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Darryl Pinckney

The ABR Podcast 

Released every Thursday, the ABR podcast features our finest reviews, poetry, fiction, interviews, and commentary.

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Giles

‘Schooled in doubleness’: Tim Winton’s enthralling new novel

by Paul Giles

This week, on The ABR Podcast, Paul Giles reviews Juice by Tim Winton. Juice represents a creative sidestep for the four-time Miles Franklin Award recipient, being both his longest novel and his first venture into speculative fiction. Paul Giles is Professor of English at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. Listen to Paul Giles with ‘”Schooled in doubleness”:Tim Winton’s enthralling new novel’, published in the November issue of ABR.

 

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This week’s podcast features a review from ABR Editor Peter Rose of Darryl Pinckney’s absorbing new memoir, Come Back in September: A literary education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. The book recounts Pinckney’s early years in New York and his unlikely friendship with Elizabeth Hardwick, the American literary critic, novelist and short-story writer.

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first went to New York City in January 1975. It was wonderfully dilapidated. There was a blizzard of sorts, but I had the light jacket I had bought in Athens. If it was cold, I didn’t notice. The morning I arrived, there was a particularly gory pack murder on the subway. I read about it in the Times. So I avoided the subway and walked everywhere, through the sludge. We all knew what happened if you strayed into Central Park. Folks in Columbus, Ohio, where I had been staying with friends, had implored me not to visit New York. They couldn’t imagine why a nice young boy from somewhere called Melbourne – anarchically long hair and freakish wardrobe notwithstanding – wanted to visit that sinful city. (Still missing Nixon, they spoke of sin and sodomy.) I stayed in Midtown, in a grungy hotel soon to be demolished. The old black-and-white TV was on a constant loop, but I followed The Dick Cavett Show as best I could. The louvred door to my room cast terrifying shadows over my bed whenever anyone passed my room. Each night I dreamt that an ogre was on his way from Wall Street to stab me to death. In the morning I had breakfast for 99 cents – or, if I was hungry, $1.99. Then I didn’t eat for the rest of the day. I haunted the grand old bookshops that lined Fifth Avenue in those days. I visited the Metropolitan Museum for the warmth, but I didn’t know about the Frick. Velvet Underground wasn’t playing at the Metropolitan Opera, so I skipped that. During my stay in New York I didn’t speak to a soul, which suited me fine. It was the purpose of my visit.

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