\'A Literature of Pluralities\' Review of Nicholas Birns \'Contemporary Australian Literature\'

A literature of pluralities

GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

by Max Porter

Wide-ranging ideas and surprising conjunctions

Faber $24.99 hb, 128 pp, 9780571323760

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row is wild. His black eyes glint and his beak seems to smile. Malicious and mischievous, he sits in a living room with two boys and their father wrapped in his wings. The woman who was their mother and wife has died, leaving the family ‘like Earth in that extraordinary picture of the planet surrounded by a thick belt of space junk’. Crow is the titular bird of Ted Hughes’s 1970 poetry collection. The father is writing a book about him that ‘will reflect the subject. It will hop about a bit.’ Grief is the Thing with Feathers reflects its subjects too: grief, firstly, but also the myth that Hughes built. And it does hop about, in a warp of prose and poetry that, like Crow, pays no heed to rules or sense. There is, for example, a certain carelessness with facts; this disorientation helps represent grief. Porter’s words have the lyric quality of poetry, but with novelshaped characters and a crackling, mythic backbone. The myth turns out not to be Crow, but the idea that one can recover from grief: ‘Moving on,’ says the father, ‘is for stupid people … The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.’ Crow is both a literal thing and metaphor, imbued with human qualities: brutality, sympathy, a sense of humour. Most memorable of all in this small book is the stubborn domesticity of Porter’s words, which ground the thrills and shocks of fantasy. This helps position grief as a sequence of sucker punches: ‘I will stop finding her hairs,’ says the father. Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a paean to Crow. But it is the truth of grief which dominates, typified by understated, lingering lines: ‘We hope she likes us,’ say the boys from their future. Daniel Juckes

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MARCH 2016

Susan Lever CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE: A WORLD NOT YET DEAD by Nicholas Birns Sydney University Press, $30 pb, 280 pp, 9781743324363

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rom time to time, Australian literature has been fortunate enough to attract the enthusiasm of international critics, from C. Hartley Grattan in the 1920s to Paul Giles, who compared Australian and American literature in his scholarly Antipodean America (2013). Nicholas Birns, a New York academic, tells us that he first encountered Australian writing back in the 1980s and has been a member of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies since then, including a long period as editor of its journal, Antipodes. In 2014 he spent six months in Australia, reading widely and talking to writers and critics. His resulting study of contemporary Australian literature is more the record of a personal encounter with Australian writing than a scholarly reference book. The subtitle may be disconcerting: ‘A World Not Yet Dead’ implies a world that is soon to be dead, possibly already moribund. But the implication is intended to go the other way, as a comment on the deadness of prevailing values outside literature. Birns frames his discussion as a critique of neo-liberalism, a term not much used in Australia, perhaps because liberalism has such a range of meanings and ambiguities. He suggests that it is a synonym for what Australians call economic rationalism – simply put, the valuing of all human effort in terms of money and profit, success and failure. It is a surprise to read literary criticism that invokes Thomas Piketty on the growing inequality in the world, but that is part of the idiosyncratic and personal nature of this book. Birns argues that writing – particularly contemporary

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW

Australian writing – is one of the last bulwarks against neo-liberal dominance. Imaginative writing, exemplified by the fiction and poetry he discusses, offers ways to ‘conceive life differently than merely valuing one another by our financial conditions’. Birns is not offering us a canon of aesthetic or social value. He rightly states that Australian literature has never established a set canon; it is a literature of pluralities. He also acknowledges that no one reader can possibly claim to have read across the entire Australian publishing output of the past thirty years, so that authoritative statements of literary value are impossible. He chooses to discuss the novels and poems that interest him, though his reading is so wide that few local scholars could match it. His guide to selection is a rather generalised notion of resistance to threats to the imagination, in particular the way recent Australian fiction treats the division between ‘social winners and losers’, a criterion that becomes generously inclusive. He begins with mid-century modernity, discussing Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (1940), For Love Alone (1944), and Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) as Australian novels, insisting that ‘Letty Fox evokes a hidden Australian identity from within the transnational maw of New York’. He traces the shift from modernity to late modernity in the work of Elizabeth Harrower and Patrick White, considering the recent publication of Harrower’s In Certain Circles (2014) and White’s The Hanging Garden (2013) as commentaries on the neo-liberal commitment to individual success. He is content to

support his broad generalisations with an eclectic range of references; Zadie Smith’s 2014 speech at Birns’s campus, the New School in New York, offers ‘proof that what I am calling neoliberalism was all-pervasive and was not just a function of a particular party platform or administrative practice’. To question these kinds of ‘proofs’ is to make reading this book impossible. They are part of a miscellany of ideas that keep Birns surging forward to engage with the Australian writing he likes. In a chapter on the reception of Australian novels, Birns argues that the short novel (which he calls the récit) fell out of fashion with the arrival in the 1980s of the big postmodernist novels (Rushdie, Pynchon, Márquez) that offered synecdochic versions of whole nations. Using reviews of Australian fiction in the New York Times Review of Books and nominations for the Booker Prize as a basis, he surveys responses to Australian work, noting the American and British preference for novels that claim to canvass the Australian nation. He suggests this valuing by length is a sign of neoliberalism’s mechanistic measuring of success and applauds the recent critical successes of Tim Winton’s Eyrie (2014) and Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014) as a sign of the resurgence of the récit. How does literature resist the dominant neo-liberal ideology? Birns finds this resistance in the ‘affective’ responses of literature, ‘feeling takes up ... the ethical burden previously borne by more direct modes of social comment’. This leads him to trace the emotion of rancour, expressed in the work of A.D. Hope, Christos Tsiolkas, Ouyang Yu, John Kinsella, J.M. Coetzee, Pam Brown, and Jennifer Maiden. He addresses questions about the land and displacement of indigenous peoples by ranging across the writing of Thomas Keneally, Arthur Upfield, Kate Grenville, Gail Jones, Alex Miller, by contrast with indigenous writing and the novels of Alexis Wright (he likens the difference between the work of earlier indigenous writers and Wright to the differences in early and late Dickens). The recent work of Frank Moorhouse,

Gerald Murnane, and Brian Castro provides evidence of the international idealism of Australian writing, while Peter Carey’s fiction gets a whole chapter examining his transnational challenge to prevailing neo-liberal values. In a typically quirky digression, Birns considers two actual people – the late enthusiast for nineteenth-century Australian literature Victor Crittenden, and former NSW Premier Bob Carr on the basis of his Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014) – in terms of Carey’s fictional characters. The book ends with an examination of Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (2013) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2014), Catton’s New Zealand residence and nationality being swept aside on the grounds of cultural similarities between Australia and New Zealand and because Catton ‘has lashed out against the cruel inequalities of neoliberalism in a way no Australian writer has’. Contemporary Australian Literature is a book of wide-ranging ideas and surprising conjunctions. It does not claim to offer authoritative readings, but its insistence that literature has a direct relationship to prevailing economic doctrine should stimulate new discussions among Australian readers. I wonder whether any Australian critic will take up the assertion in this book, and in Giles’s, that Australian critics have been blinkered by literary patriotism in their responses to Peter Carey. In Birns we have a reader with few evident prejudices, ready to tackle everyone from A.D. Hope to Colleen McCullough. g

Susan Lever is the author of David Foster: The Satirist of Australia (2008).

LEAVING ELVIS AND OTHER STORIES

by Michelle Michau-Crawford UWA Publishing $24.99 pb, 156 pp, 9781742588025

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ichau-Crawford’s accomplished début collection bears comparison to Tim Winton’s impressionistic The Turning (2005) and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2008), though Leaving Elvis is properly neither the portrait of place nor of a single character. The place might be any dilapidated small town in the wheat-belt region of Western Australia. The chronological stories follow the fortunes, or more aptly the misfortunes, of a family blighted by trauma, poverty, abuse, and silence. In ‘Getting on 1948’, the patriarch Len returns from Changi prisoner of war camp. Reuniting with his wife and daughter should be a joyful affair, but it is clear Len has lost more than his foot in the war. He has come back ‘alive but not the same’, just like his father after World War I. As with his father before him, rage and alcohol are Len’s poor defence against ‘the night terrors’. History has a terrible habit of repeating itself, and reputations, once gained, are extremely difficult to live down. Scraps of information, which the characters are at great pains to conceal from society, each other, and even themselves, are meted out as sparingly as a thriller, and with the same effect of suspense. Michau-Crawford’s writerly ear is well attuned to the nuances of the Australian vernacular; as the focus of the stories alternates between Len, his embattled wife Evie, their daughter Olive, and her daughter Louise, she makes subtle shifts in language, which reflect the attitudes of each character and period, from the 1940s through the conservative 1950s, the radical 1970s, to the present. The eponymous penultimate story won the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2013, and would have made an admirable finale. As it is, it makes the coda of ‘Can of worms 2016’ seem extraneous – that is until the wallop of the last sentence. Francesca Sasnaitis LITERARY STUDIES

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