Theory & Practice

Susan Midalia's Review

Early in this innovative and always engaging narrative, Michelle de Kretser’s first-person narrator discovers that she “no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, [she] wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form was to tell the truth.” The result of this discovery is de Kretser’s new book, Theory and Practice: an exhilarating blend of fiction, memoir and essay intent on telling the truth about the experience of shame.

Shame in this narrative typically arises from the gap between theory and practice. The narrator first becomes aware of the gap as a child subjected to sexual abuse; while in theory she should be horrified and angry, in reality she feels both responsible and ashamed. As a young feminist student enjoying a bohemian life in 1980s Melbourne, she discovers a gap between her theoretical belief in female solidarity and the reality of her feelings of competitiveness and jealousy, even vindictiveness, towards her lover’s publicly acknowledged girlfriend. Later, and perhaps most shamefully of all, the narrator-turned-successful-writer discovers that despite her theoretical belief in the novel as a vehicle for creating empathy and compassion, she has failed to imagine the sorrowful reality of her youthful sexual rival.

The book also explores the crucial gap between the theory and practice exemplified in the life of the writer Virginia Woolf. Researching a postgraduate thesis on Woolf, the narrator discovers that while Woolf’s novels and essays championed the rights of women, her private diaries reveal her anti-Semitism and racism, as well as her class snobbery. But while the narrator, a woman of colour, feels both confounded by and contemptuous of Woolf’s private self, she also comes to acknowledge her snobbish attitude towards her own mother: a woman she regards as intellectually vacuous and aesthetically impoverished. How can a woman follow Woolf’s famous injunction to think back through our mothers, when our own mother is a source of shame? How can a reader reconcile Woolf’s brilliance as a writer with her shameful attitudes to Jews and people of colour?

One of the great strengths of Theory and Practice is its refusal to provide easy answers to such difficult questions. Written as a series of fragments, and seamlessly blending fully realised scenes with reflections, the book allows us to share the intimacies of the narrator’s thought processes: her desire for sexual freedom, her self-doubt, her sometimes despicable pettiness and self-absorption. Such unpleasantness is surely part of de Kretser’s point, a way of challenging the preference among many contemporary readers for ‘relatable’ characters. The book implicitly asks: isn’t one of the roles of fiction to confront us with human flaws and failings, not to feel morally superior and self-righteous but to encourage us to acknowledge and reflect on our own sources of shame?

De Kretser’s new book is also a wonderful evocation of a particular time and place: the youthful partying, the sexual freedoms, the clothing and music, the air of hedonism and the excitement of artistic experimentation, shadowed by the AIDS crisis. It also offers the unalloyed pleasure of de Kretser’s stylistic flair, and her pitch-perfect blend of pathos and acerbic humour. This relatively short, intense mix of fiction and autobiography might also have readers wondering how much is “real” or “true”. Will the real Michelle de Kretser please stand up? But while the book deliberately provokes us with this question – its cover, after all, contains a recognisable photo of its author in her youth – it ultimately insists that what matters is not some voyeuristic interest in the writer’s personal life but our response to the book itself. While readers sometimes flock to writers’ festivals in the hope of gaining insights into the writer’s lived experience (hence the popularity of “based on a true story” novels like Boys Swallow Universe), Theory and Practice urges us to return to the book as a gloriously complex, layered artefact which understands that the idea of a ‘real’ or authentic self is a contemporary, pop-psychological illusion. And while it recognises that reading can never be neutral or impartial, it asks us to respond to every book not via feminist, Marxist or any kind of theory, but bodily and emotionally, and with the intellectual flexibility that is a mark of our most profound humanity.

Theory and Practice begins with the creation of a novel which the narrator soon chooses to abandon in favour of writing something new and different. It’s strategy that signals de Kretser’s willingness as a highly acclaimed and respected writer to experiment with form; to be both boldly self-disclosing and cleverly artificed; and perhaps, above all, to question the limits of compassion on which her previous works of fiction have been founded. This thought-provoking and beautifully written book, imbued with the melancholy of the passing of youthful idealism, is one of my picks of the year.

Publisher's Review 

One of the most anticipated literary releases of the year, this gripping novel changes the game on what fiction can be and do.

It's 1986, and 'beautiful, radical ideas' are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students-and Kit. He claims to be in a 'deconstructed' relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.

Theory & Practice is a mesmerising account of desire and jealousy, truth and shame. It makes and unmakes fiction as we read, expanding our notion of what a novel can contain.

Michelle de Kretser, one of Australia's most celebrated writers, bends fiction, essay and memoir into exhilarating new shapes to uncover what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.

'In the midst of a late coming-of-age plot effervescent with romantic and intellectual misadventure, de Kretser considers memory-how we enshrine our cultural heroes and how we tell ourselves the stories of our own lives-with absolute rigor and perfect clarity. Structurally innovative and totally absorbing, this is a book that enlivens the reader to every kind of possibility. I savoured every word.' - Jennifer Croft, author of The Extinction of Irena Rey

'Thrillingly original.' - Sigrid Nunez

'One of the living masters of the art of fiction.' - Max Porter

'Michelle de Kretser, one of the best writers in the English language, has written her most brilliant book yet. It is, in short, a masterpiece.' - Neel Mukherjee

'A hugely talented author.' - Sarah Waters

'Michelle de Kretser is a genius-one of the best writers working today. She is startlingly, uncannily good at naming and facing what is most difficult and precious about our lives. Theory & Practice is a wonder, a brilliant book that reinvents itself again and again, stretching the boundaries of the novel to show the ways in which ideas and ideals are folded into our days, as well as the times when our choices fail to meet them. There's no writer I'd rather read.' - V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Women's Prize for Fiction and Carol Shields Prize award-winning Brotherless Night