Book review: The Life to Come, Michelle de Kretser (2017)

I had seen this novel in the windows of bookshops on King Street in Newtown and on Glebe Point Road in Glebe but only got around to buying it when it won the 2018 Miles Franklin Award. My first impression, that it had been one to ignore, turned out in the end to have been correct.

The book is crushingly prescriptive, in a suitably epigrammatic way, and is dedicated to dissecting the corpus of contemporary Sydney, simultaneously bringing to mind both Jane Austen and Patrick White, but it is completely without any redeeming poetry.

It borrows its logic from the opinion pages of the Australian press, with brutal efficiency categorising people it places in different locations in the city while sucking all the life out of them, so that they end up being mere ciphers with a life only on the page. The machinery of the author’s mind bleeds every drop of blood out of her creations and leaves them gasping, like beached fish, ready to die as soon as the book is closed, on the barren shore of the continent of her busy imagination.

In the first section, the character of George is a deeply flawed one. He appears to be in middle age (his father has just died) but he is embarking on study at a university. He might be gay, it’s not clear. He supplements his income by tutoring other students, and one of these is Pippa, who emotes a lot and has plenty of feelings about the world but cannot articulate what she thinks very accurately. George gave her a credit when she reached the end of the course he was teaching, when she had only in his estimation deserved a pass. The nature of the relationship between George and Pippa is also unclear, but he had moved into a house owned by someone he had an indeterminate relationship with, and she had stayed for a while in one of its empty rooms.

I didn’t much care about either George or Pippa by the end of this part of the novel, but I soldiered on to read the beginning of the second section, about Cassie, an Australian girl whose grandmother was a migrant from eastern Europe, and Ashoka, a Brit who grew up in Sri Lanka and whose mother was Scottish (his father was a Tamil). The two young people partner up in Sydney but I didn’t get very far into this section before giving up on the dull book.

I wrote about politicised fiction on 3 August on this blog in a review of a very bad book by a young Sydney man I have met on occasion who works in the culture industry in some capacity (I never bothered to find out). De Kretser’s book is an ideal exemplar of the same kind of utilitarian writing that has gained prominence, regrettably, in the years since the memory of totalitarianism and its desultory artistic accompaniment has faded out with time.

I was of the generation that grew up with ‘Hogan’s Heroes’. We also watched ‘McHale’s Navy’ on the TV in those days. But with the rise of postmodernism and superhero movies everything nowadays has a mute kind of artistic exchange value, so that books can easily be judged purely on whether or not they further a specific ideological program. Irony in this environment is virtually dead, as are nuance and subtlety. In their place you get a kind of writing that panders slavishly to the narcissistic self-regard of the cultural elites. The critical success of this novel proves that art at its core is today nothing but flattery.

Another book I reviewed recently, ‘Confessions of the Fox’, by the transgender author and academic Jordy Rosenberg, is of the same humourless ilk. You can hear the jackboots tramping on the cold cobblestones when you open books like these, as hordes of culture-vultures group around another pyre set up to burn some other unfortunate work of fiction that didn’t toe the line docilely enough.