Exquisitely readable, with themes that stay with you.
Feature image credit: Text Publishing
Michelle de Kretser is one of Australia’s most celebrated authors, winning the prestigious Miles Franklin Award twice. Her latest novel Theory and Practice once again demonstrates her finely honed craft.
In the mid-1980s, a young woman moves from Sydney to Melbourne to complete her Masters work on Virginia Woolf. She struggles with the then-current academic emphasis on theory (particularly in English faculties). She has an affair with a man who describes himself as being in a ‘deconstructed relationship.’ She fights her own jealousies and obsessions. And though she tries to gently push aside her Sri Lankan heritage, she starts to see the colonialism inherent in the people around her, and the works she is reading.
From the beginning, in fact from the front cover, the tensions between theory and practice are obvious in this work. The cover shows a photo of de Kretser herself, in the mid-‘80s, in Melbourne. She did indeed live there then, and do post-graduate study. She is of Sri Lankan background. And the work is written fundamentally in a memoire style.
But this is a novel.
De Kretser has long been a writer who enjoys playing with form as much as content. In a recent interview, she speaks of Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag’ theory of fiction: moving away from the tightly arced, hunting inspired narrative of the hero’s journey, to a structure more reminiscent of the gatherers, bringing home a carrier bag full of nuts, berries, fish, and stories. In this form, themes speak to each other simply by virtue of proximity. The reader is left, not just to find those connections, but to make them for herself. And all the while, the tensions between theory, or that which we think, and practice, or that which we do, grow stronger. De Kretser’s narrator is a feminist, yet finds herself obsessed not just with a man, but with the woman whom she sees as her rival. She takes academic umbrage at the way that Woolf, although thinking herself liberal-minded, showed her patronising colonialism in the way she described and dismissed non-white characters. And yet she eventually capitulates to her feminist-theory-loving supervisor.
Theory and Practice plays around with ideas and themes, but still remains anchored in story. Here is a portrait of 1980s Australia that many will recognise. Here is a painful and real exploration of jealousy. And here is a gently humorous but rather fond look at academia and its myriad trends and phases. In her beautifully woven carrier bag, de Kretser has brought back for us a love story, a tale of colonialism, a story of friendships, and a few bright berries of humour.
She deserves to be feted tonight around the camp fire.
Distributed by: Text Publishing
Released: October 2024
RRP: $32.99
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