A book that uses literary post-structuralism as its main theme while playfully subverting the limitations of that movement does not immediately sound like a recipe for the most thrilling fiction of the year. Yet this is exactly what Michelle de Kretser has achieved with her arresting seventh novel Theory & Practice.
The Sri-Lankan born Australian writer — twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award — tackles colonialism, gender politics and the slippery bond between mother figures and daughters in a slim work that also offers a heady, pulsating evocation of 1980s Melbourne, in which, on the surface at least, “beautiful, radical ideas” abound. It is an enviable and astonishing accomplishment.
A twenty-four-year-old postgraduate struggles with her university thesis on Virginia Woolf’s later fiction: her avowedly “Designated Feminist” supervisor in a department full of entitled males commands her to ignore primary material in favour of the current academic preoccupation with French critical theorists. In this milieu, “Late Capitalism” is to blame for everything.
But although theory is all well and good (the narrator dutifully dips into Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse) who or what will teach her practice — in other words, how to live? “The first thing I did in Melbourne was to buy a vintage dress . . . Intellectual Black.”
Uncertain, she falls into an obsession with Woolf’s private world — that of her diaries — rather than the author’s public image. As the novel unfolds, her previous admiration for the trailblazing “Woolfmother” (with whom she uncomfortably shares the experience of early sexual abuse) is upended by the discovery of one dismissive, racist diary entry. It is through wrestling with Woolf’s own blinkered impediments that the key to the narrator’s thesis — as an immigrant outsider in a predominantly white Australian culture — will be found.
Away from this text but intrinsic to it, she has an intense affair with the privileged and distant Kit, who is, as he describes without a trace of irony, in a “deconstructed” relationship with a fellow student, the wealthy Olivia. Cue another fixation — about the “other woman”, despite there being no room for unwieldy emotions such as jealousy in the postmodern feminist universe. Punctuated throughout are needy, lonely missives from the narrator’s widowed mother, offering unsolicited advice, recipes, scoldings. “The name for that entwined closeness and distance was weirdness.” It is clear that a double umbilical cord needs severing — both from the actual mother and her intellectual counterpart.
It takes a little time to realise that de Kretser is writing a deconstructionist text to tease out more than one meaning from the novel. In fact, Theory & Practice begins with a few densely written pages of another, immediately compelling story, told in the third person, which ends abruptly, shifting to the first and an interventionist statement: “It was at this point the novel I was writing stalled.”
The book that then emerges is typical of de Kretser’s serious intent, expert handling and sensuous imagery (a moon is “as red as surgical waste”, light is like “pineapple syrup”). By critiquing critical theory and the failure of the narrator’s self-indulgent circle to see through its own set of power dynamics, de Kretser has created something very powerful indeed.
Her best-known novel is perhaps Questions of Travel (2012), with its backdrop the Sri Lankan civil war and 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. That book took its title and epigraph from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop. Here, de Kretser riffs on Bishop’s “Cirque d’Hiver”, and its rueful last line “Well, we have come this far” — a leitmotif through the years for the narrator and her gay friend Lenny, a Marxist art historian, from the 1980s Aids crisis to a meeting in Paris 40 years later. Bon vivant Lenny is one of the book’s vibrant hearts, early on throwing a party for his new Apple Mac in his slick apartment.
This tech symbol from the future contrasts with the narrator’s “dependable Blue Smith Corona typewriter” and her mouldy room of one’s own. These material disadvantages only serve to highlight the character’s persistence and originality, qualities that in turn make the novel an absolute triumph.
Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser Sort of Books £12.99/Catapult $25, 192 pages
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