de Kretser, Michelle. Theory and Practice. Sort Of Books, London, 2025. F; 3/25.

Taken from the periodical Book Marks which is usually in my opinion vitiated toward activist politics I liked this novel a lot anyway. Book Marks choosing it as a recommendation I’m sure reflects the author’s mixed race and persisting interest in what I take to be second-wave feminism. But it doesn’t matter: she really writes from the heart. There’s personal revelation and artistic showmanship, effective criticism of ideology, a wonderful streak of humour, and great depth of appreciation of life’s relationship with art: theory and practice.  De Kretser has published ten or so books, mostly novels, and won a variety of minor prizes.

As an older child a couple of things happen to our narrator. She tosses a precious ring away and the wealthy older aunt blames a servant, who is fired. Narrator is ashamed that she can’t bring herself to fess up. She plays piano and is subject to a conservatory examination by a man who reaches up and touches her sex. She shares this with another girl to whom the same thing has happened.

The main plot involves the narrator’s later relationships and the experiences of half a dozen characters in university in Melbourne and Sydney Australia. They all seem to be studying English literature although some later become successful lawyers or engineers. Narrator is in love and has mutually great sex with a guy who it’s understood is serious about another woman who he is going to marry. In later events as narrator is now a successful novelist looking back there are some impressive insights.

De Kretser’s misanthropy which is consistent is somehow never wildly vicious. There is we are allowed to imagine a difference between men and women which is just real. I’m reminded of Michael Redhill’s female narrator commenting in Belleville Square on the vigilance women experience that somehow doesn’t exist for men. But at times on the male side the difference jumps the guardrails. Sexually abusive men are of course properly evil here, and the narrator’s judgement falls on them including the man who was examining her at the piano:

What I’d recognised was the bluster, evasiveness and blanking of victims in Prince Andrew’s 2019 Newsnight interview. But something genuine gleams through the side-stepping and ducking. It’s the faint bemusement in the men’s replies. They seem to not quite understand why anyone would think there was a case to answer. Their words reach us from a different world, one in which a child squirming and clinging in a man’s bed is of no account. That child is wiser than the men. His imagination is larger than theirs. He seeks comfort in a radio, in the voices and sounds that tell him there are lives beyond the one in which he finds himself trapped. By contrast, the men appear not to recognise any reality larger than their own. They appear not to realise that an invisible audience is assessing their performance: No Distinction. No Pass With Merit. No Pass.

Academic theory and life’s practice under its influence are dissected in the late 20^th century setting of poststructuralism. No, students are taught, the old dichotomies of beauty and its opposite, good and evil, right and wrong, need to be reinterpreted as meaningless. Etc. The 20-something narrator finds this theory or group of theories incompatible with real life. At least that’s the way I read her entanglement of erotic love, resentment and absurdity, and the falsehood of attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct thought which one had to buy into to be taken seriously as as a student and writer in the 1980s and beyond.

Among the feminine morality and academic thinking there’s humour and effortlessly graceful description:

With the coming of summer, Melbourne had turned into Sydney. Deafening sunlight had arrived, and thick, moist air. The Galleon had started to serve iced coffee, ‘Colder Than Your Ex’s Heart ’. But when the bay came into view as I headed to Lenny’s, cumulus mountains were arranged along the horizon. The evening felt jumpy, spoiling for a fight.

Maturity overwhelms the struggles of early adulthood and we recognize that change: “We still thought we’d be friends forever, but we also had appetites and ambitions and dreams. Our letters and calls to each other dwindled as our lives swerved and swerved again.”

De Kretser also feels effortless when the time comes late in life to tell us what’s really on her mnd:

(after she discovers that her old romantic nemesis has died) I wondered what she’d wished for, and whether it involved Kit, and what chance it had of coming true. Many years had to pass before I’d realise that life isn’t about wishes coming true but about the slow revelation of what we really wished.

I think this story ends up pointing a way to bridge paradox and it advocates for getting through falsehood and personal limitations:

The winter circus, that curved golden building with a sequins – and – ice name, never seemed wholly of this world. Set in the deepening blue of a summer evening, it could have been a dream of itself.

It was her opinion that he was looking to life for the satisfactions provided by novels: the possibility of redemption, answers and patterns, motive and cause. Women were mocked for Bovarysme, but in her experience it was men who were swayed by well – worn narrative tropes. Life was random and cruel, she said, and she’d lost patience with his unwillingness to face that fact.

That it’s a man who has refuge in the fantasy world of tedious novels and a woman who has a better grip on reality doesn’t bother me. I’m with anyone who can step past ordinary art and hard experiences to create something like this lovely book.

9.4/9.4