Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads

“Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society – to help solve our contemporary problems – seems to me a peculiarly American delusion.”

Jonathan Franzen – whose sixth novel, the hefty and keenly awaited Crossroads, came out last week – wrote those words in 1996, in an essay about the state of American fiction. If a non-American were to make the same point, it might sound a bit rude. So it’s nice to hear an American novelist admit it. Americans do seem to have some overblown ideas about what novels are for, and what they can do. 

As it happens, Franzen started writing fiction at a moment when debate about the purpose and direction of the American Novel was raging especially hard ... [READ MORE]

The Newsreader

I’m going to miss The Newsreader, which finished last Sunday on the ABC. I can’t remember the last time I watched such an addictive show the old-fashioned way, savouring the episodes on a weekly basis instead of scoffing them all at once.

For me, part of the treat was personal. I grew up in the 1980s, and The Newsreader went to striking lengths to recreate the ambience of that garish decade. It was set in 1986, in the newsroom of a Melbourne TV station. The stories of the protagonists were interwoven with the real-life news events of the year: the Russell Street bombing, the Chernobyl disaster, Lindy Chamberlain’s release from prison ... [READ MORE]

Literary Prizes

When the Miles Franklin shortlist was announced earlier this week, the public response seemed unusually muted and polite. In the early reactions, one discerned a few recurrent talking points. Three of the six finalists don’t currently live in Australia. Does this matter? Only two of the six are women. Is that enough? Few big-name writers made the list. Is that a good sign or a bad one?

As a practicing critic, I find it hard to get excited about such questions. To feel they matter, you have to take literary prizes seriously in the first place. And I don’t. I think they’re a terrible idea all round ... [READ MORE]

Remembering Clive James

Originally published in Quadrant, March 2020

“All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.” When Clive James died last November, at the age of 80, newspapers and websites, along with a rump of literate tweeters, paid him the highest compliment a writer can receive. They quoted bushels of his best sentences, including that one. He was gone, but his phrases were still catching the light. Sometimes it was hard to tell whether they came from his poetry or his prose. He had always hoped to be remembered as a poet. In the epigraphs to his Collected Poems, he quoted Horace: “If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars.” Whether James will be ranked that way it’s too early to know. But maybe we saw hints, in those first responses to his death, that the distinction between his verse and his prose will come to seem unimportant, in the long run. Maybe he’ll be remembered as a phrasemaker of genius, who dispensed his mini-masterpieces in an unusually various range of delivery devices. The phrase quoted above originated, as it happens, in one of his memoirs. But it was poetry, wherever it came from.

In several senses, poetry always came first for James. The earliest piece in his Collected Poems was written in 1958, when he was nineteen. And poetry came last, too. During the final decade of his life he was in desperately poor health, battling a cancer that went in and out of remission, as well as a disease of the lungs that cruelly hampered his ability to breathe and talk. In those straits, longer forms of expression were beyond him, and the short poem again became his favoured refuge. Moreover, his verse had found its last great theme: his own mortality. [keep reading ...]