Anthony Macris

Loving someone, however, isn’t so easy. Loving someone for your entire life, even your child, especially your child, can be one of the most difficult things you will ever do.

‘Raise yourself up: that’s what Sydney said. That’s what the rustling trees said. That’s what the gentrified terrace houses said.’

‘We belong to people, we belong to places, we belong to ourselves. When you uproot yourself, when you decide to permanently leave somewhere, you are saying to your family, your friends, I no longer belong here. This is not the place where I can become who I want to become. You aren’t the people who I can belong to. So you go and live somewhere else, hoping that’s where you can belong. When you leave, no matter how amicable the terms of separation, you hurt those who you belonged to, and you hurt yourself.’

But can this Nordic Untermensch, with his Tolstoyan and Proustian ambitions, in length if not quite in scope, keep us interested? The short answer is yes, and compellingly so, if not for obvious reasons.

‘The world of work I was to enter in the early 1980s saw an Australia at a tipping point, steeped in a kind of clanking, mechanical/electrical Fordist modernity, but on the cusp of radical change. This was the world I was entering, and it was the world I wanted to engage with as a writer. But how could I do this in the form of the novel? I wanted to capture the shift as it was lived and felt, to give a sense of the momentum building, to bear witness to the fact that we were entering a new epoch.’ Anthony Macris on making sense of the world

‘On a formal level, the book tells a story about writing as professional work, and how it can (or at least once could) happen in Australia with some success. It also wonders, both explicitly and through its form, what it means for literary writing to survive after what has, always unsatisfyingly, been called postmodernism.’

‘The strangeness of Macris’s stories are not derived from uncommon states; rather, everyday, mundane events are amplified within selves that are captive to modes of behavior within social formations.’ Anthony Uhlmann on Inexperience and other stories

How do you review the ‘experimental novel’? Critic Watch turns its gaze to the reviews of Anthony Macris’ Great Western Highway: A Love Story (Capital, Volume One, Part Two). With a response from Jeffrey Poacher.

Macris uses his full quiver of unorthodox techniques to pierce any familiar sense of reality, just as he introduces a range of linguistic ephemera – emails, journalese, advertising claptrap – to remind the reader that words can’t be trusted, especially in the novel, the most mendacious of art forms.