Julieanne Lamond

Lohrey has spent more than three decades chronicling Australian masculinity with a curious and sympathetic eye, but The Labyrinth is in large part about what it feels like to be a woman in Australia.

‘Are notions of literary value – of excellence – of prize winning and canons – so deeply associated with masculinity that we should try not to use them at all?’ 

The real discomfort of the novel is a set of relationships marked by deeply unpleasant entanglements of attachment and disgust. The intensity of familial domesticity is literally inescapable in this house: at one point the family are snowed-in, at others the doors are locked and the heat inside is stifling. The grown sisters’ relationship is a complex and terrible mix of dependence, love, responsibility, sacrifice, jealousy and fear.’

I know this probably makes me a bad reviewer but I am pretty agnostic about the question of literary value. I carry the inherent suspicion of canonicity of my generation of scholars and feminists (and the generation that went just before me). The question of what makes a book important, or even very good, is difficult for me. But to review a novel is to wade into the waters of literary value and try to snag something on your stick. I tend to snag things I have inherited from modernism and its impact on my education as a literary studies scholar: the complexity of the ideas that the book is grappling with, or its awareness of other books, or its ability to do something new. But there are others things to snag, that have tended to be coded feminine: the pleasure of plot, the engagement of complex identification, recognition, thrill (the kinds of things Rita Felski writes so beautifully about in The Uses of Literature).

‘How do we live through the losses we know are going on all around us, a sense of calamity that is not new to our age but which is newly pervasive of our atmosphere, the earth under our feet? In the face of this, Mireille Juchau’s fiction presents art not as self-realisation but rather as a vital way of paying attention to the world — and the people — around us.’

Amnesia is a less serious novel than I thought it would be. This is, for the most part, a good thing. There are long moments in which the novel sinks its reader into the soft pillow of a well-told story, the guilty pleasure of being in the hands of a practised manipulator of readerly emotions, as Carey deals out his cards of sentiment, guilt, betrayal and compromise. Much of Amnesia, however, works in another, slightly less comfortable register.

Barracuda continues the unlikely project, initiated by Tsiolkas’ fourth novel The Slap, of bringing troubling ideas about the Australian mainstream within the view of a mainstream readership. Tsiolkas is better than anyone else writing in Australia today at thinking about the affective pull and the sharp edges of communities: ethnicity, family, friendship, class, nation.

The authors specifically exclude ‘culture’ from their account of ‘how universities can be useful to individuals and societies’ because they are trying to take a pragmatic view of the situation. This certainly presents a simpler view of the situation universities face – a less confusing view – but it is not pragmatic, because the benefits universities provide to individuals, communities and nations are civic as well as economic, and these two are related to each other.