Thanks to Favel Parrett for making me actually start weeping uncontrollably on public transport.

Another week, another upbraiding from a friend for only posting links to external content. Too bad!

Here’s my podcast interview with Meg Mundell, whose novel Black Glass envisions a future Melbourne where people without official documentation are forced to the fringes of society. At the same time, it’s a tale of two sisters’ search for each other in a city increasingly moulded by opportunistic shysters and government spin doctors.

Meg has been published widely in Australian newspapers, journals and magazines, including The Age, The Monthly, Meanjin, The Best Australian Stories 2010, The Sleepers Almanac, harvest and The Big Issue. Have a listen.

having selected the book by georges perec called the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise to read you are faced with a dilemma or if you like an unsolvable problem on the one hand you would like to read this book which is not perec’s most famous book but maybe his third or fourth most well known for which you have laid down the not insignificant sum of twenty-seven dollars and ninety-five cents and if you are honest with yourself you were expecting a book bigger than the eighty-four page volume you receive in the mail actually perhaps it is over one hundred pages with preliminary matter but that is really not to the point – and we must try our best to keep to the point – but on the other hand you are worried that if you are seen on the way to work with such a title other people on the tram may think you grasping and even worse someone who works with you may spot you and think you insensitive as well as grasping for it is well known that your industry is going down the toilet but it’s one or t’other you have after all spent your hard earned money on this book which is not perec’s most famous book but maybe his third or fourth most well known perhaps not more well known than a void written without the use of the letter e no not once yes really quite a feat anyhow you decide to read this book regardless of what the general public and more specifically your colleagues may think should they see you reading it in this economic climate and more specifically in the midst of this age of uncertainty in the industry in which you work after all you have spent your hard earned money on this book which is not perec’s most famous book but maybe his third or fourth well known and what you discover is that you are relieved that the book is only eighty-four pages rather than say one hundred and forty-four pages because there is only one full stop in the whole thing and it appears at the end that is to say that this book is made up of just one sentence though whether it is a sentence or not is questionable because the book doesn’t even start with a capital letter and there are so many digressions asides whatever you want to call them and clauses lots of them and many ambiguous points where what is missing could as easily be a semicolon as a full stop or a dash em or en whatever you prefer or whatever is house style and even the translator some professor at princeton university has called this book unreadable or what he really calls it is close to unreadable and you would not like this work at all if it was merely an exercise in unreadability but it is not the difficulty of getting through the work that is the point – and we must try our best to keep to the point – but the kind of translation the author attempted to begin with even before the translation by the princeton professor occurred or had been thought of the author accepted a challenge from the computing service of the humanities research centre in paris to write as a computer writes that is to say to adhere strictly to the possible plot given by a flowchart said flowchart is produced winningly in the front of the book so you know whether the protagonist ever gets a raise before you even start reading the text proper but if you have ever worked in an office you probably already know the answer nevertheless as previously alluded to the point – and we must try our best to keep to the point – is that you have never read a book before that has been written as a computer might have written it but of course a computer couldn’t write a book or could it think of those choose your own adventure books from your childhood surely if you plugged in some short scenes the machine would be able to work something out no matter how circuitous or repetitive and perhaps even shades of meaning would come through regardless of whether a machine is capable of creating allegiances or attachments as indeed it has in this book which you have in your hands having laid down the not insignificant sum of twenty-seven dollars and ninety-five cents though you did think that perhaps nothing could be more boring than a book written as if a computer had written it but of course a computer couldn’t write a book or could it really boredom is besides the point – and we must try our best to keep to the point – there is repetition and there is recursion here the book is after all following a pattern laid down by a flowchart what did you expect but as you know a flowchart builds in its let’s call it a reader a flowchart builds in a reader levels of expectation and tension and this book builds its story in washes like a watercolour almost it’s nothing like a mere circuit really finally you discover that the book you are holding in your hand not perec’s most famous book perhaps not more well known than a void was once produced for radio my god you think how did they do that how did they produce this work for radio being that you have just finished reading this book by georges perec called the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise having selected it to read regardless of flash judgments that may be made by co-travellers on public trams and the glances of your co-workers because although you know it must have taken you a few hours to read this book you feel like you have not taken a breath that whole time.

I was having a chat with some nice people the other day, and one of them said, ‘There is nothing so sad as a moribund blog’. I’m not quoting exactly, but that’s basically the gist of it. As he said this, my heart swelled beyond typical size and I thought bleakly of my poor little blog sitting here, all alone, by itself.

But I have been doing other things, if not blogging, and two of them can be read by you, if you so choose. I interviewed Sydney fashion label Song for the Mute for new fashion magazine Collection. Song for the Mute have just won the 2011 L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival Designer Award, against some stiff competition. Collection is pretty gorgeous – it’s a hardcover magazine printed on lovely stock, and every page is perforated at the spine, so you can tear out any page with impunity.

The other thing keeping me busy of late has, of course, been Kill Your Darlings. For the new issue, available for pre-order this week, I interviewed Geoff Dyer, famed writer of many stripes. Dyer is a wonderfully interesting writer and also a charming raconteur. If you’ve read any of his twelve books (the subjects range from photography to jazz to military history, and he’s also an acclaimed essayist and fiction writer), you’ll know what I mean.

Things I liked about Freedom:

Excellent dialogue. Often, the big difference between a good book and a great book is the utility and credibility of the dialogue. In a serviceable book, dialogue often reads as mere plot-mover. Franzen’s dialogue does not. For example, this fits-and-starts conversation between Patty Berglund and her good-doer lawyer father Ray after Ray finds out Patty has been raped by the son of the Berglunds’ ‘political friends’ the Posts:

‘Yes, but better to, uh. Life’s not always fair, Pattycakes. Mr. Post said he thought Ethan might be willing to apologize for not being more gentlemanly, but. Well. Would you like that?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
‘Coach Nagel says I should go to the police.’
‘Coach Nagel should stick to her dribbling,’ her dad said.
‘Softball,’ Patty said. ‘It’s softball season now.’

I would say that, aside from being really quite moving, this snippet contains a fair whack of character (habits, interests, concerns – spoken and unspoken), elucidates the relationship between the speakers and absent characters, tells us a bit about the social milieu, and has a great rhythm to it – as well as being an efficient bit of plot assistance.

Casual mastery of activity-specific vocabulary. A lot of my favourite writers do this well, but Franzen does it at a level that straddles the divide between immense comfort/familiarity, and ostentatiousness. Hence, Patty’s skill in basketball grows: ‘Augmenting her reliable perimeter shooting was a growing taste for driving to the basket.’ Nice.

Getting some kind of insight into what it must be like to hang out with Jonathan Franzen. So a lot of great fiction writers have strong powers of imagination, but a lot of great writers also have acute observation and recording skills. Plenty of the scenes and characters in this book are shored up with the kind of detail that can only come from obsessive observation. However. Observing people in a public place is one thing – it’s quite easy to do without bothering anyone, but Freedom deals closely with a family and domestic settings. Where does he get that detail from?

It’s hard not to start imagining what it must be like to be friends with him. Imagine being like ‘Oh, hey Jonathan, come bake some cookies at my house with me and my kids,’ and Franzen is thinking ‘What a great opportunity to observe domestic minutiae’. When he comes over and you are happily mixing dough, You are thinking ‘God I love baking with maple syrup’, and Franzen is surreptitiously taking notes: ‘X is labouring to mold cookie dough into geometrically perfect spheres, taking such pains that the butter liquefies and makes the dough glisten darkly. She makes eleven balls for every one of the child’s. When the cookies come out of the oven X never fails to ask the child’s permission to eat the one “truly outstanding” cookie.’

That is, assuming you know Jonathan Franzen, which I am assuming you don’t. Anyway, just some advice, put yourself on guard in case of friendship with Franzen.

Reading about middle class people and being allowed to laugh at them because they are highly caricatured, even though analogues for most of the behaviour in this book would probably be easily found among my acquaintance. I think that one speaks for itself. The combination of detail and absurdity made me think irresistibly of actor/screenwriter Chris Lilley, whose faux documentaries hold up funhouse mirrors to many faces of Australian society. Hue and outcry! Well, wipe down your vanity.

Deep, wide, sprawling and comprehensive portrait of complex people. I honestly don’t remember the last time I read a large novel featuring characters of such detail and depth. Obviously, I need to read more widely and in more volume, but with Freedom I went spelunking joyfully into the histories and externals and laterals of this family. A lot of people have said that they found these characters unsavoury or unsympathetic, which I find difficult to believe as a person impatient with my own seemingly endless fallibility.

A reminder me that I can love novels. A consequence not to be underestimated.

Things I didn’t like about Freedom:

SPOILER FOLLOWS, SERIOUSLY, THIS IS A WARNING THAT BELOW I DISCUSS THE END OF THE NOVEL THOUGH IN NO GREAT DETAIL

Structural maliciousness. The best way I can think to put this particular criticism is taken from the book itself. A description of Joey Berglund’s perception of the ‘higher-order bad luck’ that seems to be haunting him goes as follows: ‘The culprit was something deeper, something not political, something structurally malicious, like the bump in a sidewalk that trips you and lands you on your face when you’re out innocently walking.’

I like the term ‘structurally malicious’, actually, its corporate poetry echoing the young Republican’s disregard for personal responsibility. But it is an apt descriptor for the much criticised death that occurs about two-thirds through the book, and what follows. I’ve heard other people describe their reaction to this as ‘Franzen really hates his characters’, but my response was more to decide that Franzen privileges structure and neatness above all else. The death was so out of left field that you could practically hear the machinery grinding against the strain of being taken in such an unnatural direction. And how nuclear and paradigmatic an ending! A friend of mine describes the book’s denouement as ‘cursory’ – I thought of it as the gift-wrapper’s final tamping down of the ribbon bow: here you go, a novel.

But the most confounding part is that to some extent I liked the ending and thought it suited, with its inevitable sadder-wiser ending and cheeringly redemptive flourishes, and it challenged what I thought I wanted from a novel. I like clear moral paths and consequences in young adult books (there’s a proclivity I don’t much want to explore without the aid of a mental health professional), but in literary fiction I like something a bit fuzzier (or something), don’t I? Why did I respond with such relief to such a surpriseless conclusion? I have no good answer yet, partly stemming from the fact that I am not sure how else I would have wanted the book to end.

I think I should rename this blog – 12 BOOKS. One book a month. That seems to be the going rate right now. Not exactly a bargain. Sorry guys!

I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned for the Kill Your Darlings Culture Club podcast. I was joined by Lorelei Vashti, who writes a weekly column in The Age‘s Green Guide (which used to be my bible in the days of Seaquest DSV) and Anna Krien, author of Into the Woods (one of my favourite books this year). I quite like podcasts, and I hope you like this one. Good company for any drives to the beach you might be taking this Christmas, any holiday baking times, leisurely walks in the park, and also good as a precursor to a nap.

This is the third Fitzgerald book I’ve read, which hardly makes me an expert – I think there are five novels, eight short story collections, some essays, some letters…a veritable font of words. I certainly think that anyone with an interest in Fitzgerald would enjoy reading this – it’s so uneven as to be intimate, and many of his famous themes get a wringing out here. As expected, Fitzgerald writes beautifully about his lovers and society, but there are a couple of surprises here, particularly in form.

Not sure if I will get in another post before Christmas. If not, happy holidays! And if you’re still present hunting, Kill Your Darlings has a nifty $50 subscription, which comes with a free book (your pick of a rather good bunch: Scribe’s New Australian Stories 2, Black Inc.’s Best Australian Essays or Andrew Mueller’s Rock and Hard Places).

Just a little peep from me: a review of Kirsty Murray’s India Dark on Radio National’s The Book Show.

Also, something a bit novel. If you’d like to read a book with me, and hear me discuss it with some special guests (very special guests!), get cracking on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. I’ll be reading it for the Kill Your Darlings Culture Club podcast. Believe me, you want to read this book. It was Fitzgerald’s sophomore book, and it actually features a scene in which one of the characters refers to his first, extremely successful, novel, This Side of Paradise. It’s just like staring into a tortured soul. Seriously. The podcast airs on Tuesday December 14. Get thee ready!