‘Theory & Practice' is a whip-smart novel about life and art
Michelle de Kretser first stunned me in 2020 with her small, perfect tribute 'On Shirley Hazzard,' a brief work of outsized wisdom. But de Kretser had by then already earned fine notoriety with her fiction — praised by such luminaries as Hilary Mantel, Anita Desai, Ursula Le Guin, and A. S. Byatt.
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Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Yahoo
Take Your Book Outside
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. When I went outside to read yesterday, the first thing I noticed was the sun on my face. I welcomed it, then wondered, Do I have sunscreen? Then I asked myself if I should have used the bathroom before heading to the park. I made it to a bench and opened my book just as a bold, chittering group of sparrows swooped down from a nearby perch; I watched them jostle one another. Then I set myself to my task: I wanted to make progress on an advance copy of a new memoir, but Michelle de Kretser's Theory & Practice was also in my bag, and I had Sharon Kay Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept loaded on my e-reader—plus I knew I had just a couple of chapters left in Adam Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl. When I was a few pages into the memoir, a carpenter bee started making lazy laps around me. A leaf drifted onto my head; the light forced me to squint, then dig through my bag for my sunglasses. A cowbird joined the sparrows; the chirping competed with the hum of air-conditioning units. Chapter break: I looked up and a very happy dog was playing fetch in a park specifically marked as not a dog park, and I smiled to myself. A tiny red bug crawled across my phone; boat horns from the nearby Potomac rang out; planes soared overhead. I admired the blooming wisteria, then violently sneezed. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic's Books section: Dear James: A riddle about reading 'Guest House,' a poem by Issa Quincy A new book challenges the Church's reputation on sex. In the midst of the chattering and barking, the heat prickling my skin and the wind blowing my hair in my face, what did I gain? Certainly not an optimized reading experience. At the office, I could dispel distractions with a quick trip to the bathroom or water-bottle station; automatic curtains would block the bright sun. But I agree with Bekah Waalkes, who wrote for The Atlantic this week that some books just make 'a case for leaving your reading nook and getting out into the world.' It's important to savor pleasant days while they're here, she notes. Outdoor reading is not always idyllic; I was up against pollen, bugs, and the looming threat of bird poop. But it can be sublime. And, in fact, the many distractions forced me to marshal my attention. I pushed myself into a unique state of focus, actively choosing each paragraph over everything that was happening around me. Every page I finished was an achievement, and the author's words floated in my head, on top of the pleasant mix of noises, smells, and breeze. When my mind slipped off the page, I barely cared. My memories of the chapters I read are now tied together with images of the world's natural rhythms: unfurling irises, creeping spiders, the flowing river—and periodically, an unexpected, uncontrollable sneeze. Six Books You'll Want to Read Outdoors By Bekah Waalkes Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long. Read the full article. , by Nettie Jones 'You're not crazy to me,' one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. 'You're daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.' That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it's easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones's sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart. — Rhian Sasseen From our list: Six older books that deserve to be popular today 📚 Second Life, by Amanda Hess 📚 Little Bosses Everywhere, by Bridget Read 📚 Old School Indian, by Aaron John Curtis Does Anyone Still Hitchhike? By Andrew Fedorov But I also hitchhike because I love it. The rides I've caught across America have opened my sense of the country. Each was an encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined, as someone who's spent much of his life on the East Coast and in politically siloed bubbles. Especially when politics feels intense, hitchhiking has kept me from forgetting that decent people are everywhere. It's a way of testing the tensile strength of the social safety net. It shows that when you're at your most vulnerable, whether by circumstance or choice, people will be willing to help. You hitchhike to know you're not alone. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
02-05-2025
- Atlantic
Take Your Book Outside
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. When I went outside to read yesterday, the first thing I noticed was the sun on my face. I welcomed it, then wondered, Do I have sunscreen? Then I asked myself if I should have used the bathroom before heading to the park. I made it to a bench and opened my book just as a bold, chittering group of sparrows swooped down from a nearby perch; I watched them jostle one another. Then I set myself to my task: I wanted to make progress on an advance copy of a new memoir, but Michelle de Kretser's Theory & Practice was also in my bag, and I had Sharon Kay Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept loaded on my e-reader—plus I knew I had just a couple of chapters left in Adam Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl. When I was a few pages into the memoir, a carpenter bee started making lazy laps around me. A leaf drifted onto my head; the light forced me to squint, then dig through my bag for my sunglasses. A cowbird joined the sparrows; the chirping competed with the hum of air-conditioning units. Chapter break: I looked up and a very happy dog was playing fetch in a park specifically marked as not a dog park, and I smiled to myself. A tiny red bug crawled across my phone; boat horns from the nearby Potomac rang out; planes soared overhead. I admired the blooming wisteria, then violently sneezed. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section: In the midst of the chattering and barking, the heat prickling my skin and the wind blowing my hair in my face, what did I gain? Certainly not an optimized reading experience. At the office, I could dispel distractions with a quick trip to the bathroom or water-bottle station; automatic curtains would block the bright sun. But I agree with Bekah Waalkes, who wrote for The Atlantic this week that some books just make 'a case for leaving your reading nook and getting out into the world.' It's important to savor pleasant days while they're here, she notes. Outdoor reading is not always idyllic; I was up against pollen, bugs, and the looming threat of bird poop. But it can be sublime. And, in fact, the many distractions forced me to marshal my attention. I pushed myself into a unique state of focus, actively choosing each paragraph over everything that was happening around me. Every page I finished was an achievement, and the author's words floated in my head, on top of the pleasant mix of noises, smells, and breeze. When my mind slipped off the page, I barely cared. My memories of the chapters I read are now tied together with images of the world's natural rhythms: unfurling irises, creeping spiders, the flowing river—and periodically, an unexpected, uncontrollable sneeze. Six Books You'll Want to Read Outdoors By Bekah Waalkes Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long. Read the full article. What to Read Fish Tales, by Nettie Jones 'You're not crazy to me,' one character tells the narrator of Fish Tales, a 30-something Black woman named Lewis Jones. 'You're daring. Most people cannot even imagine life the way you live it.' That life includes nights out on the town in 1970s Detroit and disco-fueled Manhattan, copious amounts of cocaine, and sexual encounters both outlandish and, at times, demoralizing. This frenetic novel, first acquired by Toni Morrison and published in 1983, has become something of a cult classic, and it's easy to understand why: It approaches relationships with raw and unvarnished honesty. A new edition forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April promises to bring additional audiences to Jones's sharp, fast-paced look at the highs and lows of the human heart. — Rhian Sasseen Out Next Week 📚 Second Life, by Amanda Hess 📚 Little Bosses Everywhere, by Bridget Read 📚 Old School Indian, by Aaron John Curtis Your Weekend Read Does Anyone Still Hitchhike? By Andrew Fedorov But I also hitchhike because I love it. The rides I've caught across America have opened my sense of the country. Each was an encounter with someone whose perspective I could hardly have imagined, as someone who's spent much of his life on the East Coast and in politically siloed bubbles. Especially when politics feels intense, hitchhiking has kept me from forgetting that decent people are everywhere. It's a way of testing the tensile strength of the social safety net. It shows that when you're at your most vulnerable, whether by circumstance or choice, people will be willing to help. You hitchhike to know you're not alone.
New York Times
18-02-2025
- New York Times
A Story of Love, Critical Theory and Other Wild Fictions
In the 1980s, an intellectual revolution took hold on college campuses, spreading, this newspaper reported at the time, 'like kudzu.' Under the deceptively unassuming shorthand of 'theory,' a heady brew of philosophical schools and ideas — many of them imported from France — upended longstanding assumptions about language, meaning, reality and the human self. According to theory, words referred not to the world they were tasked with representing but only to other words in a ruthless system where meaning was elusive, reality an illusion and the self a romantic fiction perpetrated by the capitalist bourgeoisie. This revolution is in full swing when the 24-year-old narrator of Michelle de Kretser's deftly crafted new novel, 'Theory & Practice,' leaves her job in market research and moves from Sydney to Melbourne in 1986 to attend a graduate program in English literature. She buys a vintage dress in 'Intellectual Black,' finds a feminist scholar to supervise her thesis on Virginia Woolf and falls in with a loose circle of ironic creatives: a sax player in a feminist band, a sculptor who 'looked like Patti Smith but with much stormier hair' and a Marxist lecturer in art history who throws a party for his brand-new Apple Macintosh — 'a boxy object in orthopedic non-color' that presides over his desk surrounded by awed guests. Soon the narrator embarks on a consuming affair with Kit, an engineering student who's in a 'deconstructed relationship' with someone else. Yet she's unprepared for how her field has changed since she was last in school: 'Theory had taken book, essay, novel, story, poem and play, and replaced them all with text,' she marvels. 'It was necessary to make the text confess. Applying pressure to soft, secret places, the critic exposed fake oppositions, crude essentialisms, bourgeois hegemonies, totalizing mechanisms, humanist teleologies, squalid repressions, influential aporias, and many more textual fragilities. The text bucked and shrieked under the critic's ministrations, but the critic was merciless.' The excesses of 1980s academia are ripe fodder for de Kretser's mordant wit, but her aim here is more ambitious — and the results more rewarding. An Australian novelist of the first rank, who, like the narrator of 'Theory & Practice,' emigrated from Sri Lanka as a child, de Kretser has long been fascinated by the gap between our ideals and our actions — between theory and practice — including with respect to the novel itself. Her last book, 'Scary Monsters,' featured two obliquely linked narratives printed back to back and upside down; 'Theory & Practice' is also a bold experiment in form. It begins in the mode of realist fiction — a young Australian man touring the Swiss Alps recalls a recent love affair and a childhood transgression — before the narrator abruptly switches gears, a dozen pages in, to a first-person account that has the ring of memoir. 'I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels,' the narrator interjects, explaining why she's abandoned her opening gambit. 'Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess.' The ensuing book, a taut, enthralling hybrid of fact and fiction impossible to disentangle, situates itself firmly in the mess — in a host of contradictions and uncertainties. The narrator considers jealousy beneath her ('a morbid symptom that ran counter to feminist practice'), but she is overcome with fantasies of breaking into Kit's girlfriend's home and ransacking it. The young Marxists she knows confidently refer to the times as 'Late Capitalism,' but, she wonders, how can they be sure 'we weren't stuck in About a Third of the Way Through Capitalism? Or Still Just Revving Up Capitalism?' The English department's tenured position goes to a male Marxist who has published only journal articles rather than the narrator's female adviser, who's about to release a second book. More confusing is Woolf. She is the novelist the narrator cares for most, one the French feminists she reads revere as an embodiment of the 'disruptive Maternal' — an authentically female style. Yet Woolf's diaries betray her racism, including a description of an esteemed Sri Lankan barrister as a 'caged monkey' and 'mahogany colored wretch.' The narrator's thesis, restricted to Woolf's fiction and jammed into 'the corset of theory,' leaves her with lingering shame. Woolf, she tells us, planned late in her career to write a new kind of novel that would alternate fiction with essays. But the form proved impossible to crack and the book Woolf wrote instead, her best seller 'The Years,' remained a work of realist fiction. The trouble with realism, de Kretser suggests, is that its satisfactions — 'the possibility of redemption, answers and patterns, motives and cause' — are hardly realistic. In 'Theory & Practice' she offers an alternative whose pleasures are no less great for incorporating more mess.
