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ABC News
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Dominic Amerena writes about a literary fraudster in his debut novel, I Want Everything
Since the Ern Malley affair of the 1940s — where two poets pretended to be a recently deceased mechanic who penned a sheaf of modernist poems — Australia has produced an array of literary fraudsters. Notorious examples include Norma Khouri, Helen Demidenko and John Hughes, who was revealed to have plagiarised extensively from the work of others in his 2022 novel The Dogs. "Once you start looking back across Australian literary history, you see it's littered with notable scandals and hoaxes," author Dominic Amerena tells ABC Radio National's The Book Show. He believes "there's something very Australian" about this pattern of fakery, borne from a sense of unbelonging that comes from living on colonised land. "These writers are expressing an instability in settler identity," he says. Amerena draws on this rich history in his debut novel, I Want Everything, the tale of a modern-day literary heist set in Melbourne's western suburbs. I Want Everything's unnamed narrator is an unpublished author who nevertheless dreams of writing a great Australian novel. But there's a problem: he lacks the discipline or creativity necessary to become a serious novelist. "We know that he is roiling with ambition and that he has no talent and no stories of his own to tell," Beejay Silcox tells ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf. Instead, he has lived a life of "noble precarity" for a decade, funded by submitting himself to paid medical trials. He exists in the shadow of his talented girlfriend Ruth, a "Melbourne-famous" writer whose essay mining her problematic relationship with her mother goes viral. "[He] has this idea that greatness can be something that is almost stolen from other writers," Amerena tells The Book Show. "He has an extractive view of talent and how to tell stories." But, in an apparent stroke of good luck, he encounters a woman at a local aquarobics class who is "maddeningly familiar". Eventually he puts a name to the face: Brenda Shales, a cult 70s author who disappeared from public view after publishing two wildly successful and controversial novels. Reeling from the realisation he has unwittingly stumbled across Australia's most notorious living literary recluse at the local pool, he tracks her down to a nursing home in Yarraville in Melbourne's western suburbs, hoping she will somehow revive his anaemic literary career. "The nurse who's bringing him to her room introduces him as her grandson, and, strangely, Brenda Shales doesn't seem to correct the nurse's mistake. In fact, she seems to recognise him as a long-lost relative," Amerena says. This subterfuge — framed by the narrator in the novel's opening line as "an innocent mistake" — drives the narrative. Although he's beset by guilt at his actions, the narrator fails to reveal the truth to Shales at crucial points in the narrative. "The novel is about the self-deceptions that we tell ourselves to permit ourselves to do unconscionable things," Amerena says. The Shales character — spiky and quick-witted with a "grim hyphen of a mouth" — is an amalgam of some of Australia's greatest women writers. Amerena used Helen Garner's three-volume diaries as a guide when developing the "cadence" of Shales's voice, which made for an interesting encounter when he met the revered writer at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Heart in mouth, he told Garner she'd been a great influence on a central character in his novel. "And she said, 'Well, I bet she's a real bitch, isn't she?'" he says. "It was so perfectly Helen Garner and so perfectly Brenda Shales as well. It was very fitting." Another source of inspiration was Elizabeth Jolley's novel The Well, a "strange psychosexual gothic story", which won the Miles Franklin in 1986. The book explores the relationship between two women — one older than the other — who live together on a farm in the country. The story takes a macabre turn when they hit something, or someone, in their car and dispose of the body in the nearby well. "It's a very strange, opaque text which can be read in many, many different ways," Amerena says. He relished using these points of reference to fashion Shales and her fictitious literary works. I Want Everything is also concerned with the ethics of storytelling. "Writers are always coming up against these ethical considerations [about] what parts of other people's lives are fair game to use, what parts of your own lives are fair game [and] who owns a story," Amerena says. "These are questions that I don't think have a clear answer, but [they're questions] my novel is trying to explore." Amerena says he tried to avoid autobiography in his novel, using instead "small snippets of the world". But he soon discovered how difficult it can be to discern memory from make-believe. "I come from an Italian background, and I have this distinct memory of my grandfather telling me about his father, who'd been interred in a labour camp during World War II, which is what happened to a lot of Italian immigrants. It stuck in my mind for a few years … and it ended up in my book in a very, very small way. "Eventually I came back to my family to get the full story, and they were very confused. They were like, 'What are you talking about?' I somehow completely made it up." The episode was instructive. "It taught me that the boundary between fiction and life is more porous than I'm often conscious of," he says. While I Want Everything is a work of fiction, Amerena and his narrator share some common traits. At a recent literary event, an old schoolmate reminded him how, after reading Les Misérables as a 14-year-old, he, too, announced his intention to write the next great Australian novel. While Amerena laughs at the anecdote now, he says ambition can be a "dirty word" in our literary culture. "Artists have to pretend that they're not ambitious; they pretend the work flows out of them. It's a struggle Amerena knows firsthand. He rewrote a prize-winning but unworkable manuscript to produce I Want Everything, discarding several storylines in the process. "Part of writing this book … has been getting in touch with my own ambition and feeling comfortable with saying that I am proud of this book and … I'm happy people are reading it," he says. I Want Everything is published by Summit Books (Simon & Schuster).
ABC News
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The best new books released in May, from Hannah Kent, Ocean Vuong and more
The hunt for a good book never ends. Thankfully, our ABC Arts critics have been busy reading through piles of new releases to find their favourites to share with you. In this month's Best Books column, you'll find a poetic critique of inequality and exploitation in America, a revealing memoir from one of Australia's most beloved authors about her formative experience as an exchange student in Iceland, and an exciting and "ridiculously funny" debut about a literary fraudster in the tradition of Helen Demidenko. Jonathan Cape American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong was born in Vietnam and moved to the US as a refugee with his mother. She — or a version of her — is the focus of his acclaimed 2019 novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. There are mothers and mother figures, absent fathers and refugee histories in his new novel, too, but The Emperor of Gladness is no repeat of his earlier work. Instead, we're taken into the heart of Gladness — East Gladness, to be precise — which is a place, in Cincinnati, rather than a state of joy or happiness. There's Vuong's playfulness, right there, because this is a town verging on a hellscape: depressed, post-industrial, poor, almost falling into the river. The novel opens in 2009 as a young man, Hai, is walking in the rain by that river, crossing the bridge, seriously contemplating jumping off and ending it all. Instead, he's stopped by an interaction with an elderly Lithuanian woman, Grazina, who invites him into her house. He ends up acting as her informal carer: an odd-couple device that's charming and complicated. But this is also a story of living on the margins, trying to get by, of underclasses and drugs, Alzheimer's and despair — and of unlikely alliances that extend well beyond Hai and Grazina. Hai works in a fast food franchise, Home Market, that provides an ensemble cast of characters whose backstories and sweaty hard work come more and more to the fore. Dishwashers, managers, cooks and a foray into wrestling — this is a portrait of America's workforce that is truly diverse, vivid, ground down and not at all clichéed. It's a community to root for, with an unexpected road trip thrown into the mix, that remakes a poetic (but unsentimental) version of Gladness. — Kate Evans W&N The Original Daughter is the story of sisterhood and its precarious balance of rivalry and love. Protagonist Genevieve lives as an only child until she is eight when her sister arrives. She recalls, "Arin didn't appear the way regular sisters did. She was dropped into our lives, fully formed, at the age of seven." As an adult, she's estranged from Arin, and we spend the novel trying to determine what it is that broke them apart. As children, Genevieve and Arin fall easily into step as sisters, their relationship filled with joy and mutual admiration. But beneath this is the sting of jealousy. Genevieve is terrified that Arin will either steal her life or, worse, leave. She is torn between the love she feels for her sister and anger she feels when it seems that Arin might usurp her in their family hierarchy. Set against the vivid backdrop of working-class Singapore in the 2000s, Wei writes richly, skilfully and without hyperbole about what it means to be family and particularly what it means to be a 'Jie Jie' or sister. The Original Daughter asks with great care who we are if not amalgamations of the ones we love — mining unconsciously or consciously the mannerisms, behaviours and even lives of those we admire. — Rosie Ofori Ward Simon & Schuster/Summit Books 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 character who is a worthy addition to this gallery of fiasco-mongers: an insecure, craven, sickly and mercifully unnamed narrator. Peddling his blood and body as a clinical trial subject at the local 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. Given the precarity of the artistic landscape, only a fool would refuse 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. 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 second-hand shadow of her literary light. He will build his fame upon hers. This is a ridiculously funny meditation on careerism and economic precarity. In I Want Everything, the opportunism of the present eclipses… well, everything. Where authors once sought time and space to write, now they seek time and space to better leverage their brand. You may want it all, Amerena suggests, but first you'll need to sell yourself out — along with your friends, enemies, colleagues, fans, associates, pets, peers and family. — Declan Fry Picador Edith — the central character of British author Sarah Moss's ninth novel, Ripeness — grew up as an outsider, the daughter of a Jewish refugee and a northern English farmer. Now 73, she has separated from her husband of 40 years and found a home in a village in County Clare in Ireland. As her four passports attest, she doesn't belong anywhere but it's here she intends to stay, on "the wet coast of a wet North Atlantic island off a bigger wet North Atlantic island". The narrative shifts in the second chapter. It's the mid-60s and Edith, 17, is about to embark on a gap year in Europe before she commences at Oxford University. At the last minute, however, her mother changes the plan — rather than travel to Florence, Edith is to go to her sister Lydia, eight months pregnant and ensconced in a villa on the shores of Lake Como. Once there, Edith is to care for Lydia, a professional ballerina, and call a number when the baby comes. Told in alternating chapters (shifting between first-person narration in Italy and third-person in Ireland), the story's two strands bookend Edith's adult life. In Italy, she is an innocent whose knowledge of childbirth and motherhood comes from books and tending stock on the family farm. In her 70s, her pared-back life reflects the wisdom she's acquired over the decades; her house is small and neat, and her life is one of simple pleasures: walking outdoors, ocean swims, cups of tea, friendship and, on Thursday nights, sleeping with a companionable German potter who lives in the village. That's not to say Edith doesn't feel regret: for the baby born in Italy, for the years she spent trying to please others, for not being a better mother to her son. In Ripeness, Moss considers what it is to belong, the tension between age-old tradition and new ways of living, and how waves of migration shape communities. Moss also explores the thornier sides of motherhood: the effects of trauma, the historic shame of unwanted pregnancy and the ambivalence some people feel at becoming mothers at all. But Ripeness is also a moving and nuanced celebration of life, however imperfect its beginnings, and the joy of saying yes. — Nicola Heath Picador Hannah Kent wrote her way into the international literary scene in 2013 with a surprise bestseller, Burial Rites. Surprising? Only that she was a debut author, writing historical fiction set in Iceland in 1830, based on the real story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in that country. Since then, Kent has continued to write, create and imagine her way into the past — with The Good People (2016) and Devotion (2021) — but something kept pulling her back to Iceland, 16,000 km away from her South Australian home. In her memoir, Kent explains her connection to Iceland and revisits her writing of Burial Rites, lyrically and thoughtfully examining ideas of home and how it is that this 'foreign' country has inhabited her and continues to haunt her dreams and imagination. When she was 17, Kent travelled to Iceland as a Rotary Exchange Student. This experience is told with compelling clarity — the adventure, the bewildering language, not being met at the airport, the both warm and mystifyingly cold hosts, the shift that accompanies making new friendships and the growing appreciation of the wild white landscape. But that's not all — because the place, the stories, the archive, the families all followed her home. Followed her creatively, into the writing of Burial Rites, but kept following her for years after. And as this memoir opens, at home with a new baby, feeling detached from her body and delirious with tiredness, she realises that her sense of home, longing, memory, place and language are intimately tied to this distant land. A long way from Adelaide's heat. And so with a true writer's heart, she takes us back there — revealing silences and white stretches of paper, alongside the hush of snowfall and the white stretches of landscape. What does it mean, to be always home and always homesick? There are answers here. — Kate Evans Black Inc. The body of a girl, said to be a saint, is transported from the Pacific to the Kimberley. We know little about her. Why is she nameless? How did she reach the Pacific? Why is she beatified? One thing we do know: before she was entrusted to the care of a woodworker named Orrin, she was assaulted and died at the age of 14. Desecrations and loss haunt the saint's passage through time and space. The reader is encouraged to play detective, piecing together contextual details of the story's little worlds. Throughout the book, an omniscient narrative voice offers a sly, critical commentary on the saint's treatment and the characters' actions, contradicting the idea that she is either nameless or beatified. Thematic and narrative links between the book's four sections gradually emerge. A running theme throughout is grace, especially as women are afforded or denied it. The saint's existence in the form of a girl whose life was tragic and short suggests an ironic, if not aggrieved, stance toward notions of the sacred. Violence and erasure occur here in both dramatic and quiet ways. If the characters' failings are tempered by a desire for sacredness, it is a sacredness that often masks devastation: the Pacific island that forms the background to the opening vignette, for example, is depicted as a place gouged for phosphate mining and ruled by various colonial administrations; the failure of the girl saint's body to register any trace of the violence done to it is not absolution but a 'betrayal'. Rowe's graceful prose offers a suggestive, elliptical, thoughtful exploration of the lives of women. The result is a book about the hypocrisy and moral duplicity of a world more accustomed to realise its future ideals than its present. — Declan Fry Tune in to ABC Radio National at 10am Mondays for The Book Show and 10am Fridays for The Bookshelf.
