Ken Black is dead. Even his family refers to him in death as Ken Black, artist. He was a great Australian painter and he was also a complete shit. Everybody says so. His widow Leila Whittaker, who is the narrator of Kylie Mirmohamadi’s debut novel, Diving, Falling, is loquacious about the shortcomings of Ken Black, artist. Her best friend Nessa never liked him; her kids, Sebastian and Otis, still live in the shadow of their father. And now this colossus of a man is dead. What is left for Leila and his family?
We begin Diving, Falling just after Ken’s death, as Leila, a novelist, is busy writing his obituary. You get the feeling that Ken might have expected that this novel narrated by his wife would be about him too, about his great art, charisma and libido, about the marks he left on the world. And at the outset, Diving, Falling is preoccupied with Ken’s legacy, what to do with his archive, squabbles about the sale of a painting, with the empty spaces in the grand house that he built.
And yet Diving, Falling is very much Leila’s novel, and as it progresses, the domineering Ken recedes into the background. Diving, Falling is not so much a marriage novel as it is an after-marriage novel, one of many works published this year devoted to exposing creative women’s gruelling experiences of heterosexual marriage. You might read it alongside Miranda July’s All Fours, Sarah Manguso’s Liars or Leslie Jamison’s Splinters. And like these much-discussed books, Diving, Falling charts a wife’s liberation from the expectations of marriage and motherhood. Whereas these books are works of autofiction, however, or straight memoir in Jamison’s case, Mirmohamadi is tilling the field of fiction. Leila is a richly imagined character – mordant, self-destructive, good company – and she inhabits a milieu that resembles the contemporary Australian art world, but not so much that it gets distracting.
“Sometimes I want to stop being so responsible,” Leila tells Nessa. “Just to have some excitement.” She takes a lover who is handsome, Danish and very courteous. Her son asks, “Where did you find him? At the opposite-to-Ken-Black shop?” Liberation for Leila is almost frictionless; she is a wealthy woman with a doting family, and things seem to go well for her, even when they’re going pear-shaped. She gets drunk and insults her loved ones, and everyone forgives her (just as they forgave Ken). She goes to a book launch, and hey presto, she finds herself a lover. She’s fed up with life in the house Ken built in Melbourne – “Australia’s Fallingwater” – so she buys a beach house in Sydney. And when Magnus the perfect paramor reveals himself to be dull and controlling, there’s a new romantic interest waiting in the wings.
As Leila lets loose, we also come to understand, by way of glances and asides, the contradictions of her marriage. Life after Ken might have been eased by material privilege, but the loss she has to process is complex. Along with Ken’s tenderness as a father and husband, she recalls “the drunken rages, the verbal abuse, the fists, not through the walls, which were (conveniently) made of concrete, but occasionally on the body of the son who was the focus of all his fierce violent pride”. In the background too, her own suicide attempt and years of depression; she looks at a photo taken during her oldest son’s babyhood and sees “it is the profile of a deeply unhappy woman”. Ken leaves Leila with a house and pots of money, but also a legacy of violence and betrayal.
New family structures form and deform around Leila as she remakes her life. The plot delivers daughter and son surrogates, a stolid husband replacement – and takes them away. It is only when Leila is finally alone in the house by the sea, a place where there’s “no one’s genius to nurture, and no one’s arse to wipe”, that she finds her main character energy. This solitude is, finally, the crucible for growth: she finishes her novel and re-emerges, ready to negotiate new relationships with her family and the world.
Leila and her intimates often seem baffled by her relationship with Ken. How was she able to rationalise his violence towards their children? Why did she put up with all the affairs? How could any woman live with that ego? Mirmohamadi doesn’t ask Leila to perform penance for the fact of having married Ken Black, or stayed with him, and this is one of the appealing features of Diving, Falling: it doesn’t yield to childish morality in trying to understand what emotional and sexual liberation might mean to a woman in late middle age. And yet like Nessa and the kids, I struggled to understand why anyone would want to spend much time at all with a man like Ken Black. We’re asked to take on faith the erotic connection between Leila and Ken, to accept that few women could resist his extraordinary charisma. Me, I found it very easy to resist Ken. He comes across as a caricature of a bad art guy, the kind of guy I’m not convinced a caustic, clever woman like Leila would ever stay with.
Sex, death, marriage, art, ageing: Mirmohamadi broaches familiar themes in Diving, Falling. She liberates her protagonist from a bad marriage and lets her screw up and deceive herself as she forges a new life and identity. And yet there’s much that’s new and very charming about Mirmohamadi’s approach to the after-marriage novel, particularly Leila herself, and her determination to tear up the scripts given to older women, to grieving women, to wealthy women, to mothers, to women artists; to tear them all up and write a new set of stories to live by.
Diving, Falling by Kylie Mirmohamadi is published by Scribe ($32.99)
