James Ley

Communion of the Sublime Loogie

James Ley surveys the career and work of Russian avant-garde satirist, Vladimir Sorokin. With a Sadean virtuosity of violence and cruelty, Sorokin’s novels expose the complicity of Russian literature in upholding ideas of national exceptionalism.

Bastards!

From economic rationalism to libertarianism, neoliberalism appears under many guises. Reviewing Quinn Slobodian’s new book on neoliberal thought, James Ley shows that what its founders share with latter-day legatees is a commitment to inequality.

I know you are but what am I

In the proliferation of discourses and identities online, critique is often shadowed by its double: conspiracy. In this review, James Ley situates Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger within the re-emergence of the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics.

Poetry of the Flesh

James Ley dissects the carnal imagination at work in the English translations of Han Kang’s books.

Alienation is the Philistinism of the Intellectual

Dostoevsky’s reactionary sleight of hand in psychologising his demonic revolutionaries was to shift the political ground from the social to the individual.

City Mouse, Country Mouse

In contrasting ways, Sam Vincent’s memoir My Father and Other Animals and Rick Morton’s anthology Growing Up in Country Australia complicate clichéd notions of rural life.

The Parable of the Amen Snorter and the Rotten Fish

Ultimately, it is of little consequence whether or not Morrison is genuine in his religious beliefs. He probably is.

Lest We Remember

John Hughes can be considered an antipodean writer in several senses, one of which is that he knows how to stand an idea on its head, but the most significant is that his preoccupation with memory and forgetting has its origins in the cultural dis...

The Nerd’s Dilemma

In a quietly melancholy way, Bewilderment is a politically defeated novel, and perhaps in a deeper sense defeatist.

My Certainty Shall Be Their Confusion

The complexity of Quin’s writing naturally admits any number of conflicting interpretations. Though there is now something close to a critical consensus that she is a crafter of brilliantly multifaceted fictions, there is no consensus about the in...

The Perspective is the Story

Pity the poor writer whose fate is to be harried with opportunities and accolades. Erpenbeck’s deadpan portrayal of herself as a passive yet accommodating figure, somewhat nonplussed by the attention, makes a substantial claim.

Brexit, Pursued by a Bard

'Ali Smith’s decision to begin her seasonal quartet in the mellow fruitfulness of Autumn and end in glorious Summer now seems like heroic optimism. The quartet was conceived as an exercise in writing to the moment: a sequence of novels written and...

Millenarian Pastoral

The Rain Heron is an exemplary work of popular fiction. People can be a little touchy about such designations, so let me stress that I am imputing no deficiency of craft or intelligence or imagination. Quite the contrary. What I mean, specifically...

Don’t call me I’ll call you, Ishmael

Fathoms presents itself as a sensorium – a study in synaesthesia. Its style is in fact a collision between two modes of expression, representing distinct ways of understanding the world. There is the intoxicated, subjective, extravagantly metaphor...

The Writers’ Writer’s Writing

In certain respects, Davis is as quirky an essayist as she is a short-story writer. The greatest practitioners of the form – Hazlitt, Woolf, Orwell (choose your own) – tend to write in ways that seek to draw the reader into the movement of their t...

Trapped in Negation

I am well aware that academics have been complaining about managerialism and lamenting the fate of the humanities from time immemorial. But I can’t recall a time when the discipline of literary studies, in particular, has seemed as besieged and vu...

The Necessity of an Alternative

Our dependence on the environment is the ultimate proof that there is such a thing as the common good.

All is Vanity: The Rich Man’s House by Andrew McGahan

It is fitting that McGahan’s final novel should draw together several of his defining themes, and that he has fashioned those themes into a satisfying slab of genre fiction.

The Drug of Otherness: The Returns by Philip Salom

The Returns portrays the acts of creating and engaging with art and literature as distinct modes of understanding. They are presented as processes that are analogous to, and perhaps even synonymous with, the paradox of selfhood, which decrees that...

Everything Is A Sham

What makes Moshfegh an uncommon writer is that beneath the scorn and the dark humour there lurks an authentic Swiftian disgust. Her work has a corporeal, rebarbative, scatological quality. She revels in the grubbiness of the human body, splashes t...

Godwin is Dead

"It is not just that the left and right consider each other repellent," observes Jeff Sparrow in Trigger Warnings: Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right. "It’s also that they find each other almost incomprehensible." Trigger Warnings and...

Attack of the Numinous

Robinson may be the moderate face of American religiosity, but she takes some pretty wild swings. The more you read her essays, the more it becomes apparent that she is positing a few simplicities of her own. Whatever manifestation of modern thoug...

I’m with stupid: The Lebs by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

A Complicated Man: The Odyssey and Daniel Mendelsohn

Fictive Selves: The Life to Come

De Kretser is an ironist without peer in contemporary Australian writing. Her instincts are subversive, her scalpel well-honed. She exposes her characters’ vanities, only to turn our sense of their thoughtlessness and self-regard inside-out so tha...

The Pleasure of Hating

It is always a good idea, I think, to resist the temptation to regard the politics of one’s own time as especially awful, but recent history does seem to have provided no shortage of prima facie evidence that there is something a bit unhinged and

Good Grief: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo is a democratic novel in its multi-voiced technique, but it is also concerned with the paradoxical and fragile nature of democracy itself. It raises the question of whether a fractious republic of atomised and unequal individu...

The Demythologising Business: The Invention of Angela Carter

Injuries and Usurpations: The Sellout & The Underground Railroad

'There is no subject that exposes the tensions, hypocrisies and flat-out contradictions of the United States’ defining myths – manifest destiny, individual liberty, self-reliance, exceptionalism – as starkly as that of race. It is hardly surprisin...

Bob Dylan goes to Stockholm

Novelist of the Sorrowful Countenance: The Schooldays of Jesus

There are critics who have suggested that J. M. Coetzee’s writing lost its edge when he emigrated from South Africa to Australia. I don’t necessarily agree, though it is undeniable that the move coincided with a shift in the tone and emphasis of h...

Illegitimate Son: On Patrick Modiano

It is unsurprising, then, that testimonials and critical assessments of Modiano’s writing should so often resort (as I have already done) to vague terms like ‘mysterious’ and ‘atmospheric’ and ‘haunting’. But the element of uncertainty is not only...

Expert Textpert: The Limits of Critique & Better Living Through Criticism

‘Anyone who has spent some time in a library hanging around in the vicinity of the low 800s will know that, for all their variety and intricacy, methodological arguments about the interpretation of literature invariably organise themselves around

Erosion of the Will: A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk

‘The critical cliché about Pamuk is that he is preoccupied with the cultural tensions between East and West. The cliché is true, up to a point. In subtle and complex ways, Pamuk’s novels depict a Turkish society caught between the conflicting impe...

Measured out in coffee spoons: M Train by Patti Smith

‘I have been referring to M Train as a ‘memoir’ by default, but it is something far more ambitious and complex than the word implies. It is a work in an elegiac mode that occupies an indeterminate space between autobiography, essay and fiction.’ J...

Novelist Yells at Cloud: Purity by Jonathan Franzen

‘Purity’s unifying theme, clearly announced in its title, is not ultimately social or cultural or political, but moral and psychological. Its concern with information and technology on a large scale are ultimately subordinated to its interest in t...

Frequent coarse language: Merciless Gods

‘Tsiolkas is hardly the first to find himself lionised by the bourgeois-types he set out to affront. The adversarial or iconoclastic artist is a naturalised and often celebrated cultural figure. But Tsiolkas’ celebrity has become part of a complex...

How does it feel to be famous?

The End of the Tour is the product of this posthumous celebrity. This is true in the obvious sense that neither James Ponsoldt’s film nor the book on which it is based would exist if David Foster Wallace had lived. But it is also true in the more

This week in review

Keep a good head and always carry a lightbulb

Bloomsday

Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Excellence

Ali Smith and Being Both

PEN and Freedom of Speech

Edward O. Wilson and the Meaning of Existence

Samuel Johnson and Critical Matters

Ishiguro and Genre

Knausgaard and Breivik

Hebdo and satire

19 December 2014: the book council

Gut instinct: This House of Grief by Helen Garner

Like The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation before it, This House of Grief proceeds from Garner’s first instinctive response. All three books are grounded in the idea that to feel something is a kind of fact. All wonder about the meaning and...

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

Enter the swine: Demons by Wayne Macauley

In appropriating Demons for the title of his fourth novel, Wayne Macauley alludes not only to Dostoevsky’s Demons (which he also quotes in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation), but to the title’s biblical provenance. Near the end of Macauley’s

Bad Sex Award

Richard Flanagan’s win, Barry Spurr’s emails

Nussbaum’s Political Emotions

29 August 2014: libraries doing it tough

Earthly happenings: Time, History, and Literature

It is the intellectual foundations of Auerbach’s far-reaching views that are most noticeably illuminated in Time, History, and Literature, a career-spanning collection that includes several essays which are appearing in English translation for the...

Nadine Gordimer, the Melbourne Writers Festival

11 July 2014

Notes on ‘Kamp’: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

At the centre of these books, then, is the paradox of a man trying to be objective about his own subjectivity. The paradox is inherent in any autobiographical endeavour, but there are a number of factors elevating Knausgaard’s intimate revelations...

A Stand for Democracy in the Digital Age

Matthew Thompson Interview

Age of idiots

As the fifty-something David Shields remarks in How Literature Saved My Life, ‘everyone I know under thirty has remarkably little notion of privacy.’ We are living in an age of idiots, in the etymologically precise sense of the word.

I refuse to Rock and Roll: J.M. Coetzee: A life in writing

J.C. Kannemeyer describes ‘What is a Classic?’ as ‘one of the most important lectures of [Coetzee’s] career’. It is certainly one in which a number of key themes intersect. As Kannemeyer observes, it is especially striking for the way Coetzee rela...