Category Archives: authors

A penchant for dissatisfaction and Lionel Shriver’s brilliance

01 Tuesday Jul 2008

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I will need to elaborate on Lionel Shriver’s brilliance at some time. She’s about the most quotable writer I’ve ever read. After being very impressed by We need to talk about Kevin, Post-birthday world has lines on almost every page that I feel like writing down. She has this acute insight into the details of life, and it’s this which can truly set a writer apart.

Not just the details either – an ability to observe and describe emotional states. To see what we all experience but don’t realise.

A couple of weeks ago she wrote an excellent column about her father for the Guardian where she talks of their mutual penchant for dissatisfaction – ‘great when you’re young; at 80, it’s self-destructive’. How true. How disturbing. (Maybe it’s half my problem. I need to get over the dissatisfaction that drove me through my teens and early twenties. Because IT DOESN’T WORK when you hit late twenties.)

I wonder how her father feels about her writing so candidly about him while he’s still alive. Ten years ago I would have written with this openness. Maybe even five years ago. But I’ve become much more guarded the last few years.

I don’t think she’s candid out of naivety, like I was. I genuinely thought that if I was open and honest to the world, they’d repay me with my kindness. Then I met some formidable people who taught me otherwise.

I’m fascinated by Lionel Shriver’s father because he’s a theology scholar. One of these few places where my polarity of interests – theology and literature – meet, besides in me.

Siri Hustvedt at Adelaide Writers Week

06 Thursday Mar 2008

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Hustvedt endeared herself to me greatly by being nervous. She was the only writer I noticed being nervous in all the sessions I went to. She said she was shaking and couldn’t stop. She’d written out her speech word for word, and I loved hearing it. This tall woman nervously saying beautiful things about her writing.

She defined writing as ‘Remembering something which never happened.’ She talked about her work as echo chambers for themes and how she removes anything which doesn’t echo with it.

It was a treat to see J.M. Coetzee, another of my favourite writers (at least for the brilliant Youth), chairing her session. He wasn’t as aloof as I imagined or heard, and he’s hardly a hermit being involved with Writers’ Week.

On the death panel Hustvedt said some interesting things, including relating her brush with death when she, Auster and their daughter were in a car accident. She talked about how celebrity is a third person existence, emptied of humanity.

Ian McEwan at Adelaide’s Writers Week and questions from the public

06 Thursday Mar 2008

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I got there early, but the seats were already filled up and there I was outside the tent in the sun again, and when he came my myopic eyes could only make out a blur. He was a good speaker, but his voice was rougher than I imagined. I thought he’d have the same smoothness as his prose, a sort of aristocratic eloquence, but it wasn’t that kind of voice.

He read from his work in progress, a climate-change novel which sounds brilliant so far, full of those McEwan tics, timeframe and style that I love so much. He covered about five minutes of narrative-time in twenty minutes of reading.

A woman taking an ego trip asked him if it was possible to write happiness, because (she claimed) Saturday was a failure.

‘I did it,’ he replied graciously, ‘and you didn’t like it.’

I disliked a lot of the questions throughout writer’s week. They seemed to be divided between the self-serving, the loony , the wannabe writers looking for The Secret – and, I must admit, the good. ‘Don’t let the public near a microphone. They’ll say all kinds of stuff.’

The woman saying how it was unfashionable to talk about the afterlife. All the boring old men who made speeches. We didn’t come to hear you!

I’m a grumpy old man. I believe in everyone having a voice, but I don’t necessarily like the outcome.

Writers’ Week panel on the Rules and how to break them

06 Thursday Mar 2008

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This panel had Paul Auster, John Kinsella (my PEAC teacher’s cousin!), Margo Lanagan and Matt Rubenstein.

None of the writers particularly liked the question, and it was amusing to see them deconstruct it. Lanagan and Kinsella were both amusingly opinionated. I liked  Kinsella’s rabble-rousing excitability and his earnest ideology – ‘I am a vegan pacifist anarchist’ – but it didn’t go down well with the older book-club set sitting near me.

Auster was brilliant. He said there was only one truly subversive thing – clarity. And I agree with him entirely. I love clarity too, a transparent book where the words aren’t calling attention to themselves but you’ve just found yourself immersed in the narrative world. It’s what’s similar about Auster and my second favourite writer, Ian McEwan.

Auster said at one point ‘I live in such a solitary world. I’m just trying to do my work. I don’t have an awareness of the literary world.’ He talked of his indifference to critics and fame and I thought of his years living ‘hand to mouth’ working on translations and starving. For him, writing is about one person talking to another, two strangers meeting in intimacy. Well, I’m a stranger to him, but he’s not a stranger to me.

Auster’s only rule : ‘swift and lean’. He said profound things on the spur of the moment in answering questions and he was private yet generous. He didn’t want to be there, but he was making the most of it and delighting me.

Nathan Hobby meets Paul Auster at the Adelaide Festival Writer’s Week

06 Thursday Mar 2008

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I did not have a coffee with Paul Auster. I did not shake hands with Paul Auster. I didn’t even really have a conversation with him. But I went to Adelaide and heard him speak (I was just out of the tent in the sun and he was very small but distinguishable) and he was wise, cynical yet generous, amusing and weathered, just as I imagined and hoped for.

And I did exchange a few words with him.

I was waiting in the autograph line wondering what I could say to a man who I had spent so many hours with and who had been so important to me. In the end the exchange went like this:

NH: ‘You’re my favourite writer, Mr Auster – it’s an honour to hear you speak.’

PA: ‘Well thank you. Thank you reading for my books.’

(Paul Auster indecipherably scribbles in my battered copy of Moon Palace.)

NH: ‘In my new novel one of the characters reads Moon Palace.’

PA (looking surprised): ‘Really? Well thank you.’

What happened then? Did he move onto the next person or did I walk away, spoiling a promising opening because there were a thousand people behind me waiting in the hot sun? I don’t know.

The reality is that you can’t hope to know a writer in ‘real life’ with any of the intimacy or depth that you know him or her through their books. It’s just not possible. It’s the wonder of reading and writing. Auster even said something to this effect at some stage, or I think he did.

There was a time when I would have thought of a witty or controversial or brilliant question to ask and I would have asked it, and I would have waited by the tent for hours, and I would have pushed my way into talking to Auster. But I’m 27 now, as of yesterday, and I’m old and shy. I’m mistrustful of people who push their way forward and I’m sick of egos.

I was glad I went, because I had to and because I enjoyed it, and yet it was in an important sense exactly as I feared.

Randolph Stow

02 Saturday Feb 2008

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I’ve stared reading Randolph Stow’s The Merry Go Round in the Sea. I can’t remember why I stopped reading it four years ago. I knew then that it was brilliant, but for some reason I didn’t have the energy.

His prose is exquisite; it’s amazing that such a brilliant writer has written about Western Australia, has walked these same streets as me. He evokes childhood with this preciseness of sensation and experience.

I feel sad thinking about Stow. He wrote four or five brilliant novels before he was thirty and then only a handful since. I wonder what happened. Why did he stop? Did he discover there were more important things to do? Or did his muse flee him?

A family legend has it that his grandmother boarded with my great-grandmother for a time. I must find out precise details from my Granny. I feel honoured to have a connection to him.

Book review : Atonement by Ian McEwan

21 Friday Dec 2007

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Spoiler alert 

Atonement manages to work as both a compelling narrative with popular appeal – the sort of novel you can recommend to people who don’t read literary fiction – and as an extended exploration of life and the nature of writing itself.

Compelling narrative 

The compelling narrative comes from a strong plot and masterful control of detail. It is a love story, but a love story told mainly from the perspective of the person who has come between the lovers.

McEwan gives us two very attractive characters in Robbie and Cecilia – both young, intelligent and vibrant people. We want them to love each other, we want them to be happy.

Yet Briony is likeable in her own way too. A precocious and brilliant child who is on an awkward cusp of maturity and immaturity. Her desire to make life more dramatic, to make it black and white, good and evil leads her to decide that the rapist she saw running away from Lola must be Robbie.

Reading it the second time and knowing what was to come, I was tensely aware of all the small details that were piling up, sending events down the path that would lead to Robbie going to jail for the rape and being separated from Cecilia.  What would have happened if he hadn’t added the impulsive postscript about his sexual desire for Cecilia? Or even if he’d sent the right note, the corrected one? Would he still have ended up in that passionate tryst in the library which Briony interrupts?

What if Briony hadn’t read the note? Would she still have thought Robbie a sexual maniac?

What if the twins hadn’t run away and everyone gone to search for them? Would there have been no opportunity for Paul Marshall to rape Lola?

There are what-ifs in any narrative, but McEwan handles them so well, piling them precisely and expertly.

In part two as Robbie trudges through France trying to get home to Cecilia, the narrative drive is simple and strong: his survival, which would have been suspenseful in any case, is made even more so by the knowledge that Cecilia is waiting for him and their love has been so cruelly interrupted by years in jail.

In part three, we follow Briony as she works in the wartime hospital, ‘atoning’ for her crime by forsaking her dreams and trying to help others. The narrative drive comes from the fact that just like her, we don’t know what’s going on, whether Robbie made it, until, at the end of the section and the end of the novel as she wrote it, she visits Cecilia and Robbie is there with her.

An exploration of life and writing 

Everything shifts with the revelation in the epilogue ‘London, 1999’ that the preceding novel has been written by Briony Tallis, and that in ‘real life’, Cecilia and Robbie both died in the war. It breaks my heart. I’ve gone soft; I would rather things ended where they did and I didn’t have to think of the happy ending as a fiction within the fiction.

But it’s a profound epilogue. Full of wisdom about the experience of being old and looking back on life. And full of insight into writing itself.

Briony writes in first person, asking herself whether writing can be atonement, whether by creating happiness for Robbie and Cecilia she has atoned for her crime. The answer is ambiguous. The problem is that the writer is the god of her novel, and so there’s no-one higher to appeal to, no-one to forgive her for what she’s done.

Thus the final scene as the dying Briony witnesses the play that was never staged with all her family around her has a special poignance. It’s realistic about the consolations that are available in life.  Even if there’s no undoing what’s done, there’s still moments like these of joy and love. Not a happy ending, but a happy scene at the end of a profound life.

Book review: The Sportswriter by Richard Ford

18 Thursday Oct 2007

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Dirty realism? 

Richard Ford was friends with Raymond Carver.  Figures. The Sportswriter seemed to me like the novel Carver would have written if he ever wanted to. (Presumably, he thought short stories were much more important.) The genre’s usually called dirty realism, but that doesn’t sound right to me, because these writers are both so eloquent, even when they’re writing about the grit of everyday life. Dirty realism sounds like it should describe the sort of boring squalid lives of the characters of Andrew McGahan’s  Praise.

 Both writers have a poetic way with everyday American life, with the small hopes and comforts of ordinary Americans. Carver’s characters were more working-class/trailer trash types, though, while Frank Barscombe, the narrator of The Sportswriter, is an educated journalist who mentions James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

A grown-up Holden Caulfield on antidepressants?

I hope not, but that’s sort of how Frank Barscombe sounds. As a great American character, he falls somewhere between the eloquence of Holden and the ordinariness of Rabbit Angstrom.

 Like Holden Caulfield, he handles a crisis by ringing up various ex-girlfriends / his ex-wife and catching a train into New York.

 Women in Frank’s Life

It is not till the end when he says it explicitly that I realised what he really wants more than anything – reconciliation with his ex-wife, known befittingly as ‘X’. It is an accomplishment that it made me so sad it didn’t happen.

It’s almost as sad watching things fall apart with his girlfriend Vicky. There’s never an argument, only her moving further and further away from him over the course of weekend. The reasons are opaque to me, and probably to Frank as well. They don’t have enough in common? The phony way he spoke to her father? The fact he got caught going through her handbag?

Hitting home: Frank as abandoned writer

What moved me most – or scared me, maybe – was the fact that at 26 (my age now) Frank abandoned his writing career after a successful first book. He got to the point where he couldn’t write; he would sit down to write, but do nothing. Here he is in the novel, thirteen years later, a successful sports journalist with such small ambitions, living under a spell of dreaminess – which seems remarkably similar to life on antidepressants.

Perhaps I should take comfort in the fact that Ford himself seems to have abandoned writing for a while – after two well reviewed early books – only to come back with the gigantic success of The Sportswriter.

8/10

Stephen King mistaken for vandal in Alice – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

16 Thursday Aug 2007

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Stephen King mistaken for vandal in Alice – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I’ve sometimes thought of secretly signing my book when I see it in a bookshop. I’ve never actually done it surreptiously, though.  I  asked the assistant at Floreat Forum Book Exchange if she wanted me to sign my book, and she said ‘no’. Stephen King has the right idea – just go ahead and do it.