical, cultural, and/or scientific significance, have long been the subject of voluminous print and broadcast media (both popular and academic) and have fuelled often obsessive and granular debates. Thaw is both a contribution to, and comment on, this discourse.

When pushed to vote on the bleakest poem among Philip Larkin’s death-obsessed body of work, most would likely stump for his late masterpiece ‘Aubade’, that arid interrogation of human finitude. Yet his ‘The Building’, from 1972, is in many ways a more savage appraisal of individual extinction and the structures we build in an attempt to deny it: ‘Higher than the handsomest hotel / The lucent comb shows up for miles …’ Larkin was referring here to the Hull Royal Infirmary, a modernist pile which loomed over the poet’s hometown after it opened in 1967. Yet the poem could just as easily be translocated to Rochester, Minnesota, where the substantial modern tower of the Mayo Clinic stands: a building around which, too, surrounding streets stand like ‘a great sigh out of the last century’.

Anyone who watched the recent SBS survival series Alone Australia will have gained a new understanding of western Tasmania: of how wild it is, and how rugged, and how cold. A hand-to-mouth, hardscrabble life of subsistence farming there would be bad enough today; for the nineteenth-century white settlers of Annette Higgs’s novel it is close to unsurvivable, and indeed some of her most vulnerable characters do not survive it.