A playful meditation on the hellscape of contemporary literature
FICTION
I Want Everything
Dominic Amerena
Summit, $34.99
Ern Malley. Helen Demidenko. Norma Khouri. Wanda Koolmatrie. Australia has a rich and storied tradition of fakers, forgers, frauds and fabricators.
For his debut, Greece-based Dominic Amerena offers us a worthy addition to this gallery of fiasco-mongers: an insecure, craven, sickly and mercifully unnamed narrator. Peddling his blood and body at a hospital while attempting to succeed as a writer, his existence is dreary. He envies his 'Melbourne-famous' writer partner, Ruth, who has found acclaim selling a story about her mother. The family betrayal benefits her career and introduces a new term to the world: daughter-boarding – 'hit pieces by young women against their mothers'.
Given the precarity of the artistic landscape, only a fool would not take an opportunity for advancement, and the narrator is no fool. Swimming at the Victoria University pools, he encounters Brenda Shales. A Whitlam-era luminary – part Thea Astley, part Helen Garner – she wrote two novels, won a cult following and promptly vanished into the only dignified position available to a self-respecting literary author: obscurity.
The work speaks, as they say, for itself. Only that's not enough for an unnamed narrator looking to make his name. Who better to provide prestige than a recluse with some flesh to offer the biographical mill? It's not quite spotting Christ on the boulevard, but it will do. He sets about writing a tell-all account of what happened to the celebrated author. He will be her witness, her confidante. The Boswell to her Johnson. He will bask in the secondhand shadow of her literary light. He will build his fame upon hers.
Coy, winking, spritzy, this is a scurrilously funny meditation on ambition and economic insecurity. It satirises the commercialised hellscape of contemporary literature, if not life in general: no pleasure, no heart, just product.
Take Shales' reputation-solidifying second novel, The Widowers. Passed around Carlton share houses 'like some graven object', its publication results in courtroom wranglings and the advent of questionable legal precedent. It is, we are told, controversial in a way that Amerena calls 'unimaginable now'.
It's a telling detail. It suggests not only changing social mores, but a shift in how literature is received. What was once epoch-making is now merely content. Debase yourself for the algorithm or die trying. 'The world is a vampire,' the Smashing Pumpkins sang. Even if it were untrue, you would have a hard time convincing Amerena's narrator.
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