Fiction

To call into question the literary value of Dalton’s fiction is not to disqualify the pleasure and imaginative release that hundreds of thousands of readers have found in his novels, especially Boy Swallows Universe; it is to take that popularity seriously.

What the First Nations writers in This All Come Back Now reveal is that the only civilization in need of saving is the present western capitalist one – for its capacity to self-destruct and for its inability to listen.

It is Winkler’s attempt to document Grim’s unfathomable life – to indirectly, absorb and transform some of his pain – that allows us, humbly, to see the beauty and validity in all lives, and to better see our own.

What are the aesthetic possibilities offered by Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney’s blockbuster 2021 novel? To answer this question, we might look at the novel’s plot, characters, themes, style, narrative form. But we might also, inspired by a pragmatic view of art, look at how readers have made use of the novel.

Here in Neave’s second novel, the author tackles the essential unknowability of our parents and who they once were. Believe in Me tells the story of Sarah as recounted by her daughter Bet. The narrator, whose name we do not learn until page 104, begins her mother’s story in 1974 and, like the narrator of Neave’s previous novel, must also grapple with impressions and events she cannot fully understand.

If the narrative has a driving question, it is the eternal one of how to live, find meaning, amidst all the sorrow and horror.

While they were written at a time of highly charged crisis – both politically, and personally for their authors – their urgency still speaks to us as readers of our own charged times. For as well as the stripping of a person, the reduction of a man to ‘a swear-word on two legs’, the question that cannot be avoided is what about the rest of us? What does such stripping say about the polity, the social and political order, that encompasses us all?

Here is my little hypothesis: People love to say that the problem with Australian literature is a lack of critical culture. It’s not. It’s that people don’t read Australian literature, and then they lie about it online. Every day I open Instagram and think, it is so brave of you to post a picture of that book you haven’t read. Someone could ask you a single question about it and the whole house of cards would come down. But nobody will, because they haven’t read it either.

Like Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Easton’s The Magpie Wing is an anxious novel about anxious characters in anxious times. It seeks to register this anxiety in all of its contradictions and complexities, but thankfully does not want to resolve it.

In the years to come, we may look back on 2021 as the beginning of rugby league’s reckoning with violence and its attendant trauma. In Plum, Cowell has written a book for this cultural moment, addressing the hidden cost of the hyper-masculine culture that sustains rugby league.