Non-fiction

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.

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.

The Burning Library begins with an incendiary question: ‘Who or what killed Australian literature?’ The book investigates various possible answers before solving the mystery with the surprise discovery that the corpse may not be dead after all.