ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

Claire Aman, Gaylene Carbis, Gregory Day, and Carrie Tiffany are the four shortlisted authors in the inaugural ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Their stories appear in this special Fiction issue. ABR and the judges – Tony Birch, Mark Gomes, and Terri-ann White – congratulate the shortlisted authors, who were selected from an impressive field of 1300 stories.

Some thematic currents emerged from this vast pool of entries. As in the contemporary novel, many short story writers chose to re-imagine scenes from colonial Australian life, and other historical periods. Stories of migration, and of migrant life in this country, also featured prominently. And, of course, the perennial narrative mode of domestic realism was ever present, deployed in telling stories ranging from the harrowing to the hilarious.

Four further stories are commended, and will appear in coming issues of ABR. They are: ‘A Body of Water’ by Else Fitzgerald, ‘Bad Luck’ by Rose Lane, ‘Russell Drysdale’s Trousers’ by Catherine Moffat, and ‘Nitrogen’ by Meg Mundell. The judges admired the short-listed and commended stories’ charm and simplicity of expression. Their aims, it was remarked, are modest, contained, and achieved with linguistic economy.

The winner will be announced at the launch of this issue – Wednesday, 12 October, at Readings, Carlton, 6:30 p.m. Shortlisted authors will not know the result beforehand. ABR patron Ian Dickson, who generously supports this Prize, will present the winner with a cheque for $5000; the other three shortlisted authors will each receive $1000. All are welcome to attend the launch. To RSVP email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. And if you can’t be there, follow ABR on Twitter on the night for live updates.

Internship opportunity III

Australian Book Review – supported by The Ian Potter Foundation – seeks applications for an editorial intern. The successful candidate will spend six months at the magazine and will receive $20,000. This is an excellent opportunity for recent graduates who are seeking an entrée into publishing. The ABR Ian Potter Foundation Editorial Internship reflects ABR’s strong commitment to fostering new editorial talent, and extends the magazine’s highly regarded volunteer program.

We seek applications from graduates who wish to work in the publishing industry. The successful applicant will work closely with the Editor and with Mark Gomes, the Deputy Editor, who joined us in 2009 under this program. As in his case, there is much scope for a diverse creative contribution to the shape of the magazine.

Applications close on 21 November 2011. Full guidelines are available here. Applicants should read them closely, and must demonstrate a sound knowledge of the magazine.

Chong and Grenville

W.H. Chong is back with another of his inimitable portrait prints. Kate Grenville, whose new novel, Sarah Thornhill, is reviewed by Sophie Cunningham in this issue, is his fifth subject. Full details of Chong’s limited edition appear here. The first ten purchasers of the Grenville print will receive a signed copy of Sarah Thornhill, courtesy of our friends at Text Publishing.

Dry martini

Advances was amused by one item in The Weekend Australian of 17–18 September. Paul Kelly reported that Heather Henderson, daughter of Robert Menzies, had rebutted John Howard’s claim in his memoirs, Lazarus Rising, that, on becoming prime minister in 1996, he invited the Hendersons to The Lodge for a celebratory martini. Mrs Henderson told the newspaper she was astonished by the claim and that she and her husband had never been invited to The Lodge as a couple. In an earlier letter to Mr Howard, she noted: ‘I don’t like and don’t drink martinis.’ John Howard has now removed this anecdote from the paperback edition. Meanwhile, Sue Ebury, in this issue, reviews Heather Henderson’s edition of Robert Menzies’ Letters to My Daughter (Pier 9).

Give a free six-month sub

We invite renewing subscribers to give a free six-month subscription to a friend. This year the version on offer is ABR Online Edition (not the print edition). Complete the back of the flysheet that accompanied the October 2011 print issue or contact us on (03) 9429 6700. As ever, you can renew your subscription at any time to qualify for this special offer. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc. (This offer, ideal for Christmas, is open only to current subscribers.)

Loyalty program

Our new program proved highly popular last month. Those who have been subscribers for five or more years can select a complimentary book when they renew their subscriptions (which can be done at any time during the life of the subscription, not just when it finishes). We have some marvellous new fiction and non-fiction titles to add to the list of books (we will email this to individuals whose subscriptions are due for renewal). Please note: from the complete range of our special promotions (books, gift subscriptions, film tickets, etc.), new or renewing subscribers can select one item. We encourage Melburnians to collect their giveaways from the office. This helps with postage – and we love meeting our readers.

CONTENTS: OCTOBER 2011

Declaring an interest

Dear Editor,

No doubt one of the spin-offs for those who commission and read book reviews is the jousting or arm-wrestling following the publication of a review that is contested by an aggrieved writer. An instance of such jousting appears in the Letters column of your September 2011 issue, when Eileen Chanin defended her recent biography Book Life: The Life and Times of David Scott Mitchell against the magisterial but waspish filleting of her work by Paul Brunton in the July–August 2011 issue.

I am not writing here to defend Chanin’s book, but I think she is entitled to feel aggrieved that her reviewer’s special interest in the subject was not declared, with Brunton describing himself innocuously and modestly merely as a ‘Sydney-based archivist and librarian’. It is only in ABR Online Edition that we are told of Brunton’s role in curating a major exhibition on Mitchell in 2007.

Brunton’s own long professional association with the Mitchell collections in the State Library of New South Wales is not mentioned; nor, as Chanin now complains, is there any indication that Brunton served de facto in the role of an institutional host and colleague during her tenure (2007–08) of the C.H. Currey Memorial Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales while working on the biography.

I think readers of ABR should be alerted to any special interest which either colours a review or which adds substantial value both to commentary and to wider critical debate. More puzzling perhaps is the implication that your expert reviewer did not share his views and knowledge with a conscientious and enquiring author, working in close proximity, on a shared interest in a notably enigmatic and problematic subject.

John Thompson, Darlinghurst, NSW

Paul Brunton replies:

I thank John Thompson for categorising my review of Eileen Chanin’s Book Life as ‘magisterial but waspish filleting’. Two out of three is not bad, and I can live with ‘waspish’. It usually only means the target has been stung. The truth can hurt.

Dr Thompson does not defend the book; rather, he complains that I did not declare a special interest in reviewing it. He also implies I should bear some responsibility for the errors because ‘the expert reviewer did not share his views and knowledge with a conscientious and enquiring author’.

I have no special interest to declare. I have never been a colleague of the author. In fact, I hardly know Ms Chanin. I was not involved with her research. The forty-nine people, excluding her publisher and family, whose assistance Ms Chanin acknowledges in Book Life do not, quite rightly, include me. I was not asked to comment on the manuscript before publication. Ms Chanin may be an ‘enquiring author’, but she never enquired of me.

What is most revealing, though, is that no one seems able to rebut my serious criticisms of this book. That surely is the essential point. Ad hominem attacks have always been the resort of those short of arguments.

Rustling

Dear Editor,

In her review of my book Meet Poppy, Ruth Starke wrote:‘I did wonder, however, what “bushranger” Harry Power wasdoing on the banks of the Murray in 1864 (and how Poppywould know of him), given that he was sentenced inDecember 1863 for horse stealing and known by his realname, Henry Johnstone, until 1869. His infamy asa bushranger came years later’ (July–August 2011).

Starke’s statements are in conflict with my own research. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography: ‘As Power he ... [was] arrested on a charge of horse-stealing; he was sentenced at Beechworth on 19 February 1864 to seven years on the roads.’ Further, the journalist Frank Corlette questioned Harry Power himself extensively, and wrote in 1910:

He did not give his correct name when charged with the offence because it would have brought discredit upon the family, his father being the game-keeper to the Marquis of Waterford.

He stole a saddle and bridle and was overtaken illegally using a blood horse, and with this act his career in Ireland came to an end. He was convicted and sent out in 1838, under the name of Johnston, and adhered to that name until he became a ticket-of-leave man.

Dropping the surname, for obvious reasons, and under the impression that Power would carry him safely over any likely obstacle, he began the life of a highwayman ... It has been said that Power was not his correct name, but I have no doubt whatever about it. More than once I questioned him closely on this subject, but only to irritate him and get the reply ‘No true Irishman who had fought the battles of his country against the landlords would dream of changing his patriotic name.’

This should clear the record.

Gabrielle Wang, Camberwell, Vic.

CONTENTS: OCTOBER 2011

Not since Marguerite Yourcenar’s classic Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) have I encountered a novel of such bravura intensity and insight into the jagged contours of the human heart.

Autumn Laing opens with a mercurial soliloquy. Over eighteen shimmering pages, the novel’s eponymous heroine draws scarcely a breath as, in a soul-scouring torrent, spanning a lifetime while skewering the moment, she conjures the characters who are ‘seething in her brain’. Autumn parades her dramatis personae of lovers and artists, loathed family, and beloved friends. She struts her many selves: Cleopatra and crone, artist’s muse and scourge, Sybil and hysteric, moral vagabond and seeker after redemption. Haunted by her own mortality and resurgent remorse, she brandishes Tennyson: Let me shrive me clean, and die.

The heroine of All That I Am reflects that an author’s published books ‘preserve the fossil imprint on the world of that particular soul at that particular time’. In her début novel – based on real characters and events – acclaimed non-fiction author Anna Funder (Stasiland, 2003) has preserved the imprint of a particular group of souls at a vitally important historical moment. A beautifully executed blend of historical fiction and psychological thriller, it follows the lives of a London-based network of activist refugees from Hitler’s Germany.

Sarah Thornhill is the third book in Kate Grenville’s loose trilogy depicting life in the early days after Australia’s settlement. Like the previous novels, The Secret River (2005) and The Lieutenant (2008), Sarah Thornhill fictionalises actual stories of settlement. In the process, Grenville transforms our history into something immediate and tangible, which gives readers the chance to enter our shared past.

British author Glen Duncan released his eighth novel this year, the title of which, The Last Werewolf, is fairly self-explanatory. Although a much more philosophical (and entertaining) read than one might imagine in our current supernaturally-dominated ‘box-office’ novel landscape, Duncan’s book was a marked departure from an author better known for his explicitly literary output. Of his previous seven novels, only one, I, Lucifer (2002), deviated into genre and found a wider readership. Although this story of the Devil transplanted into the body of a failed writer was optioned, and A-list actors such as Jude Law, Ewan McGregor, Daniel Craig, and – ahem – Vin Diesel all dallied with the notion of strapping on horns and a forked tail, no movie has yet appeared. The Last Werewolf stands a much better chance of being adapted for the silver screen, given its purchase by Ridley Scott’s production company, Scott Free.

Scott notably purchased the film rights to another literary writer’s stab at a blockbuster last year, Justin Cronin’s post-apocalyptic vampire romp The Passage (2010). When will we stop making films about werewolves and vampires, you may well ask. Probably never. A more interesting question posed by this series of events is why well-respected literary authors are writing novels about them. Glen Duncan’s response during an interview with Anita Barraud on Radio National’s The Book Show, broadcast on 11 April 2011, was both honest and troubling.

It was undertaken initially in a rather mercenary spirit, given that the novel that came before it, A Day and a Night and a Day, had performed exactly as its six predecessors had, which is to say not enough people bought it and it didn’t win anything. I ended up having a conversation with my agent in which I said if I write another novel more or less like that, will you be able to find a publisher for it? And he, rather nauseatingly and simultaneously refreshingly said ‘No’. So the intention at the outset was to write a straight commercial genre novel. It was meant to be a fairly clinical exercise. But very, very quickly it became apparent that this was a great arena for actually writing about the things I wanted to write about in any case. And so it was a happy, accidental consummation.

This may have worked out well financially for both Duncan and Cronin (who earned an advance in the millions for The Passage and its film rights), and may have brought both authors wider name recognition, as well as tying them up creatively for the next few years (both are working on trilogies), but it does make me wonder about the career options for mid-list literary novelists. Has the rapidly changing publishing industry altered the career path of authors, whether they like it or not? Are authors under more pressure than in the past, from within or without, to tailor their content in order to be more commercially viable, and is that necessarily a bad thing? Is it still possible to have a career as a literary novelist? If not, how long before we see a Toni Morrison vampire trilogy?

In a vibrant Australian publishing landscape, a plethora of book award ceremonies keep literary novels in the spotlight, though commercial success does not necessarily follow. Stephen Romei, literary editor of The Australian, had championed Stephen Daisley’s book, Traitor, several times on his blog A Pair of Ragged Claws prior to its winning the fiction prize in the 2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. Romei was delighted with the result: ‘He collects $80,000 tax free for today’s win. I also hope the publicity will encourage more people to buy his book, which has sold not much at all, even by debut Australian novel standards.’

It is rare for an Australian literary novel to find the sort of commercial success that Duncan and Cronin have tapped into by lending their literary chops to more commercially popular subjects. Despite the evident merits of Daisley’s novel, there are a limited number of readers in Australia willing to invest time and money in stepping outside of their popular fiction comfort zone.

This may not always have been the case. Writers such as Peter Carey have won Man Booker Prizes with nary a lycanthrope in sight. Surprisingly, when I approached Carey for his thoughts on the matter, he initially felt he was too old to address the issue of literary career viability.

I grew up in a time when I never, not for a second, expected to make a living from writing literary fiction. And while I desperately wished to be published in the UK and USA the odds seemed very long indeed.Yet, by the late 1980s and 1990s the world had changed, forever so it seemed. Australian writers were being read and praised the world over. Midnight’s Children was a best seller. Andrew Wiley made a huge deal for Martin Amis and it seemed literary writers could give up their second jobs. Now it’s 2011 and there is, you tell me, an agent advising a literary writer he has to be more commercial. It’s easy enough to imagine a writer feeling that he or she had no choice but to follow that advice. After ten or twenty years of full-time writing, what the hell else can the writer do? But how in the hell do you be more commercial? Does anybody know?

Since 1974, when I first published, my only successes have come from the most unlikely ideas. A gambling tortured clergyman and the heiress of a glass factory? Really? You think that’s sexy? They’re going to float a glass church down a river? We’ll call you back. And then you wish to write about an Australian bushranger and you think they’ll want to read that in Bentdick, Mississippi? Oh, and you’re going to leave out all the commas and run the sentences together? Then tell me this – would you rather shoot yourself?

Yes, I would like to sell more books in what is called a ‘down market for literary fiction’, but I have no idea how I could do it. Being told to be more commercial would not work well with someone of my character. As James Thurber wrote of himself: ‘Easy to arouse, he is very hard to quiet, and people normally just walk away.’ When I write a novel, I’m just doing the thing I know how to do. The result, sometimes, is a commercial success and sometimes, well, let’s say sometimes I sell fewer books. Bryce Courtenay says he could easily write books like mine, and I believe him. He also says I couldn’t write like him. He’s correct again. A hundred William Morris agents couldn’t teach me how.
Writing any good novel is a high wire act. This is enough for any writer to worry about without getting dizzy about what some ‘market’ wants. In fact, as many publishers will tell you, they don’t know what a market wants. And most importantly, the market doesn’t know. It does not have the tiniest clue until it sees it, something, naturally, like nothing it could possibly imagine.

In his novel Theft: A Love Story (2006), Carey coined the geographical location of Bentdick, Mississippi, during one of Butcher Bones’s tirades against the art world, a passage that could equally be applied to publishing.

But it was all the same everywhere: everyone who loved me was trying to get me up to date. Sometimes it seemed there was not a place on Earth, no little town with flies crawling inside the baker shop window, where there was not also some graduate student in a Corbusier bow tie who was now, this instant, reading the party line in Studio International and ARTnews and all of them were in a great sweat to get me up to date, to free me not only from the old-fashioned brush stroke but from any reference to the world itself.

These were weighty issues, but the first question the Manhattan dealers asked me was of a different order: ‘What are the names and phone numbers of your collectors?’

And the next question would be: ‘When was your most recent auction sale?’

And then, when they actually looked at the canvas, they would silently ask themselves, What the fuck is this?

All dark and comfortless. They had no eye, only a nose for the market and I smelled to them like some demented Jesus fool living in a cotton town in Bentdick, Mississippi.

But I am Butcher Bones, a thieving cunning man and I made this beautiful seven-foot-high monster with my greens and my Dutch canvas and when it was done, and I had cropped it, the result was twenty-one feet long and its bones, its ribs, vertebrae, wretched broken fingers, were made from light and mathematics.

Even in this short excerpt, the power and beauty of Carey’s prose is evident. Readers can be thankful that he stuck to his guns and produced the novels that he wanted to write rather than those he felt he ought to write. That his oeuvre has found frequent critical acclaim is heartening, though his royalties are probably a fraction of Justin Cronin’s. As so many writers do, Carey teaches, at Hunter College in New York, alongside fellow prize-winning novelists Colum McCann and Nathan Englander.

In the absence of long-term financial security – if teaching, criticism and journalism are vital sources of income for writers even of Carey’s pedigree – how do authors further down the food chain survive in order to write books? Sophie Cunningham, former Meanjin editor and author of the novels Geography (2004) and Bird (2008), and of the non-fiction work Melbourne (2011), has a pessimistic view, and it is easy to sympathise with her. Cunningham’s third novel, This Devastating Fever, about Leonard Woolf, has been in stasis for the best part of a decade. The excerpt I have heard her read in public was reminiscent of Carey at his best, but there is still no sign of this intriguing book.

I certainly think that any author – as Duncan found – who wants a long-term career as a writer is now under pressure to write ‘commercial’ books. Publishers are less likely to take books on, whatever a writer’s track record, advances are going down, and you’re more likely to be asked to complete the entire work before a commitment is made. Ways in which writers have traditionally made money (teaching, writing, journalism, etc.) are paying less (literally, not just relatively). The publishing industry and bookshops are employing fewer and fewer staff – both these industries have traditionally employed writers. My Twitter profile reads – ‘I used to work in publishing but don’t think I can take it much longer. I am also a yogini. I like ancient grains and cats.’ I’m not actually joking.

I can’t afford to finish my novel and I’ve been told I can’t sell it when it’s only half written, so I’m trying to do other bits and pieces of work, and to work on some more commercial writing projects. In my case this means writing non-fiction, which I very much enjoy – in some ways enjoy more – so it’s not a compromise I’m unhappy with. But it was made because I cannot sustain myself by writing novels. Very few writers can. You can’t exactly blame publishers for this – they can’t continue to run a business publishing books that don’t sell.

Finding the formula that strikes a perfect balance between literary merit and commercial viability has long been the Holy Grail for authors and publishers. Publishers are often accused of being the fly in the ointment in this process, and while there are many cases of publishing houses passing on books that went on to become critically acclaimed successes, the other side of the story is almost never mentioned. Joyce’s The Dubliners was rejected twenty-two times; Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance one hundred and twenty-one times; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind thirty-eight times before winning the Pulitzer Prize; Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune twenty-three times – all quite mystifying decisions, suggesting that publishers don’t have a clue. Of course, they do have a clue; otherwise they would have gone out of business long ago. What we don’t hear about are all the shrewd decisions: the thousands of manuscripts rejected due to their lack of literary merit or commercial potential. Many egos have been bruised along the way, but if a manuscript fails to exhibit a suitable combination of the qualities needed by a publishing house, the author must return to the drawing board with good grace.

As Carey suggests, no one really knows what makes a novel commercial. Unlikely tales of success are not limited to the realms of Hogwarts and Robert Langdon. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose has sold more than fifty million copies since its publication in 1994. Although Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (2008) has yet to scale such dizzy heights, several hundred thousand copies have crossed the counter. It is not unknown for ‘serious’ literature to achieve excellent sales figures. While an author may have no idea if the manuscript she is working on will be a raging sales success that prolongs her career for a few more years, or a dismal commercial failure that has her scanning the employment pages, is it possible to influence the outcome by being circumspect in choosing which novel idea to develop? Do writers have a duty to their publishers and themselves to select from their pool of ideas those stories with a better chance of resonating with readers? Brisbane author Nick Earls is a career writer whose eighth novel, The Fix, came out this year; he is also well known for his five Young Adult novels and numerous short stories.

I do think, at least sometimes, about commercial viability. I don’t want to be non-viable. Being non-viable sounds like you’re one step short of being broken up for parts. As a simple matter of personal preference, I happen to be not very interested in most of the kinds of books that sell millions of copies, and it used to be okay not to be – okay to sell tens of thousands of copies in each of a number of countries. That’s viable as a job, but the publishers in each of those countries are no longer always seeing it that way. Lose a few countries, start to drop numbers in your home market and all of a sudden viability is on the line.

It makes simple business sense to see if you can diversify your product line, but there are limits to that, for me anyway. I’d still have to be excited about the idea and where it might take me, for two reasons. I’m in this job because I love it. If I pushed myself to write something I didn’t even like, maybe I should be looking at a different job. Also, I couldn’t be Stephenie Meyer, Lee Child, or Matt Riley if I tried. It’s not my thing, so I’d do a half-arsed job at it and it’d get me nowhere.

So, I have to look at my range – at the range of things I might be genuinely drawn to write about – and then I think it’s reasonable to start thinking, ‘Which of these stories might people want to read?’ I did that for the first time in 1994 when I was in a career hole. My short stories had sunk and I’d had two subsequent novel manuscripts rejected. I had six piles of ideas. I’d been trying to be a writer since school, in 1978. I had outsmarted myself and was writing work six people might be fascinated by, and there’s no career in that. I told myself to make a career choice. If I was equally excited about all six piles of ideas, I should pick the two that some people might actually like, I should write them and, if they got me nowhere, I should stop. They both ended up published, and are both still in print.
I’m not as pragmatic as some people and perhaps not as pragmatic as I should be, but, on the other hand, this shed is no ivory tower. I think about the marketplace sometimes, but to me it feels like there’s no point in going to it if I’m not excited about my wares. One day that may be the end of me, but I’m pretty convinced I’d write a crappy werewolf novel and have a bad time doing it. I’m going to leave that to people who want to do it, even if it means I end up watching them all drive by in Bentleys.
I have to write as if my current contract could be my last roll of the dice, but maybe that’s how we should write all the time anyway. Complacency never wrote a great novel.

Given the rise of social media and the increased interaction between the public and those in the public eye – be they actors, musicians, hotel heiresses, or novelists – writers are encouraged, even expected, to participate in the sales process. Just as actors travel the globe promoting their latest film in a never-ending series of repetitive interviews, authors now find themselves in a similar position. Awards ceremonies, writers’ festivals, interviews, author talks, readings, Q&A sessions, library and book club presentations – these are some of the myriad activities that authors can look forward to – or dread.

While not every shy and retiring writer is well suited to this whirlwind of publicity, it is relatively easy to forgive publishers for thrusting such a schedule of personal appearances on their literary stars. Books are in direct competition with a wide array of other media and publishers must at least attempt to play the same game as other creative disciplines if they are to survive. In such an environment, rock stars are entirely necessary – the everyday men and women whose names are synonymous with fame and fortune, achieved through the simple transference of an idea into a Word document and thence the crisp pages of a book or the reassuring slate landscape of an e-reader. J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer, Charlaine Harris, Jonathan Franzen – these gods of popular literature form a pantheon that is irresistible both to their legions of adoring fans and to the thousands of writers, aspiring and established, who trail in their wake.

Sydney-based author and playwright Mardi McConnochie released her fourth novel this year, The Voyagers: A Love Story.

I think there is an element of literary authors wanting to get some of the love that genre authors get. I had one of those writers’ festival experiences recently at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, one I’m sure all authors who’ve ever done a festival can relate to. After one of my sessions I turned up for my signing to find a queue that went out the door, down the street and out onto the footpath, being vigorously patrolled by facilitators who were shouting ‘only one book per person!’ and writing everybody’s names down on Post-it notes, which they stuck to the title page in order to speed up the signing process. There were hundreds of readers there, mostly but not exclusively young women, all carrying large stacks of books and all in a state of high excitement about meeting the author – Cassandra Clare, the author of several best-selling fantasy series. As I gratefully signed my one or two books I couldn’t help but be aware of the hullaballoo down the table and to wonder, how could I get some of that action?

There have always been authors with enthusiastic fan bases. What has changed has been the rise of the mega-successful author and our awareness that this kind of success is possible. Because once it starts to seem possible, an expectation begins to arise that maybe this is something you could, and should, aspire to. Publishers are all looking for the next big thing – of course, why wouldn’t they be? But authors too are more aware that this is possible and many of us want a piece of that: the sales, the adulation, the attention. There probably are writers out there who aren’t interested in reaching a lot of people, because what they have to say isn’t going to interest the vast majority of people; but there are many more of us, I think, who find the idea of spending years of your life on a book only fifteen hundred people read sad and depressing. I’d like to think that I’ve written something that connects with people, and hey, the more the merrier. The model of mega-success is unhelpful for most of us, since we’re not going to achieve it; but it is increasingly difficult to ignore.

I have never been asked to write a more commercial novel by either an agent or a publisher, possibly because what I write is closer to mid-list than highbrow anyway. But I would be surprised by any agent who gave their client such bad advice. I strongly believe that cynically chasing the market is not a recipe for success. Novels should come from some genuine excitement or engagement with your subject matter; writing a werewolf novel, or a vampire novel, or a child-in-the-Holocaust novel just because you think they’re hot right now is just not going to work. You’ll get bored, and readers will sniff out your insincerity and stay away. If you think you have something genuinely new and exciting to bring to a popular genre, then go for your life. But if you’re doing it because you think it will help build your career, forget it, because it almost certainly won’t.

Not all authors can find a place in this vaunted pantheon; nor should they. Like any other job, literature has its high earners at the top of their game and high earners who don’t produce quality work, followed by a range of excellent, competent, and sub-par scribes ranking somewhere below in terms of talent or financial status. Many in the latter camp will inevitably fall away and try their hand at something else. One has to believe that genuine talent and perseverance will eventually be recognised.

The concern with regards to contemporary publishing is that too many of the middle ranks are becoming extinct. A situation is forming, if indeed it has not already formed, wherein the multitude of hopefuls at the lower end of the scale aspire only to become their opposite. Consumed with the thought of an unknown J.K. Rowling scribbling her tale of a boy wizard in the corner of an Edinburgh café, the notion of forging a career as a mid-list author who creates a normal life around their work is anathema. Nick Earls again:

Garrison Keillor last year in the New York Times said ‘the future of publishing [is] 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.’ As far as novelists go, we’ll still need new stories and people to tell them. I just hope there’s room for a range of voices to be heard above the noise. My fear is that, of Garrison Keillor’s 18 million authors, three of them will be earning ten million bucks a year and the other 17,999,997 will be earning eight cents each. I’d like to see a broader base to commercial viability. I’d like to see a lot of authors paying off regular mortgages with their earnings, and doing better than that, and writing without the stress of  non-viability lurking around the next corner.

With traditional employment alternatives for writers such as teaching, working in bookstores and at publishing houses diminishing at an alarming rate, the mid-list of authors who simply want to make a reasonable living from their work is in real danger of vanishing. Publishers are being forced into make-or-break scenarios as the desperate need to find the next blockbuster drains resources that might be employed in assisting mid-list authors to maintain a healthy career. Despite this, those select few whose work does reap a cash bonanza are vital to the survival of an industry under threat from a dizzying array of angles.

Given such pressures, it may no longer be possible to forge a career as a distinctly literary author without another career of some kind for security. Those interested in creating such work can look forward to producing it while working in another capacity, probably unrelated to the book world. Should they be published, the print run is likely to be tiny. Whatever brand of critical reception they receive – hot, lukewarm, frigid – it will make scant difference to their success or failure, or to the prospect of a third or fourth book. A major literary prize may help, ensuring that another book appears, but barring the unlikely crossover of a literary work onto the shelves of Target or WH Smith, the career prospects of tomorrow’s Peter Carey look fraught. Which may mean we are witnessing just the beginning of an onslaught of vampires, zombies, and lycanthropes, albeit beautifully composed. The last werewolf is yet to be written.

Christina Stead is an author perennially ripe for rediscovery. Her acknowledged masterpiece, The Man Who Loved Children, came out originally in 1940; in 2005, it figured in Time’s list of the 100 best novels published since 1923. But in his introduction to the Miegunyah Modern Library edition of the novel, American novelist Jonathan Franzen cites a more recondite statistic, from a 1980 study which shows that Stead is not one of the 100 most-cited literary writers of the twentieth century, in order to ground his mission of rehabilitation.

It is easy to see affinities between Stead’s big unruly novel and Franzen’s bestselling Freedom (2010):both deal with fractured families, creatures of their (American) times; with the battle of the sexes and the sins of the fathers; with idealism and manipulation. Both depend on comic effects, often dark, generated by the idioms provided to the characters. Both are ambitious novels, Franzen evidently having an eye on Great American Novel status: the nature of Stead’s ambition is less easily categorised, and herein lies the rub.

Franzen’s discussion amounts to a declaration that Stead is unquestionably a writer’s writer. Over time she has been championed by Saul Bellow, Lillian Hellman, Angela Carter, Barnard Eldershaw, David Malouf. It is no accident that her latest reflorescence is in large measure due to Franzen’s enthusiastic advocacy in the New York Times last year.

Publishers also have championed her, and here Melbourne University Publishing’s Louise Adler takes her place in a distinguished line-up that begins with Peter Davies in London in the 1930s. Adler commissioned Hazel Rowley’s important biography for William Heinemann Australia in 1993, then published a revised version from MUP. She also published my edition of the letters between Stead and her husband William J. Blake, Dearest Munx (2005).

Probably the most decisive moment in Stead’s publication history, however, was the reissue of The Man Who Loved Children by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1965, at the instigation of Stanley Burnshaw. This edition brought Stead the most sustained attention she ever experienced, and led to the appearance of novels such as Cotters’ England (1966) and Miss Herbert, The Suburban Wife (1976), in which no publisher had been interested in the postwar period following her return to Europe from the United States in 1947. Carmen Callil at Virago in the 1970s and early 1980s reissued a number of titles, as well as publishing posthumously the extraordinary I’m Dying Laughing in 1986. It is appropriate therefore that Callil should introduce the second in the Miegunyah series, Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946). For Love Alone (1944), with an introduction by Drusilla Modjeska, is on the way as the third title. In a sense, MUP is now picking up the mantle of Angus & Robertson, whose editions in the mid-1960s of the novels with Australian settings, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) and For Love Alone (1944),coincided with the reissue of The Man Who Loved Children. A&R made further amends for its earlier rejection of Stead by publishing The Little Hotel in 1973, and subsequently keeping a number of her works in print well into the 1990s.

Franzen is respectful of the history of Stead’s reception, and so is MUP. The decision to include in the Miegunyah reprint the long essay by American poet and novelist Randall Jarrell that accompanied the 1965 reissue and practically all reissues since is an interesting one. Jarrell champions a Stead who nearly makes it into a pantheon of the novel that derives from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, acknowledges Moby-Dick, resists Joyce, and comes to rest on Proust. After more than 12,000 words of praise for the realistic particularity of The Man Who Loved Children, for him a family tragedy revolving around the isolated figures of the three main characters, Jarrell retreats to formalist criteria and denies it greatness because of what he sees as its indiscriminate excess – while allowing that it is as ‘plainly good’ as War and Peace is ‘plainly great’.

Franzen is less equivocal, though he too appears to concede that Stead is rejected because she takes on the literary canon on its essentially male terms. He bemoans the loss of confidence in the novel form from Jarrell’s Cold War day until now. For him any fiction (any text) is inextricably a product of its time, not caught in the timeless web woven by Jarrell. Thus he clearly identifies a political dimension to The Man Who Loved Children – Sam Pollit is ‘the Great White Father, he is literally Uncle Sam’. Franzen also gets that part of the gender dynamic to do with the offensive of the artist as a young woman, Louisa Pollit cum Christina Stead, against the father. He is less astute on the place of Sam’s wife, Louie’s stepmother, Henny, in the central triangle. Curiously, given that he maintains that the book should be a core text in women’s studies programs, Franzen doesn’t see that there is a contest also with the mother, and that Louie is both nemesis and liberator. His reading of the novel as comic is one that perhaps offers more hostages to fortune than he realises, because it backs off from the fundamental boldness of The Man Who Loved Children. The dimensions of that boldness become apparent when this novel is read in relation to its successors, Letty Fox and For Love Alone, as variations on the theme of a young woman affronting her destiny, variations developed in terms more explicit but no less excoriating than those laid out by Henry James for Isabel Archer.

The fact that The Man Who Loved Children is a seriously demanding book has to be confronted: it is long (nearly 500 pages), at once hard and exhilarating because of its relentlessness and intensity. The contemporary livery of the Miegunyah Modern Library volumes, elegantly re-set, with covers by the fashionable designer Miriam Rosenbloom, is intended to attract a new readership for Christina Stead. As Franzen observes, ‘it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you’. Melbourne University Publishing now gives readers and critics another chance to find out.

Reading Letty Fox in 2011

by Fiona Morrison

The recent edition of Christina Stead’s Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) from Meigunyah locates the book in an appropriately wide-ranging and international set of influences. The very choice of Letty Fox: Her Luck as the second reissue indicates a cosmopolitan commitment to making easily available in Australia at least two of Stead’s most important ‘American’ novels. These transnational contexts are very appropriate for a book written by an Australian expatriate about a girl of transatlantic origin living and working in New York in the late 1930s and 1940s. Carmen Callil’s introductory account of what it meant to republish Letty Fox at Virago in 1973 is similarly apposite.

What is striking about reading Letty Fox in 2011 is how current it seems (how prescient it was in the mid-1940s), and yet how strange. Hazel Rowley claimed that it was her ‘first truly American novel’, indicating that whereas The Man Who Loved Children reallyoriginated in Stead’s Australian childhood, Letty Fox was always going to be about the modern American girl. Letty Fox was certainly Stead’s one and only first-person narrative, meant to showcase her grasp of American and specifically New York speech patterns and rhythms, among other things. These facts don’t really help all that much with the sense of being somewhat at sea in the novel’s bulging, vivid mass of description, the enormous cast of characters, and the ebullient (to the point of overwhelming) linguistic energy of the title character. Callil calls Letty Fox a comic novel, but this is only useful if you understand that it is comic in the way that Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is comic, and, rather more recently, the way in which Sex and the City mightbe comic: energetic, episodic, satirical.

In a letter to Geoffrey Dutton in 1975, Patrick White wrote: ‘have been reading Stead’s Letty Fox, a kind of picaresque of sex American style. It’s extraordinary to think of that quiet sedate woman writing anything so hilarious.’ White, Callil, and other commentators have invoked, in passing, this key genre from the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish tradition and its many English imitators in the eighteenth century. The term is much more useful than it seems at first glance. Rather than suggesting a vague sense of a roguish title character who rather likeably and comically lurches from scrape to scrape, it precisely describes Stead’s novel – its narrative shape and point of view, inclusion of key episodes, the endlessly mobile central character, the detailed evocations of a highly textured and chaotic social world, and the keen satire of social mores of sex, food, dress, and work. Letty Fox is a textbook picaresque novel, carefully composed using contemporary material, to approximate the great Spanish, French, and English novels in the genre.

Stead is so interesting in this novel in her deployment of the female rogue, or pícara, as a modern working girl in the streets of New York (with the intentional inference of prostitution), who uses her marketable assets of good looks, street smarts, and moral and writerly flexibility in order to survive and thrive. The waning Popular Front and early war years in New York (1936–45) were the perfect stage on which to set this story of the indefatigable working girl on the move, with her thwarted racketeer schemes to attract affection, stay ahead of the sexual game, marry advantageously, and keep financially afloat. True to the original picaresque novels from Spain, England, and the United States in the nineteenth century (haven of the picaroon), social, economic, and political upheaval (1937–45) provided the perfect setting for the mobile female trickster and the kind of ethnographic social detail that interested Stead.

This might not have seemed revolutionary to Stead herself, who was steeped in European literary traditions of the radical left (Rabelais, Cervantes, Stendahl, Balzac, Dickens, Malraux), as well as an abiding fan of Mark Twain, but the female-authored picaresque, like female-authored satire, was, and still is, quite rare. Stead’s attraction to the genre was that it offered a contrast to, and a break from, the more obviously romantic quest narrative, For Love Alone (1944), a narrative form to which she never really returned. It also provided a platform for her main comic and political purpose: to satirise the ineffectual left-wing middle class with which she had socialised in New York since 1935. The way in which this radical set moved through the marriage market and associated libidinal and cash economies was just one indication of its corruption, hypocrisy, and blind American obedience to the structures of capital. It emerges, of course, that Stead was also centrally interested in that bind in which modern women found themselves: between libidinal freedom and a kind of married respectability.

Stead’s novel certainly produces many rambunctiously comic moments, but the work delivers more than the standard comic disapproval of a roguish protagonist. Although planning to embrace the traditionally restrictive spaces of matrimony with a none-too-promising chap at the end of the novel, Letty is still in motion in her tenacious, impudent, and clamorous way; still working for her survival in the urban jungle of New York at the end of the war. Her morally reprehensible behaviour is certainly satirised, but the novel also celebrates Letty’s extraordinary vitality (her ‘bounce’), which stands at the heart of her survival as an outsider – a modern working girl on the make in a man’s world.

Why do you write?

I write to understand the world, and also to find out what I think. When I look at something very closely (whatever it is: fruit bats or space travel or a particular situation), it seems to expand; to contain allusive meanings I wouldn’t see if I weren’t writing about it. My books are also about honouring otherwise forgotten people whom I find extraordinary.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Not particularly, sadly. Mostly very obvious dreams. Freud would be bored. When I am writing, which is most of the time, I spend a lot of time muddling around in my mind. Maybe there’s not much of interest left over when I’m asleep.

In the weeks and months after his Moira died he’d whittled off the callers, one by one, until even gentle Dave O’Donnell, his oldest friend, felt like a stranger when he came by to drop off a family-size pie. This was an unlikely turn of behaviour. In the resolute stare he gave Dave at the side door of the house, there was a grief that could brook no niceties, despite their history together. Dave wouldn’t be coming in. All the tasks and laughter the two old men had shared over the years became just a dwindling sound on the doorstep between them, an echo like they used to hear from currawongs under the bluestone bridge, when dusk settled in and rain was on the wind and they were called home by their mothers for tea.

Before he left the family, my father worked as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company. He travelled from chemist to chemist with samples of pills and lotions and pastes in the back of his Valiant station wagon. The best sales representatives visited modern chemists in the city and suburbs. My father had to drive long distances to country chemists who had stocked the same product lines for years and weren’t interested in anything new. As he drank more and more, my father called on fewer and fewer chemists, but the cardboard boxes of samples kept arriving. They no longer fitted in the back of the car, so my father stored them in the corrugated iron shed next to the house. Summer in Perth is very hot. For months and months the bitumen boiled on the roads and we had to use the ends of our T-shirts to open the iron lid of the mailbox, or risk getting burnt. The pharmaceutical samples expanded in the heat of the shed. The lotions and pastes burst their tubes and tubs and seeped through the cardboard boxes. It smelt good in the shed – sweet and clean and surgical. My brother and I went in there often and sat among the sodden boxes as we read our father’s Playboy magazines.

In the last weeks of their marriage, our parents battled out the terms of their separation at the dinner table in between the ice-cream bowls. My mother, small and freckled, wrote lists of their possessions on a Nordette^® low dose oral contraceptive notepad. She looked like a teenage girl playing a board game. Nathan and I listened in as we watched television on the other side of the vinyl concertina doors that marked the division between the lounge room and the dining room. We watched MASH. Nathan sang along to the theme song, and for the first time I noticed how high and piping his voice was. And there was something creepy about his pink skin and the cowlick at the front of his fine white hair. I wondered if we hadn’t created a masculine enough environment for our father. I tipped my brother out of his chair and started boxing his arms and chest. He wailed. The doors were dragged open.

‘Kevin, what are you doing?’ my mother said, leaning against the buckled vinyl as if she was too young to stand unsupported. I let Nathan squirm out from underneath me.

‘He’s a sissy,’ I said. ‘He sings like a girl. Tell him he’s not allowed to sing.’

She looked from me to Nathan and back to me again; then she forced her eyes open wide so they boggled with exasperation.

The playmates in the Playboy magazines are always smiling. Or, if they aren’t smiling they have a gasping, pained expression as if they’ve just stood on a drawing pin. None of them have someone special in their lives at this time, but with the right man they can be hot to handle. They like the feeling of silk against their bare skin, and they appreciate the outdoors and candle-lit dinners. Miss July says she likes the heat (she’s from Queensland), but on the next page she says she would like to make love in the snow. This contradiction seems to have slipped past the Playboy editor. I wonder if this is a concern to other readers? The skin of the playmates can be matched to the samples of different timber stains that we have in woodwork class. The brunettes are teak or mahogany, the blondes are stained pine if they have a tan, or unstained pine if they are from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or the Netherlands. The playmates don’t have veins showing through their skin – it is just the one colour – like a pelt. And none of them have freckles or bits of hardened sleep in the corner of their eyes like tiny potatoes.

My father agreed to take only his personal items; his clothes, shoes, records, golf clubs, and alcohol. On the morning that he left I stood in the driveway and waved him off. My mother and brother watched from the kitchen window. My father’s work shirts hung in rows down each side of the rear of the station wagon. It looked neat – like it had been designed for that purpose – like a gentleman’s wardrobe on wheels. My father waved his forearm out of the window as he drove off. Just as he rounded the bend in the road and the car moved out of sight, he tooted his horn. I stood and watched for a few minutes. When I finally turned to walk away, I noticed my mother and brother were still looking out of the kitchen window; but now they were looking at me.

My father married my mother when she was eighteen, because he had made her pregnant. It was just the one time; the one date. My mother had a job interview at the shoe shop where my father was working. She didn’t get the job, but my father, the junior sales clerk, asked her out. When my brother and I were little we often asked our father to tell us the story of how he met our mother. He always said the same thing. He said that our mother had the best pair of knockers he’d ever seen. For many years my brother and I believed that knockers were a brand of shoe. It was through reading the Playboy magazines hidden among the boxes of pharmaceutical samples in the shed that I realised my mistake. And although we never spoke of it, I believe that Nathan, who is three years younger than me, was also enlightened this way.

I heard my father’s car in the driveway a few days after he left. My mother was at her boot-scooting class and Nathan had gone along to watch. The Valiant was empty and I wanted to ask my father where he was living, where all his shirts were hanging now, but it felt too intrusive. My father called me over to help him load the stereo, the fan, a china dinner service that had never been out of its box, an esky, and a bodybuilding machine into the back of his car. I knew that my mother would be angry, but I felt flattered my father had asked me for help with the lifting. No man ever refused to help another man lift.

A week later, my father came back again and tried to remove some of the boxes of pharmaceutical samples from the shed. My mother rushed out of the house as soon as she saw his car. She shrieked at him and tried to block the doorway to the shed. My father pushed past her. Nathan started to whimper. I stood near the tailgate of the Valiant – I hoped that my father would think I was trying to help him, and that my mother would think I was trying to stop him. My mother saw one of our neighbours working in his garden over the fence and she called out to him. She insisted that he help her, saying that my father was trying to steal her property. Ron looked uncomfortable, but he came and leant against the fence, holding his small soil-stained trowel in his hand.

‘G’day, Ron,’ my father said, cheerfully, as he carried a stack of cardboard boxes towards the car. My mother rushed at him then, and they grappled with the boxes. Some of the boxes disintegrated as my mother and father snatched at them. Ron banged his trowel against the fence palings to signal his disapproval. I was embarrassed for all of us. It was unseemly. The pieces of soft cardboard on the ground looked dirty and cheap. The value of us – the whole family enterprise – seemed to be symbolised by them.

My father never came to the house again. He took a job interstate. The telephone calls became less and less frequent, then they stopped. The first year, with the anticipation that he might write or ring on our birthdays or at Christmas, was confusing, but things settled down after that.

Because my father left Western Australia and my mother didn’t know where he was working, she was unable to have any maintenance payments taken out of his wages. Money was tight. When the windscreen of the Torana shattered, my mother covered it in gladwrap and kept driving. She took a job with the local real estate agent. She didn’t have her licence, so she answered the telephone and wrote down messages. On the weekends the owner of the agency let her put up directional signs in the streets surrounding houses they had listed for sale. He told her it was good experience and would help her when she sat the exam for her estate agent’s licence.

One Saturday morning Nathan and I went along to help our mother with the signs. The signs were metal; they attached to a steel stake with wire. There was a rubber mallet to bang the steel stakes into the ground. The house for sale was on a recent estate behind the tip. A new road had been built to get into the estate so that the residents didn’t have to go past the tip, but everyone knew it was there. In summer the tip stank as the rubbish decayed in the heat. It was better in winter when people lit fires there and the smoke was rich and fruity. We parked on the side of the road and tried to hammer the first stake into the ground. It only went in a few inches before it hit rock. We took turns. Each of us thought the other wasn’t doing it right, until we had tried for ourselves. As I hit the stake with the mallet and the force reverberated, not into the ground, but back up my arm and shoulder, I knew we were no longer a family. A woman and two boys is not a family. We had no muscle. We had no way of breaking through.

It rained overnight. My mother insisted that we go back and try to erect the signs the next day, as the ground would be softer. With my father gone I had to sit next to my mother in the front seat of the car as she drove. She was wearing Nathan’s old raincoat from scouts and a red gingham headscarf over her hair. I told her that it would suit her better if she tied it under her throat like the Queen. ‘This way,’ I said, as I turned in the seat and knotted it under her chin, ‘is more dignified.’ I was already a foot taller than her and I was worried someone from school might see us and think she was my girlfriend, instead of my mother. My brother sat in the back of the car while my mother swung at the stake with the mallet. The rain had muddied the surface of the ground, but barely soaked in at all. It was still hard going. It started to drizzle. I held the Lorazepam^® high-potency benzodiazepine golf umbrella over my mother’s head with my arm outstretched so I didn’t have to stand too close to her. If anyone drove past and saw us I hoped they would think I was more in the role of caddy than lover.

Increasingly, when I thought about my father, my memories of him were not so much of actual events or incidents, but of the things he left behind. My father had a moustache and one of his eyes was sleepy. The sleepy eye was more noticeable in photographs than in real life. Not many adults have a sleepy eye – or perhaps it’s difficult to tell because so many of them wear glasses. There was a framed photograph of my parents on their wedding day next to the telephone in the hall. My mother is wearing a too-big navy suit in the photograph. Her cheeks are uneven and she looks seasick. My father seems happier – his moustache, if not his mouth, is smiling. His eyes are downcast though. He is looking at the most striking thing in the photograph – his massive white wrists. My father told me the story of the photograph one night when he’d been drinking and my mother wouldn’t let him in the house. He climbed through my window and spent the night on the floor next to my bed. The story was this: a few months after the date with my mother, my father had another date. This date was with a girl he really liked, a girl he wanted to marry. He paid a friend who worked in a garage to give him the keys to a sports car for the evening so he could take the first rate girl out. Showing off, he took a corner too fast and crashed into a brick wall. The girl was unhurt, but my father broke both of his wrists. Because of this he was wearing plaster casts on his wrists when he married my mother a couple of months later. The casts give my father a serious and masculine appearance in the wedding photograph. The weight of them on his wrists makes his arms look heavy, almost burdened, with muscle. And the thickness and hardness of the casts straining at his shirt cuffs is menacing. He doesn’t look like a sales clerk, he looks like a boxer.

Underneath the photograph, in the drawer of the hall table, there are three boxes of white biros with blue writing on them – Aldactone^® spironolactone easy to swallow tablets. One afternoon after school I try all of the biros on the back cover of the phone book. Out of fifty-four biros, only seven work.

Because my mother goes on a few dates with one of the real estate agents and it doesn’t work out, she has to leave her job. She goes on benefits and is made to do courses. Her course at the local neighbourhood house is called ‘Starting Again for the Divorced and Separated’. My mother does her homework in her My New Life Workbook in front of the television. When she gets up to go to the toilet during a commercial break I take a look at what she’s written. Under, ‘What motivates me?’ she has answered, ‘flowers’.

My mother asks me and Nathan to go with her to a Parents without Partners picnic. It’s at an animal nursery. I can tell that Nathan doesn’t mind the sound of it, that he would like to pet the lambs and the rabbits. But I say we are too old, that it’s dumb, and by holding Nathan’s eye for long enough I get him to agree. My mother goes without us. She meets a man who works on a prawn trawler in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The man has a daughter whom he sees sometimes when he’s in town. My mother has a lot of late-night telephone conversations with the man on the prawn trawler. She has to say ‘over’ when she finishes what she is saying, because he is using a radio telephone. When the prawn season finishes, my mother’s new boyfriend moves in with us.

I have become so familiar with the playmates in my father’s Playboy magazines that they don’t work anymore, so I read the articles. In Playboy forum, men write in and describe how they meet women in ordinary places; the petrol station, the laundromat or the video library, and they have sex with them against the bowser, the dryers, or on the counter. When this happens a friend of the woman with different coloured hair often arrives unexpectedly and has no hesitation joining in. And if the first woman at the petrol station, the laundromat, or the video library has small breasts, her friend will always have large breasts – or the other way around. After I’ve read all of the articles I look at the ads and the fashion pages and choose things. I choose Rigs Pants, Lord Jim Bionic Hair Tonic, Manskins jocks, Laredo heeled cowboy boots with a fancy shaft, and Aramis Devin aftershave – the world’s first great sporting fragrance for men. I think I hear someone outside, but it’s just a pair of dusty boxing gloves that hang from a nail on the back door of the shed. When it’s windy the gloves bang into each other. I can no longer remember if the boxing gloves belonged to my father, or if they were in the shed before we came to live here.

Nathan joins the gymnastics team at school and I get a checkout job on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings. Nathan’s legs are bowed and he doesn’t have any strength in his upper arms. When he does his exercises his shorts ride up and his orange jocks show. The gymnastics teacher says his vaulting technique is poor. He tells me that Nathan doesn’t look like he’s trying to jump over the horse, more like he’s trying to fuck it. He tells me this because I am standing next to my mother in the school quadrangle on open day where we are watching a display of gymnastics. I am wearing my Coles New World tie and the gymnastics teacher must think I am my mother’s boyfriend. Nathan is best at the type of gymnastics where he has to throw a stick or play with a ball – a type of gymnastics that might have been invented by puppies. Because Nathan’s wrists are weak he wears special white tape around them. He brings some of the tape home – he says the gymnastics teacher gave it to him, but I doubt it. Nathan wears the tape on his wrists every day during the school holidays. When the tape gets grubby he puts more over the top until his wrists are so thick he can’t hold his fork properly. When he’s talking he throws his hands around in the air and watches them. This is something I’ve seen my mother do when she has just changed her nail polish.

By over-ringing the total on a number of small sales, it is safe to take around five dollars out of the till at work each week. It’s better not to take an even amount. Four dollars thirty-nine is good. Playboy magazine costs two dollars. I don’t buy it every month. I buy it when the cover looks like it will go with the covers of my father’s magazines already in the shed.

My mother takes her wedding photograph out of the frame on the hall table and replaces it with a picture of herself and her new boyfriend on a fishing trip. The photograph shows my mother and Wayne standing on a jetty together, each holding a fishing line with a white fish dangling from it. My mother’s face is puffy with the strain of holding the fish aloft. Her lips are open and stretched tight, just like the fishes’ lips. If it were a group portrait you would have said my mother and the fish were related. My parents’ wedding photograph is relegated to a drawer in the hall table where the envelopes and takeaway menus are kept. The photograph rises to the surface every time I search for a piece of paper to take down a message. It is crumpled now and smells of soy sauce.

There is a letter in the latest Playboy that I think might be from my father. In the letter a man describes an encounter he has with a woman at a bodybuilding centre. The man describes himself as well built, with a full head of hair and a moustache. He is lifting weights on his own late one night when a beautiful girl comes in to clean the equipment.

The girl is wearing a short pink cleaner’s dress which fits poorly across the chest. Because her washing machine has broken down and she is poor and has no change for the laundromat, she is not wearing any underpants. The girl says hello to the man shyly and starts cleaning. The man is sweating heavily – sweat is running off his biceps like he’s standing under a waterfall. The man notices that the girl is watching him. He decides to do a few rounds with the punching bag. He calls the girl (she has been bent over rubbing the weight lifting bars with a cloth), and asks her to help him lace up his boxing gloves. As soon as the girl gets close to the man, she is intoxicated by his sweat. She ties the laces of the boxing gloves together so he is her prisoner. She tells the man to sit down on the bench press, then she takes her dress off and rides him like he’s a bucking bronco.

The letter is signed, Hot and Sweaty, Tweed Heads. I hope that it is my father’s letter. I hope the girl in the story is the same girl my father took out on a date when he broke his wrists, and when she finally takes off his boxing gloves and they hold hands, I hope they are not joined by one of her friends with different-coloured hair. I place the magazine on the top of the pile so Nathan will read it too. I hope Nathan will think that our father is happy. I want Nathan to understand that our mother was never going to make things work with our father. She was the wrong girl. And because she was the wrong girl, Nathan and I were the wrong sons. It could never have been any other way.

Carrie Tiffany and Gregory Day were the joint winners of the 2011 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

Click here for more information about past winners of the Jolley Prize.

This is to say I didn’t take the old lady’s things for myself, I was only looking after them. I wanted to leave the chocolate box in her garden so when she lifted the lid she’d find her ruby rings and diamonds and pearls each tucked in their own dark nest. It was nearly ready, only two more to go – Turkish Delight and Peppermint Crème. She would have understood. But it’s too late, and now I can’t decide whether to bury the box on the riverbank or flog the lot and go to Bali.

In the middle of their love-making, he said, suddenly – ‘Wait.’ He reached over to his wallet beside the bed and took out what was obviously a condom. He opened the packet, held up the condom and said, ‘Put it on.’

The business of growing up starts with distancing ourselves from our parents. It ends (as far as it ever ends) with drawing them close again. Rather than disappointing giants, we recognise them at last as fallible, unique human beings. We recognise them in ourselves, and so they become real to us.

Heather Menzies was ‘the apple of her father’s eye’, reported A.W. Martin, Sir Robert’s authorised biographer, and this collection of letters reveals that she was indeed, to use her father’s own words, ‘the great unalloyed joy of my life’. So much so that Ken, her elder brother, confessed to being jealous of her in his younger days. Heather married Australian diplomat Peter Henderson in 1955 and moved to Jakarta, when these letters begin, but her political education began years beforehand. In a letter that Menzies wrote to Ken (not published here), who was serving in the Australian forces during the war, he proudly describes his sixteen-year-old daughter’s ‘sotto voce comments in the galleries during speeches by such favourites as Forde and Ward and Evatt … [as] worth going a long way to hear’. This extremely close relationship and sharing of political values between father and daughter had an interesting precedent: Dame Pattie had enjoyed a similar bond with her father, the politician and manufacturer John William Leckie. Politics was the stuff of life for the Menzies family, both in Opposition and government. Heather accompanied her parents on official engagements that included overseas trips to India in 1951 and London in 1952, and travelled with them on the hustings during electoral campaigns.

This year is the 175th anniversary of European settlement in South Australia. The University of Adelaide presented a series of public lectures collectively called Turning Points in South Australian History. Bill Gammage gave the first and showed by an accretion of primary sources that, prior to white settlement in 1836, Aborigines kept a tidy landscape thanks to the controlled use of fire. First Adelaidians exclaimed that the landscape was close to an English garden. Henry Reynolds gave the second lecture, and made much of the political and social timing of the settlement, after the abolition of slavery in London and just before the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand. The idea of terra nullius was in its preliminary colonial tatters.

As with all such collections, this issue of Meanjin mixes the inspired with the modest, the fascinating with the mediocre. That is of no consequence: in this fraught cultural age, all that matters is that journals like Meanjin survive and provide a forum for both established and aspiring writers.

The most recent edition of La Trobe Journal is an exploration of Melbourne’s gay and lesbian past. Amusingly titled Queen City of the South, it investigates an aspect of this city’s history that has frequently been overlooked or ‘hidden’. In the Introduction, guest editor Graham Willett argues that the compilation will help bring to light ‘striking stories and deep insights’ about the ‘sexual subcultures’ of Melbourne. These ‘stories’ will enrich not only our understanding of the city’s history, but also the history of homosexuality in Australia. There are essays on gay male networks in Melbourne during the interwar years, the gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the queer presence in our museums, and the (in)visibility of homosexuality in the Australian Communist Party.

The writers of two books about Fred Williams published in the 1980s, Patrick McCaughey and James Mollison, were friends of the artist, and involved with him in their roles as art critic/historian and gallery director. Their respect for Williams led them to write against the grain of their usual modes. Mollison, professionally always on the knife-edge of making judgement, held back, exploring with great precision within the factual boundaries of materials and processes, numbers, dates, and sequences. McCaughey, too, looked between art and artist rather than to mainstream contemporary art. In a new chapter written for the 2008 edition of his book, McCaughey endorsed the insights of younger writers, thereby providing a springboard for Deborah Hart.

So Patrick White’s most flamboyant novel (with the possible exception of The Twyborn Affair) has been brought to the cinema, after the usual longueurs and fiscal frights. Director Fred Schepisi and his scriptwriter, Judy Morris, have tamed the long and somewhat unwieldy beast that won White the Nobel Prize in 1973. Lovers of the novel will miss certain scenes, but there is a coherence to the script, and no film should slavishly adhere to the original text.

In 2003, the year in which Elliot Perlman’s previous novel Seven Types of Ambiguity was published, the eminent gadfly David Marr suggested that Australian novelists failed to address major contemporary social concerns. As if anticipating Marr’s criticisms, Perlman wove a plot that involved stock market speculation (and peculation), upmarket Melbourne brothels, privatised prisons, privately managed health care, downsizing and unemployment in the education sector, the crisis in the humanities, economic rationalism, globalisation. Late-twentieth-century capitalism and its discontents, in short. The novel obviously spoke to the judges of the Miles Franklin Award, who shortlisted it for that pre-eminent, if contentious, prize.

Australian author Helen Hodgman depicts writing and domestic love as apotheoses of self-annihilation. In Jack and Jill (1978) – Hodgman’s second novel and the second to be reissued by Text Publishing this year, after Blue Skies (1976) – literary imagination acts as a sexual Strangling Fig, and childbearing poses a threat to psychic wherewithal. Mind and body, this stylish short work suggests, are equally appalling, are contradictory, are destructive in combination. Proxies, effigies, and symbolic recurrences abound in the novel, as Hodgman charts her characters’ changing allegiances to sex and art-making in pathological detail.

Australia is supposed to have a knowing relationship with East Asia, but the embarrassing truth we keep under wraps is that you can count on one hand the number of first-class translators we have produced. There are no doubt complex cultural reasons for this, but it is hard to escape the impression that many academics teaching Chinese and Japanese have not been earning their keep.

Machine Man, Max Barry’s fourth novel, begins with its protagonist Charles Neumann searching for his mobile phone. It takes him twelve very funny pages to find it, but when he does it ushers in the novel’s central ‘tragedy’. It is easy to assume that Barry comes bearing a worn theme about modern society’s alarming reliance on technology, but he is no Luddite, and Machine Man’s central tragedy is also the centre of its comedy. Neumann loses a leg, but as a clinically minded, emotionally incapable engineer whose love for hard science and determination to improve knows no bounds, his loss quickly becomes his (and his company’s) gain – before, inevitably, it becomes his loss again.

For a work that deals heavily with culinary aspirations, it is going to be hard to review Wayne Macauley’s brilliant new novel The Cook without reference to Masterchef, so let’s get it out of the way early. This year, after each new episode of the television show aired, the assorted snark-addled wits of the Fairfax press gathered online to do their mocking work. The mechanics of the show were pulled apart, and the comments section soon filled with the matching-set echoes of disdain and mockery. Filling their prose to breaking point with jokes – it wasn’t a sentence unless it tried to get a zinger away – the gathered souls confessed, through their sneers, that the show was nonetheless utterly compelling viewing.

What does a young boy make of a father who carries in his pocket a knife that is used to peel fruit, behead chickens, fashion toy flutes, and potentially serves as a weapon to kill his spouse? Two Greeks,the work of third-time novelist John Charalambous, is an engaging study of the power of family and the need for identity. In similar company to Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father and Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap, the novel delves into difficult emotional territory, but does so with humour and humanity. Like its literary cousins, it has the foundations for an insightful filmic adaptation.

For the Patriarch first appeared in 1981 and was much lauded, winning a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. The work is an important landmark in migrant writing. Angelo Loukakis, although born in Australia, identifies with the first generation of post-World War II migrants who are under-represented in our literature. Their children and grandchildren are the ones who have engaged with the complexities of what it means to be Australian while acknowledging that their roots lie elsewhere.

Amos Oz, who is at the pinnacle of Israeli writing, epitomises the role of writer as a voice of hope, a moral guide, as well as the spinner of dream tales. Speaking recently at the Melbourne Town Hall, Oz captured the mood of progressive thought in Israel when he spoke of the pressing need for a two-state solution to resolve the Palestinian–Israeli crisis, where the warring forces would negotiate over the small tracts of land at issue, and would respect each other’s claims of sovereignty over their lands as indigenous peoples and equals. With his gift for striking images, Oz spoke of a time when Israel and Palestine would have embassies in each other’s countries. Israel, Oz declared, should be the first state to recognise the new state of Palestine. But is it all a dream?

The latest work by bestselling Tasmanian novelist Rachael Treasure is a collection of short stories, written at various stages of her career. At the age of thirteen, Treasure began writing mock Mills & Boon stories with her friends. The influence, and the mocking tone, are still there in the square-jawed heroes with chocolate- (or coffee-) coloured eyes and dark curls, but the stories veer in unexpected directions.

There are only seven High Court judges. Since Federation there have been just fifty-six of them (or fifty-five if we discount Justice Piddington, who never sat during his four weeks on the court). High Court judges are rare creatures, and as a rule they are publicly noticed far less than the importance of their work might suggest.

Tariq Ali, proclaims the Guardian, ‘has been a leading figure of the international left since the 60s’. If his latest book is the best the left can muster, I fear that its chances of influencing political debate are minimal – and, even worse, undesirable.

‘A MISSIONARY ARRESTED! A LONDON MISSIONARY ARRESTED!!’ These alarming words were trumpeted in the Sydney Gazette in 1828, and they shout from the back cover of Anna Johnston’s The Paper War. Readers might be forgiven for assuming that this book is about scandals in early colonial Australia – all the more entertaining for involving clergymen. And in a way it is, for the man arrested, Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld, is the book’s central character. His endless battles with his peers and superiors via the printed, written, and spoken word are a major focus of this book.

Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge.
(Matthew Arnold, ‘Shakespeare’)

When Arnold wrote his famous sonnet, he could have been anticipating John Bell’s book, which repeatedly asks provocative questions about the man and the work that have been his life’s inspiration – and arrives at much the same conclusion as Arnold. We don’t go to Shakespeare for mere knowledge, but for insight, challenge, and enrichment, and perhaps to help us know ourselves and others better. Further, as Bell says: ‘There is no worldwide conspiracy to keep Shakespeare alive. He survives because actors want to go on performing him and audiences want to listen.’ These sentences come from his second-last page, and the rest of the book helps us to understand why.

Sixteen-year-old Jemima (Mim) Dodd lives in a dilapidated house on the edge of suburbia, with an overweight, couch-loving mother. Mim’s two elder half-brothers are in remand for drug-related offences, and she is struggling not to be sucked into her neighbourhood’s vortex of sex, crime, and violence. Mim seems to be a victim both of her hostile social environment and her dysfunctional family. For want of a choice, it seems likely that she will follow the well-trodden path of school drop-out, teenage pregnancy, and unemployed layabout. But we should be cautious about mapping out Mim’s life as the book pushes the simple moral of never taking anything at face value; even the most unprepossessing circumstances can still yield surprising results.

The Wheeler Centre recently hosted ‘four provocative nights’ based on the assertion that Australian criticism of film, theatre, books and the visual arts is, in its own words, ‘failing us all’. The series was entitled ‘Critical Failure’. For ABR readers unable to attend, here is one person’s account of the books-related panel.

There was certainly a sense of failure in the room at the session devoted to ‘Books’ (7 September 2010). The questions from the audience that followed the panel discussion, and subsequent comments, expressed people’s frustration and anger at what was a wasted opportunity. The dissatisfaction arose from the general lack of preparation and focus, and, more specifically, the dismissive pronouncements of Peter Craven and the disparaging complaints of Gideon Haigh. Hilary McPhee, recently returned to Melbourne, seemed concerned but a little at sea as to where current reviewing and criticism are heading. Rebecca Starford engaged with an important issue in her defence of the emerging role of the internet – ‘extending the conversation about books’ – but neither she nor anyone else pursued the vital distinction between mindless tweeting and serious online addresses.