Fiction

Speaking and writing, in Foreign Soil, are never simple acts. Both are, of course, embedded within the body, and as such are deeply personal and even instinctual; but they are, at the same time, inextricably implicated in wider social circuits of violence, of bodies politic, of privilege and power.

Women lust and die in Robert Hillman’s Joyful, but not, it would appear, in the classic realist novel manner. Where a heroine such as Emma Bovary yearns, is seduced, and falls from grace, Joyful offers a twenty-first century update on that scenario. Women still die, but it is the men who love longest when all hope is gone.

Scott’s new novel, N, is longer and more ambitious than any of his previous works, but it develops the interest in the parallel possibilities of Australian history that is evident in Warra Warra. In this case, it is Australia’s experience of the Second World War.

Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude begins in a funeral parlour in contemporary Beijing with the unceremonious cremation of Shaoai, a woman who suffered serious brain damage 21 years earlier, but had ‘clung to a world that had neither use or a place for her’. As a 22 year old student, Shaoai had been involved in democratic protests in Beijing in 1989, for which she was expelled from university.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a piece of high modernism a century on, recognisable in its stream-of-consciousness ways as using a version of the techniques practised by James Joyce, and also by Virginia Woolf, who might have approved its style but would have hated its subject matter.

Cairo is both a futuristic dystopia and an attempt to respond to the dystopian nature of present reality. Although it appears on the surface to be a science fiction novel, it depicts a state of being that Umberto Eco described as hyperreality, in which life is experienced as a bewildering array of simulacra.

Speedboat and Pitch Dark were sometimes not recognised as novels, or were seen to be new kinds of novels. Muriel Spark, reviewing Pitch Dark for the New York Times, went so far as to claim that its ‘discontinuous first-person narrative’ inaugurated ‘a genre unto itself’.

There is subterfuge, smuggling, in the writing of The Night Guest. It imports ‘genre’ techniques into the genre ‘literary’.

The reviews of A Naked Singularity have compared it to a host of other long novels. Many agree that it is firmly in the tradition of those baggy works of late twentieth century postmodern masters, such as William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

There is a certain similarity of reaction, so the story goes, to a new Thomas Pynchon novel. Each generates a sense of anticipation; we ask ourselves whether the new Pynchon will approximate the mind-shattering impact that Gravity’s Rainbow had on readers and critics alike.