Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel, her first since the Folio prize-winning Scary Monsters, opens conventionally enough. We’re introduced to an Australian geologist, who is travelling in the pristine Swiss Alps of the late 1950s. Against an idyllic backdrop of “chalets, cows, ice-blue lakes, hillsides of coloured flowers”, he considers the beginnings of an infatuation with a Spanish music teacher, and recalls a childhood visit to his grandmother’s farm, during which his theft of a ring was blamed on a “native” housemaid. There’s a strong sense of place; of character and character flaws; of a plot that’s pleasurably thickening. The stage is lullingly set.
And then, abruptly, De Kretser marches out and dismantles it. Fictional mid-20th century Switzerland gives way to something close to factual present day; De Kretser shifts into the first person, and launches into a crisp description of her critical engagement with a 2021 London Review of Books essay on the application of situationist theory to an Israeli military raid that killed 70 people. After reading that essay, she explains, “experiences I’d had, over time, with theory and practice came into my mind … As I recalled thrashing about in the messy gap between the two, I began to see that my novel had stalled because it wasn’t the book I needed to write. The book I needed to write concerned the breakdowns between theory and practice.”
And this is the book she gives us. Our newly installed narrator, whose biography mirrors De Kretser’s own, carries us back to 1980s Melbourne, where she’s embarking on an MA on Virginia Woolf while renting a “run-down one-bedder” in the rackety suburb of St Kilda: a place that is “violent, and violently policed”, but open to sea and sky; bathed in “carbolic summer light”. The focus switches between the university’s English department, which, in 1986, is busily fortifying itself with the fashionable abstractions of literary theory, and St Kilda’s gaudy and chaotic social scene: parties and cafes; film, fashion, gossip, and art. In these invigorating contexts, the narrator finds that her “undergraduate years had taken on the aspect of a wasteland”. Intellectually and socially, the “foundations on which [she’d] expected to build” turn out to be “mere rubble underfoot”.
In academic terms, she struggles to cram her increasingly disparate thoughts on Woolf either into theory’s merciless structures, or into her own evolving system of values. The novels of the “Woolfmother” have inspired her, and a poster presides over her desk, but she finds Woolf’s cavalier racism – in particular her diary entry describing a famed Sri Lankan anti-colonialist as “a poor little mahogany-coloured wretch” – increasingly unpalatable. Away from the page, meanwhile, she grapples with her relationship with her actual mother, whose persistent letters and calls trammel her in different, more personal ways. Finally, and most urgently, she finds herself caught up in a vivid love affair with Kit, an engineer in his final year who, at the same time as sleeping with our narrator, is unapologetically involved in a “deconstructed” relationship with Olivia, an elegant Law student who “wore her yellow hair in plaits woven around her head like a fairytale girl”. The physical insistence of this real-world affair cuts across and through both her work and her perception of her self: she is, she believes, a “modern woman”, fully committed to feminism; but this self-construction turns out to offer no defence against a flood of unsisterly feelings towards Olivia, whom she envies, obsesses over, pities and despises in equal measure. The practice of life, it turns out, refuses to fit neatly into her theories of it.
“I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,” De Kretser says, early on, of her abortive sojourn in the Alps. “Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.” Her rejection of historical fiction in favour of apparently autobiographical descriptions of the tangle of human relationships – and the tangle of contradictory, often irrational feelings that surround them – appears, at first glance, to do just that. But De Kretser, and her book, are too alive to the slipperiness and instability of narrative – all narrative – to leave it at that. Fiction lies, for sure; but memoir, in which the author sets to work on her own life, sifting it, sorting it, and making it shapely, lies in its own way, too. In Theory & Practice, De Kretser gradually, delicately, picks and plucks at the notion of “truth” in literature – questioning first the trustworthiness of the novel and then the trustworthiness of autobiography – until, by her book’s end, all certainties have been dismantled, and it’s hard to know what it is, exactly, we have read. Her excellence as a writer lies in the fact that she manages to make a novel that effectively acts as a deconstruction of the novel form feel like a pleasure, rather than a chore. She offers us the theory, while revelling in the practice; she exposes the lie to us, but permits us to love it anyway.
• Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser is published by Sort Of (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
