Reviews
The late unfunny ones: Philip Roth
During my formative years, when I was still a baffled undergraduate, this was a magical name amongst the friends I counted as readers, and even to older acquaintances a generation removed from our contemporary gods but not so dismissive of the notion of greatness as to not bend at the knee to the prowess of a novelist in the highest flight.
Precarious images: Cumulus: Collected Poems by Robert Gray
Leaving home, returning home, catching trains and ferries, watching the weather from the window of a hospital or hotel room, renewal and self-betrayal: these are the starting places of Gray’s poetry.
The Provincial and the Princess: The Voyage by Murray Bail
Murray Bail’s two most recent novels, The Pages and The Voyage, have a repentant air about them, an acknowledgement of limitation and failure, which is all the more striking when set against the encyclopedic ambition characteristic of his earlier novels.
Radiant, everlasting: Dear Life by Alice Munro
Among my collection of Alice Munro’s books, the two most prized are the ones that she autographed for me on a visit to Adelaide in March 1979. One was my copy of her first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968). The other was the Women’s Press reprint of Lives of Girls and Women (1971), which my students and I were reading as part of a class on women’s writing.
The mind has mountains: A life of David Foster Wallace
What I desperately wanted from this book, and what Wallace deserved, was a biography that was itself a significant work of literature. Max is no slouch as a reporter … but his prose doesn’t have the percipience and complexity over the long haul to fully dramatise the unresolvable questions that it raises, and he tends to be wiped off the page whenever he quotes from his subject.
Subtle persuasive protest: Liquid Nitrogen by Jennifer Maiden
From her superbly accomplished first books Tactics and The Problem of Evil, to this, her sixteenth book of poetry, Maiden’s style has evolved from bitingly tense portraits and narratives with echoing dialogues and soliloquies, constructed in heightened, almost visionary imagery, to a more direct quasi-conversational tone.
Narrative Parkour: The Memory of Salt by Alice Melike Ülgezer
Estrangement and the quest to overcome it are at the novel’s core. It is about communion and connection, about the longing for others and to know others – family, lovers, the divine – and the hard work of living and of making the present while toiling over the stuff of the past.
Yours, Outraged, of no fixed address: Joseph Anton: A Memoir
It is, of course, possible to live by one’s principles, but it takes a superhuman effort to guard them from any taint of compromise and, as Joseph Anton demonstrates in excruciating detail, it inflicts a heavy toll on those compelled to share the burden of such unbending rectitude.
