Dutch is an awkward language. It sounds humorous to me even now, except when someone uses it in anger. When my stepfather cursed, I imagined dirt in his lungs, old black farming earth from the north of Holland, clotted with blood and bone. God verdomme.

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On the back cover of Michael Sala’s The Last Thread, the publisher’s blurb hails the book as “[r]eminiscent of the great autobiographical novels of JM Coetzee and Michael Ondaatje.” For a publisher to associate those names with a debut work is an audacious move, an attempt to make the book appealing to a very particular readership even at the risk of raising readers’ expectations to heights the book can’t reach. Thankfully, there’s more substance to this association than mere marketing gimmickry. Like Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life and Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Sala’s autobiographical novel depicts the tensions of a troubled youth in prose that oscillates between the lyrical and the limpid. Like those novels, too, The Last Thread strikes a balance between the personalisation and depersonalisation of a life story, concluding with an adult’s first-person reminiscence on his boyhood years after he has offered a third-person depiction of his younger self. But are those similarities enough to make The Last Thread worth reading? If troubled youths are a dime a dozen in the age of the misery memoir, and if Coetzee and Ondaatje have breathed new life into a tired genre with various artistic flourishes, is it enough for Sala to follow his masters’ footsteps through such well-trodden territory or does he break away from them to blaze a trail of his own?

Michael Sala was born in Holland in 1975 but immigrated to Australia in the 1980s. The first part of The Last Thread follows a young boy, Michaelis, on a broadly similar but less straightforward journey. Born in Bergen Op Zoom to a Greek father and a Dutch mother who divorced when he was an infant, Michaelis moves to Australia with his brother, his mother, and his abusive stepfather Dirk. After his mother experiences difficulties adjusting to Australian life, the family makes a return to Holland but then, when a change of heart leaves his mother longing to see Australia again, the family embarks on a third migration back to the coastal city of Newcastle. Intertwined with the turmoil of repeated and prolonged migration are a succession of other disruptions to Michaelis’ social and emotional stability. His ongoing fear of the tempestuous Dirk and his gravitation towards his distant father in Holland. The birth of a half-brother whose arrival signals Dirk’s permanent presence in the life of the family. The deterioration of the relationship between his mother and his stepfather, and then the discovery of the secret that has shamed his Dutch family for the better part of forty years.

I wasn’t captured by Sala’s story, although I’m not sure that the story is supposed to be so captivating. The dramatic tension has been sapped from every source that might generate drama. Dirk’s abuses are acknowledged, summarised, but rarely described in detail. Michaelis’ father in Holland hovers around the margins of the novel without doing anything particularly interesting. Even the vaunted family secret turns out to be less a source of shock, outrage, and familial conflict than a half-hearted revelation coloured by ignobility. The storyteller is too guarded, too detached, to mine all the depths of storytelling.

Where The Last Thread works best is in its exploitation of the interstice between the story told and the telling of it. Consider what happens after the events of The Last Thread have ended but before they can be distilled into words and transformed into literature. Sala’s decision to engage in autobiographical fiction suggests a belief that the act of writing allows the author to retrospectively edit, reshape, explain, and manage the experiences he could neither understand nor control when he first endured them. Yet, counterbalancing the belief implicit in its form, The Last Thread is guided by an undercurrent of ambivalence about whether the act of writing can indeed allow for the reclamation of control, and the novel comes to life when the narrator’s anxieties leave him paralysed and vacillating between subjecting his material to renewed control and wallowing in the linguistic mud.

For the most part, The Last Thread unfolds with what appears to be a steady stylistic assurance. I counted only one use of parentheses and no more than perhaps a dozen dashes: the point being that the novel consists of a succession of statements laid on the page largely without interjection, digression, equivocation, and qualification. The prose strides on, clear and direct, and yet, beneath the sense of assurance it conveys, the narrative seems crippled by the narrator’s ambivalence about the assuredness of his linguistic and recollective capabilities. With his sentences of almost relentless linearity, the narrator, Michael, erects a façade of certainty over a narrative that repeatedly returns to those moments in which he senses the fragility of both his words and his memories. The premises of the form of the autobiographical novel begin to falter as The Last Thread pushes forward with a life story told by a narrator with less than total confidence in his abilities to remember the life and to tell a story.

“It’s important to know what happened,” Michaelis’ mother tells him after he gains an awareness of the Holocaust. “If enough people know, if they really know about that sort of thing, maybe it won’t happen again.” But the causal connections of that last sentence crumble under the pressure of a moment’s thought. “When Mum is gone,” the adult Michael writes, “Michaelis lies in the darkness thinking about what she said. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand how knowing about something can stop it from happening again. It’s never been that way for him. Like when he crosses his legs under the table. He’s eight and he’s been doing it forever. When he crosses his legs, Dirk kicks him in the shin. Once the pain has died down, Michaelis just does the same thing again. … It is called forgetting.” But because the forgetting is remembered by the adult version of the child who forgets, it undermines the veracity of what else is remembered in this scene and throughout the novel.

At times, too, other characters in the novel, versions of real people remembered by Michael, explicitly challenge the accuracy of what he, as the narrator, remembers. “They ride [their bicycles] alongside a field locked in early morning fog,” he writes of his younger self, his brother, and his father, and he adds that “[t]he ears of rabbits rise and dip as the bike rattles past.” But then, without having spoken as his younger self, he remembers his father refuting the observation Michael has made as the narrator: “‘You always say they’re rabbits,’ Dad says, ‘but they’re not. They’re hares. Hares have longer ears.’” Remembered events are remembered in a way that repeatedly challenges the authority of the rememberer. “Oh God,” says Michaelis’ mother, remembering the moment, years earlier, when her husband’s Greek parents offered her the culinary delicacy of pickled sparrows. “[T]hose naked little sparrows,” she complains. “It made me sick to the stomach just looking at them!” Michaelis chimes in — “I remember that,” he says — but then his brother, Constantine, enters the conversation and shouts him down. “You don’t remember anything,” Constantine sneers.

Also working against the veracity of Michael’s remembrances are, firstly, the recurrent accusation that Michaelis does not pay close enough attention to the details of the world around him — an accusation levelled by his father, his brother, and even his teacher — and, more importantly, the difficulties of articulating those remembrances in an adopted language. “Words from home” reflexively slip off Michaelis’ tongue after his arrival in Australia, “but suddenly they are out of place.” He cannot communicate in a lucid way. “What’s Holland like?” a school counsellor asks him in an effort to help the boy open up. When Michaelis begins talking,

[w]ords from home tumble into his sentences. He talks about Dad and football in the park. He tells the [counsellor] about the endless rain — het regen — about his ten uncles and aunts, one for each finger, though he never saw most of them, and about snowy-haired Moessie who lives with a white dog Baasje on the top floor of an apartment block called the Bunthof. Underneath the apartment block stretches a dimly lit tunnel with lots of doors. Each door leads to a dry, stale smelling room like a prison cell, except people put bikes and old stuff they don’t need down there. … Michaelis runs out of words and has to draw pictures.

Obviously, the adult Michael does not resort to drawing pictures in order to articulate his remembrances. But he does assemble his sentences in a way that suggests an uncertainty about the capacity of his English words to accurately refer to aspects of his childhood world. Michaelis arrives in “a place called Sydney,” for instance, and then he moves to “a place called Newcastle” where he plays video games on “a machine called an Atari.” The English language “is so clean in his head yet comes out so muddy from his mouth,” and Michael’s efforts to ensure that it does not now come out muddy on the page result in the overdetermination of even those simple referents. As the fallibility of his memory places the narrator’s vision of his own childhood world forever on the brink of collapse, the words with which he reconstructs that world are burdened with the task of stabilising it where it risks faltering. Michael’s words, and especially his rare redundancies and circumlocutions, not only work to convey his remembrances but also suggest an attempt to forestall their dissolution.

Michaelis’ interactions with his beloved mother construe this later act of writing as an enterprise undertaken in her linguistic shadow. Her entire life revolves around the palpable realisation of a single word that occupies her mind and is forever on her tongue. The word is gezellig.”

This is Mum’s word. ‘Nou ja, dit is gezellig,’ she says as she shrugs off her coat full of winter rain and puts on a light. Gezellig. Indoors you hear it, around talk and tea and coffee and pastries with cinnamon and clove and nutmeg, around Mum’s music. You hear it between people, and you cannot touch it because it is a feeling a place has when it is filled with the right kind of things, when it is safe, when Dirk is away.

All the actions of Michaelis’ mother, the intermittent readjustments of her circumstances, are aimed ultimately at transforming her life into this single word. The actions of her adult son, the writing of his life in the form of a novel, testify to his inability to distill his own life into just one word — even though, in a sense, he should be able to do so. Because he is now an adult, because his boyhood is behind him, because Dirk is away, his life should be gezellig. But insofar as that word cannot encapsulate his life, insofar as he makes recourse to tens of thousands of words, his boyhood is not behind him and Dirk, although absent, has not gone away.

For Michael to have grasped gezelligheid would have been for him to pre-emptively negate the need to sit down and write The Last Thread. The writing of the novel, then, is a recollective purging of Dirk, a reaching towards catharsis, whose ideal ending is the realisation of gezelligheid. Yet, perhaps inevitably, gezelligheid continues to elude Michael by the end of the novel. The Last Thread comes to an end without actually ending by veering into a circularity, by denying the author gezelligheid and directing him towards an abundance of words, by bringing Michael to a point at which the end of his childhood with Dirk allows him to remember and begin writing about his childhood with Dirk. “He doesn’t understand how knowing about something can stop it from happening again,” and in fact, in his own case, it is his knowledge of his childhood with Dirk that allows that childhood to be continually happening in the narrator’s memory. As above, while the story of that childhood is stirring and distressing, the thrust of The Last Thread lies less in the story told than in the telling of it, in the manner of that telling and in its failure to elaborate into something with reference beyond itself. If it’s not quite of the calibre of Coetzee and Ondaatje, it is recognisably — and audaciously — of the same blood.

It is true that you get accustomed to money very quickly, that the miraculousness of the idea of it wears away and it becomes unremarkable. … Around the neighborhood it became clear that I had money. I bought whole packs of Wings cigarettes and not only smoked them continually but was generous with them. In the pawnshop on Third Avenue where I went for the glasses I found a reversible satin team jacket, black on one side, and then you could turn everything inside out and presto it was a white jacket, and I bought that and strutted in the evenings in it. … So I was wearing that and with my cigarettes and new sneakers and I suppose my attitude, which I might not be able to discern in myself but which must have been quite clear to others, I represented another kind of arithmetic to everyone on my street, not just the kids but the grown-ups too, and it was peculiar because I wanted everyone to know what they figured out easily enough, that it was just not given to a punk to find easy money except one way, but at the same time I didn’t want them to know, I didn’t want to be changed from what I was, which was a boy alive in the suspension of judgment of childhood, that I was the wild kid of a well-known crazy woman, but there was something in me that might earn out, that might grow into the lineaments of honor, so that a discerning teacher or some other act of God, might turn up the voltage of this one brain to a power of future life that everyone in the Bronx could be proud of. I mean that to the more discerning adult, the man I didn’t know and didn’t know ever noticed me who might live in my building or see me in the candy store, or in the schoolyard, I would be one of the possibilities of redemption, that there was some wit in the way I moved, some lovely intelligence in an unconscious gesture of the game, that would give him this objective sense of hope for a moment, quite unattached to any loyalty of his own, that there was always a chance, that as bad as things were, America was a big juggling act and that we could all be kept up in the air somehow, and go around not from hand to hand, but from light to dark, from night to day, in the universe of God after all.

E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate

Now, in his most recent post, Parks sets out to “tackle one of the literary set’s favorite orthodoxies head on.” The orthodoxy in question is the notion that “the world ‘needs stories.’” To illustrate just how orthodox this notion has become among the members of ‘the literary set,’ Parks quotes Jonathan Franzen as one of its major proponents. “There is an enormous need,” Franzen has declared, “for long, elaborate, complex stories, such as can only be written by an author concentrating alone, free from the deafening chatter of Twitter.” After unpacking Franzen’s self-serving motivations for expressing such a view, Parks goes on to catalogue several variants of the same position and then to relate an anecdote which illustrates the institutionalisation of that position:

“This is an excellent novel,” I remember a fellow judge for a literary prize repeatedly telling the rest of the jury every time he encouraged us to vote for a book, “because it offers complex moral situations that help us get a sense of how to live and behave.” The argument here is that the world has become immensely complicated and the complex stories of our novels help us to see our way through it, to shape a trajectory for ourselves in the increasingly fragmented and ill-defined social world we move in.

Surprisingly, and disappointingly, Parks concedes that “[t]here’s something to be said for this idea.” Is that really the case? What sort of person would seriously take their moral and social cues from a novel? What sort of person would turn to a work of imaginative literature in order to adjust their behaviour in the real world? Of course, the idea that we should do so is only a slight variation on the idea that we should read literature for this purpose — but even the proponents of the latter idea, with Matthew Arnold and Harold Bloom being exemplars, are not so myopic as to contend that that purpose can be better served by novels than by any other type of literature. Parks, however, proceeds to defend the exceptionalism of the novel.

“[T]he political, sports, and crime pages of the newspapers are full of fascinating stories,” he writes, “many of them extremely challenging and complex. [But w]hat the novel offers… is a tale mediated by the individual writer who (alone, away from Facebook and Twitter) works hard to shape it and deliver it in a way that he or she feels is especially attractive, compelling, and right.” As well, he suggests that the best sort of “tale mediated by the individual writer” — and the sort best suited to the artform of the novel — is itself a tale of the intensification of individualism, a tale that allows its readers to “believe more and more strongly in this sovereign self whose essential identity remains unchanged by all vicissitudes. Telling the stories of various characters in relation to each other, how something started, how it developed, how it ended, novels are intimately involved with the way we make up ourselves. They reinforce a process we are engaged in every moment of the day, self creation.”

So, if the world does indeed ‘need stories,’ the need arises within a world of individualists who feel that the world itself threatens their individualism. And, if novels are at all able to address this need, they do so insofar as each novel is itself the product of an individual consciousness and is designed to tell a complex story which depicts the triumph of individualist sentiments.

That strikes me as a pretty bleak view of what novels should do and why we should read them. Perhaps in an effort to ramp up the provocative nature of his post, Parks issues the last-ditch contention that, after all, “we” don’t actually need “this intensification of self that novels provide.” “I love an engaging novel,” he adds, “I love a complex novel; but I am quite sure I don’t need it.” At this point, however, what is already expressed can’t be diluted. What Parks advances is a view of the novel that impoverishes the artform in two ways. First it impoverishes the artform by locating the value of the novel in its capacity for expressing and celebrating individualism, which entails severely restricting one’s view of the novel’s other capabilities. Then it impoverishes the artform by construing the reading of novels as an impulsive act carried out in the absence of a ‘need’ to read them and in denial of that absence, rather than construing it as an act carried out in awareness of that absence and therefore in deliberate defiance of it.

No, we don’t need to read novels. With the hierarchy of human needs dominated by the imperatives for material wellbeing and socialisation, the reading of novels is relegated to the outermost ranks. But the needlessness of reading novels is the essence of reading them. Maybe that’s just a more elaborate way of arguing the value of art for art’s sake, but I struggle to say any other way of arguing it. No doubt it’s possible to draw moral and social lessons from novels, no doubt those things are elements of many novels, but whatever such lessons a novel may provide do not amount to reasons to read it. To read a novel in search of moral and social cues is essentially to strip away its aesthetic particularities and boil it down to nothing more than the dramatisation of a dilemma. It is to discard the novel’s stylistic details and structural complexities and to elide so much of what makes it a novel that it might as well not be one at all. It is also to adopt a reactionary stance towards the marginalisation of the novel in a culture dominated by economic rationalism, to tacitly concede the minimal economic value of reading novels while casting about for some other sort of value that lies beyond the realm of economics and that is difficult to tarnish with accusations of self-service. But why is it not enough for novels to do what only novels can do? Why should there be something insufficient about reading novels for the particular type of experience that novels in general provide, and for the variations on that type of experience provided by each individual novel?

Forty-five years later, what may seem most revolutionary about Barthes’s essay ['The Death of the Author'] is what it takes for granted: that there are readers at all for literary fiction, let alone that there’s a “someone” interested in doing the hard work of holding all these traces together inside her head. In an era where everyone has a novel waiting to come out, authors are legion; it’s the reader who seems, well, dead. If anything threatens to kill the author today, it’s not that the reader might interpret her work in subversive ways — if only we were so lucky! — but that the reader might not care enough to try in the first place. What to do in this situation has been the subject of what we might as well call a debate between Jonathan Franzen and Ben Marcus, waged for about a decade on the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper’s. It’s also the backdrop against which we must understand the successes and occasional fumbles of Marcus’s disturbing and remarkable new novel, The Flame Alphabet.

For, at first blush, The Flame Alphabet seems as if it’s perfectly pleased with the death of the reader, as if it hopes for nothing more than to murder those very few remaining who bother to buy books at all, throttling them with a suffusion of pus-covered words and sentences. [It] is a pointedly disgusting book that will tickle your gag reflex with its bony, sore-covered finger. Reading Marcus’s fetid prose will clog your nostrils, enflame your throat, jam your every orifice with a thick and soupy, cold and gloppy, not to mention barbed and burning, meal of unpalatable, oddly shaped sentences.

That’s how Lee Konstantinou begins his fantastic review of The Flame Alphabet in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It was the choice of the word “meal,” and the ambiguous referent, that caught my attention. It was the deft analysis of the novel in the context of Marcus’ disagreements with Franzen that sucked me in. And it was the self-reflexivity of the opening section’s last paragraph that kept me hooked. “And yet,” Konstantinou writes there, “if I properly understand the aims of The Flame Alphabet, [the above] description should not count as an insult, but as deep praise,” essentially reading the review itself in the context of Marcus’ use of language without allowing it to overshadow the work under consideration. Book reviewing: this is how it’s done when it’s done at its best. And in less than 3,000 words at that.

Despite the stylistic verve of Doctorow’s famously snappy, streetwise prose, the stories are half-baked and half-hearted, rarely developing any complexity from the dramatic tension of their opening pages. If All the Time in the World is at all worth reading, then, it’s worth reading less for the virtues of the stories it contains than for its capacity to underscore exactly what makes Doctorow’s novels so spectacular. The short story form, defined by brevity and compression, is inimical to Doctorow’s sprawling imagination and freewheeling sensibilities. In his novels, he takes a high-concept premise and teases out its implications in painstaking detail over hundreds of pages, relishing the slow burn and the piecemeal disclosure of something insidious. In his stories, though, his high-concept premises are shoehorned into a literary form that doesn’t allow the same indulgence in digression and detail. The reach of their narrative premises exceeds the grasp of their literary form, and so they burn out in an instant, a flash in the pan, left unremarkable because they are implausible, and implausible because they are underdeveloped.

My review of E.L. Doctorow’s All the Time in the World is online at The Critical Flame.

All works of art are founded on a certain distance from the lived reality which is represented. This ‘distance’ is, by definition, inhuman or impersonal to a certain degree; for in order to appear to us as art, the work must restrict sentimental intervention and emotional participation, which are functions of ‘closeness.’ It is the degree and manipulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute the style of the work. In the final analysis, ‘style’ is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representations. … Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will. And as the human will is capable of an indefinite number of stances, there are an indefinite number of possible styles for works of art. … To the extent that a work seems right, just, unimaginable otherwise (without loss or damage), what we are responding to is a quality of its style. The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style.

That’s Susan Sontag — who I could go on quoting ad infinitum — brought in here to speak to the takeaway paragraph in a great discussion between David Winters and Anthony Brown over at 3:AM Magazine. The subject is modernism, “then and now”:

David Winters: You mention Bernhard in the same breath as Lydia Davis, which I think is fruitful. What I mean here is that I read Bernhard for the same reasons I read some recent American writers. I want to say that I read for the style, but I don’t mean ‘style’ in the ‘superficial’ sense you astutely describe [in discussing "Peter Gay's 'modernism as style' position"]. In the work of the writers I most admire, a style is always also a stance. That is, for them, a way of arranging words on the page is also a way of reaching a view of the world.

When I saw the green sneaking back into spaces from which it had been expunged, a part of me wanted to cheer it on and even to see it triumph. I enjoyed the thought of watching it slowly reclaim a city whose urgent cosmopolitanism, undisturbed by the wilderness, struck me then and strikes me now as complacent and somehow presumptuous. More than any other city I’ve ever known, Melbourne is exceedingly pampered — the unruliness of the natural world has been arrested and landscaped into submission — and yet in my bones I feel a resistance to such a pampered aesthetic and a reflexive attraction to almost anything that disrupts it. Only recently, however, did I begin to see the source of what I feel towards the city when the Christmas and New Year period gave me some time to read two long meditations on life in Australia’s capital cities.

In late 2009, UNSW’s NewSouth imprint kicked off a series of book-length exercises in psychogeography with Peter Timms’ In Search of Hobart. Hobart developed from a simple concept. Timms would wander around his adoptive hometown and remark on its history and its people to sketch out, in words, a portrait of its character. He would note its distinguishing features — its layout, its landmarks — and he’d tell the stories behind them. The result was a disquieting and often melancholy work in which figures from the city’s past rose up to haunt and exert an influence over its present-day population. The book invited readers to embark on a prosaic meander through the city in the company of a guide, erudite yet unassuming, who felt no obligation to depersonalise his tour and no pressure to cast the city in only the best possible light. In early 2010, NewSouth followed Hobart with Matthew Condon’s Brisbane, and then, in late 2010 and early 2011, the NewSouth series soared to new heights with Delia Falconer’s Sydney and Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne.

Falconer and Cunningham have both penned books every bit as erudite and disquieting as Hobart. On the whole, I’m inclined to say I prefer Sydney to Melbourne — partly because I think Falconer is one of Australia’s very best contemporary writers; partly because Sydney is more or less where I grew up — although I’d also say that to read either one without reading the other is to impoverish the two of them. They overlap, they align, they interlock. They converse together to enrich one another. They are complementary works that each reflect and refract the insights of their counterpart; and, as such, I found that they jointly struck at the heart of what might’ve led me, a Sydneysider in Melbourne, to take those pictures of the urban green. Or, more specifically, I found that Cunningham identified what might’ve led me, in Melbourne, to notice the urban green in the first place while Falconer, as a fellow Sydneysider, gave voice to the instincts that impelled me to preserve it in photographs.

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Click the cover to listen to an interview with Delia Falconer on ABC Radio.

Falconer paints Sydney as almost literally an urban jungle, a metropolis that runs ragged at the edges and rugged underfoot. “Studded with remnant bush and national parks, crossed by rivers and gleaming ocean inlets, it is hard to pinpoint, exactly, where the city begins and ends,” she writes. “[S]andstone [i]s a kind of base note, an ever-present reminder of [Sydney's] Georgian beginnings and more ancient past… [and] water, which penetrates the city with bright fingers, filters constantly through its foundations, and weighs down the air.” “[T]he mysteriously porous nature of [the] sandstone,” she adds, “means [that], after heavy rain, even when the air is still steaming, the ground is quickly grainy and dry. It is possible, in a single walk, to smell rotting fig and leaf mould, and the tea-like scent of eucalyptus leaves cooking on the sandy earth.”

The rot of something or other, especially the rot of vibrant foliage whose season has drawn to an end, is a ubiquitous feature of Falconer’s Sydney. Jacaranda trees in full bloom “appear unreal, as if you have suddenly developed the ability to see ultraviolet,” until “their ferny leaves crowd through, and the flowers brown and rot upon the ground.” Moreover, “they [have been] planted foolishly, or perhaps sadistically, beside public swimming pools, to the peril of the bare-footed, since the fallen flowers are home to drunken bees.” No other city, Falconer suggests, “is so under the spell of natural beauty, but so addicted to the ugly as a kind of talisman against it. It would be hard to find another as vigorous and dreamy, as full of fecund life yet on the verge of decay.”

“In fact,” she continues, the city’s natural surroundings can be “so strong, and so moody, that it is often hard for the human side to get a look-in. When it does, it has to compete with all this natural life.” Sometimes it emerges victorious, of course, as in the burial of the Tank Stream, the freshwater flow that ran down into Sydney Cove from Hyde Park before it was cemented into a stormwater channel. “But the Tank Stream,” writes Falconer,

is only the best known of the thwarted waterways that continue to agitate across the city. The whole of metropolitan Sydney is built on the great bed of a prehistoric floodplain. Look at any piece of sandstone in situ, with its sloping ripple lines, and the high end of each line will point south, marking its ancient course toward the sea. The rock acts as a giant filter, so that after heavy rain the city’s surface may dry quickly, but its soft cliffs and stairways continue to weep; it is hard to overestimate the impression those walls at the back of The Rocks and around Walsh Bay made on me as a child, with their mossy extrusions, like running snot. Even now, these tiny natural waterfalls thrill me.

Most of the demarcations between the city’s postcodes also mark the courses of the ghost creeks that once rilled across the surface of its sandstone. Look at a map of our suburbs, and you are looking at a vanished topography of streams. These still long to be active, as owners of houses built in their vanquished beds soon find out when it rains, as the old watercourses rise to clog drains and well up through walls.

As Falconer describes it, the city of Sydney has been built upon land that doesn’t want to be built upon. The civilising processes of the city are frequently undermined, and sometimes thwarted, by the unruliness of its natural surroundings. Unlike Melbourne, Sydney rests on a site that does not readily yield to landscaping, and Falconer is quick to note that the comfort-controlled southern city is therefore more conducive to a calmer, more complacent lifestyle:

In Melbourne, that flat, planned city, you can construct a perfectly ordered existence for yourself. There are starched tablecloths in the cafes; transport is predictable; you can even park in town. More than likely, the same pubs you have been visiting for years are relatively untouched by renovation, the same crowd greyer and paunchier beneath their short-sleeved shirts and little hats. The weather may be miserable, but it is more often neutral. It doesn’t matter anyway, as many of the city’s entertainments — and it still has a vital centre — are reliably indoors. People stay, their friends stay, in the same places. Melburnians structure their lives around the real possibility of satisfaction. In fact, if any new restaurant or pub is mooted, it can cause distress.

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Click the cover to listen to an interview with Sophie Cunningham on ABC Radio.

That’s not an attempt to be glib or provocative, although it might read that way when excerpted. Falconer knows what she’s writing about — she lived in Melbourne for a decade before she returned to Sydney a decade ago — and her survey of Melbourne here aligns with the urban village charted by Sophie Cunningham. “With the exception of seven years spent in Sydney,” Cunningham writes, “I’ve lived in Melbourne my entire life. It feels like a small town to me, though in reality it no longer is. … [I]f my ashes were scattered in the Carlton Gardens you could mount an argument for a life lived as narrowly as that of any 18th-century English village girl. About 2 square kilometres would cover it.” She has been a regular at the Standard Hotel in Fitzroy, her local, since the 1980s. She spent the summers of 2006 and 2007 working at a bookstore on Fitzroy’s Brunswick Street, a street that Falconer singles out to contrast its “quiet hush” with the cacophony of Sydney, and she now lives just one street over from there. Aside from accepting a job that swept her up to Sydney for those seven years, Cunningham’s efforts to step outside her comfort zone involve not much more than attending Monash University instead of Melbourne University and briefly making a home on the south side of the Yarra River. “The only strange thing,” she says, “is that this isn’t, really, such an unusual Melbourne story.”

It’d be wrong to suggest that Cunningham’s Melbourne remains entirely untouched by unruly natural forces. On the contrary, her book opens with the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 and chronicles the twelve months between that disaster and the end of the decade-long drought in 2010. She begins with a beautiful but unsettling recollection of the suffering of the city in the summertime heat. “[O]n Saturday 7 February,” she writes, “the temperature rose to 47 degrees Celsius in our street. … That day, which came to be known as Black Saturday, capped off two weeks of above 30- and often above 40-degree temperatures. In the hot weeks of build-up, railway lines buckled, overloaded buses broke down. … Over in the Carlton Gardens, possums fell, dead, out of trees… [and b]irds dropped out of the sky.” With several outer suburbs of Melbourne reduced to soot and ash that day, Cunningham’s book finds the city shocked and terrorised by a devastating demonstration of just what nature, untamed, can do.

As the book unfolds, however, Cunningham unearths the history of a city that has been developed, over a century and a half, on the twin assumptions that nature exists to be tamed and conquered and that the right combination of persistence and know-how will easily get the job done. Writing of Albert Park Lake, for instance, she reveals that “this sometimes beautiful, strangely shallow lake is a remnant of the South Swamp, an enormous salt lagoon that formed a part of the delta where the Yarra met the sea. As a consequence it kept on flooding the entire area now known as South Melbourne and St Kilda until it was sealed up in the late 1880s and from 1890 filled with freshwater drained from the Yarra.” Then, visiting Federation Square in the city, she descends the staircase on the southern side and arrives on the banks of the Yarra itself. “It’s an erratic river,” she writes:

One day its flow [might be] slow and sluggish — it’s been as low as 17 million litres a day — but during times of flood up to 97,000 million litres has coursed through its beds… push[ing] out into tributaries and marshlands. This contraction and expansion is as regular as a long, slow heartbeat. It’s what made fertile the broad flat plains that Melbourne is built on. As Kristin Otto wrote in Yarra, ‘A time-lapsed, Bunjil-eyed view of the river over tens, hundreds, thousands of years would show a living thing expanding (flood) and contracting (drought), changing beds, looping cutoffs and billabongs running faster or slower, in different unpredictable patterns.’

Cunningham takes note of the “landscap[ed] area around the river bank, now known as Birrarung Marr,” and then she discusses the way the river has been treated by the expanding city as the tendrils of train lines and freeways have lashed out over the plains:

It is symptomatic of Melbourne’s attitude towards the Yarra that shifting a waterway that had been cutting its way through volcanic rock for over 300 million years was seen as more straightforward than diverting an as-yet-unbuilt freeway. Several powerful eruptions, the most recent 800,000 years ago, had failed to destroy the river — they’d simply forced it to embed its course all over again. Something of the stubbornness and recalcitrance of the river’s spirit is captured in a Wurundjeri version of its creation, in which its beds are formed by the heels of a young boy who is being dragged along the ground by an angry old man. After white settlement the river kept fighting, and there were notable floods in Melbourne in 1839, 1848, 1863, 1891, 1934, 1972, and 1989. Elizabeth Street, the lowest point of the CBD, is still particularly susceptible to flooding. In its early years water coursed through it at such speed that humans and horses were drowned. In 1972 flood waters rose to the heights of the awnings of buildings. Water always finds its level, it seems. This regular flooding was a direct result of the profound lack of understanding about how water moved through the land before it was developed.

Yet there was no weakening of the assumption that nature exists to be tamed and conquered, and, even though Melbourne faced many of the same flooding problems that Delia Falconer finds in Sydney, Melbourne’s engineers solved those problems with decidedly more success:

If you open a Melway street directory from the late sixties it’s the creek lines that are overlaid with broken lines, signifying the possibility of development, and nowadays almost all Melbourne’s freeways trace the path of a creek run underground. … Why is it that the rivers were rerouted and the creeks sacrificed to make way for these freeways? According to Merri Creek activist Ann McGregor, they were ‘the line of least resistance.’ There was no need to buy up or knock down houses to allow the freeway to go through. It also solved the problem of Melbourne’s pesky waterways and their tendency to flood. In 1974, serious flooding damaged swathes of residential areas and water management was becoming a political issue. Rather than discourage people from living in flood-prone areas — often some of the most beautiful spots — it was easier to concrete up the creeks. That way [the] engineers could estimate what volumes of water a creek could accommodate, and they could have some semblance of control over the water’s movement.

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So: two cities were founded on two different terrains in two different climates, and they have since ameliorated the intemperance of their natural surroundings with different degrees of success. This scenario breeds a temptation to look at each city’s relationship with its wilderness beyond and, from that, to extrapolate the characteristics of its inhabitants and even the character of each city itself. Falconer and Cunningham both submit to that temptation in their own ways, although Falconer’s submission is easily the more overt and the more spectacular.

As above, Falconer draws a line between the “perfectly ordered existence” of many Melburnians and the “flat, planned” character of the city. Because the land has been forced to accommodate human activity, because it has been shaped to leave human affairs undisturbed, Melbourne radiates a sense that the wilderness occupies a place apart from, and subordinate to, the civilisation of the city. Nature is kept at a safe remove from urban life, and, where it exists in the urban environment, it exists largely in an ethos of managerial orderliness. At one point, Cunningham implicitly reinforces this view of her city. Her closest encounter with the wilderness occurs only when Bruce McGregor, husband of the Merri Creek activist Ann McGregor, brings the urban wildlife to her notice. “In the Melbourne area,” says McGregor,

we get migratory birds that are involved with four migration patterns, maybe five. One of the patterns is northern Australia to southern Australia — these are birds like reed warblers. … [P]eople might go to the Merri Creek and think, oh, there’s nothing here, but the reed warblers nest there in the summer half year.  Then we get birds that migrate from Tasmania… [and] birds that are altitudinal migrants… [and] birds that are erratic in their movements depending on the food. … Cockatoos and honeyeaters. As there’s been a drought in country Victoria for years they’ve tended to hang around southern Victoria and Melbourne because there’s food, and we’ve been planting trees for thirty years now so they have somewhere to forage.

“When Bruce spoke like that,” Cunningham writes, “I saw that the air above the city is full of purposeful movement. The places we think of as empty are not.” Yet the urban wildlife remains distant, up there more than down here, and even then its presence, its return from a diaspora, is partly the result of that ethos of managerial orderliness. The birds of the Merri Creek have a place to forage again because the McGregors have spent decades recreating it for them.

Melbourne, in short, is notably devoid of what Falconer calls the “feral.” In my reading of Sydney, I counted ten uses of the word “feral” to describe aspects of life in her city. Often the word applies to the encroachment of the wilderness on the urban environment — banana trees are “feral,” jacaranda trees possess a “feral vigour,” lantana is “a noxious feral pest,” “bats and possums leave feral scent markings on the trees,” and the city’s outskirts are home to “feral cats, dogs and goats” — although, over time, it colours Falconer’s evident affection for the people around her. Sydney is populated, on the one hand, by “wowsers” with “sober habits,” and, on the other hand, by “the feral masses.” Its intellectual climate is spearheaded by “the most feral, interesting thinkers,” and the city itself, as Falconer sees it, is characterised by a “perverse love of the mad and feral” and “an attachment to the feral, undisciplined and harsh.”

In Sydney, there’s no way to efface or escape from the feral. Some people, like the wowsers, despise it and try desperately to guard themselves against it or to bludgeon it into conformity with their straightlaced dispositions. Falconer gives due coverage to their resentment of the uncouth and their hostility towards difference. Other people, however, do what they can to come to terms with the feral and move on from there. They acknowledge its grotesquerie and its challenge to human superiority, and then they develop a communal character, a way of being together in the world, founded on that acknowledgement:

Sydney is allergic to earnestness, and this has many causes. Perhaps because of the higgledy-piggledy organisation of the early city that made social divisions hard to enforce, the peanut gallery has always been installed closer to the centre of our public life than in any other Australian city. It is there in the delight the 1803 Sydney Gazette took in relating undignified accidents, and all the way through to the pre-tabloid days of the Sydney Morning Herald, whose back page used to run an annual survey on which streets were the most polluted by dog shit (I lived on two of the top three: Arundel Street, in Forest Lodge and Abercrombie Street, in Chippendale). Perhaps because the city started life in the less hide-bound eighteenth century it has had an abiding affection for the carnivalesque over the pious. … The piecemeal, busy nature of our spaces also lends itself to loudness; no quiet hush on the footpaths here, like cloudy Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

The carnivalesque trumps the pious, yes, and Falconer’s sly, self-deprecating glee at having lived on two of Sydney’s top three shit-stained streets — and at noticing, earlier, that the “mossy extrusions” on Sydney’s sandstone resemble “running snot” — offers a demonstration of the very attitude she discusses. Then she hits her stride, and she hits the nail on the head:

It is Sydney’s wild mix of the stunning and unplanned, of glitz and rot… that gives it its very distinct cultural and intellectual life. In Sydney we are shaped spiritually by damp abrasion and the democracy of grit. The sublime and ridiculous are never far apart. Our pleasures, though at their best beyond compare, are rarely unalloyed with disappointment. There is a high chance at a sunny outdoor cafe that a bogong moth will dive bomb your perfect cappuccino; or, as happened to me quite recently, it will drown in the cheese on your focaccia, and you will be relieved, at least, as you stop yourself from taking a bite just in time, that the black antennae are not pubic hair. A simple downpour will bring the roads to a standstill, or you will find yourself jammed on the F3 with everyone else heading north for Christmas, even while the dry bush to either side of you thrums with joyful heat, and the bays below turn into tender mirrors. As a result, Sydney may be impatient, pushy, volatile, aggressive — but it is rarely righteous, because it is never surprised. … Imperfection and making do are part of our aesthetic.

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I read those words with a gut-level thrill that still hasn’t faded away. I’ve never seen anyone so clearly express what it feels like to be in that city and to carry a part of it inside you wherever else you might go. It’s the riff on the pubic hair that I love the most. For a Sydneysider, the disgust at finding a moth in your sandwich really would be followed by a vivid consideration of worse, more carnivalesque scenarios. That’s something I tried to express on this blog last year, after I attended a panel discussion on the work of Patrick White at the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing, and Ideas. White’s worldview, I wrote, “manifests in a tension, throughout all of [his] novels, between grotesque carnality and humanistic charity.” What I meant was that his characters repeatedly seek some sort of emotional release or fulfilment, or even a spiritual transcendence, by embracing and revelling in physical and moral muck. What I meant was what Falconer puts succinctly: “[t]he sublime and the ridiculous are never far apart.” You can glimpse that worldview, too, in the fragment from Sydney I posted last month.

What I didn’t say when I wrote about White — or what I said in an early draft of that post before I deleted the remark — was that the aspect of his work that appeals to me the most is his ability to bring life to a worldview essentially identical to my own. I like inhabiting an environment that refuses to yield to human demands and that undermines the human striving for order and comfort. I like inhabiting an environment that confronts me with continual reminders of my own smallness and animality, and the smallness and animality of all human beings. From time to time, in conversation, I also like offering those same reminders to other people who too easily avoid them — a characteristic vice, I guess, that tends to raise eyebrows amongst friends in Melbourne but rarely elicits more than a shrug of the shoulders in Sydney.

The differing structures of Melbourne and Sydney bear out the different worldviews these cities engender. Cunningham covers the twelve months between Black Saturday and the end of the drought by splitting her book into five sections: “Summer,” “Autumn,” “Winter,” “Spring,” and “Summer” again. Unruly natural forces attack the civilised city, but the book insists on the renewed strength of civilisation as the seasonal structure corrals uncontrollable events into a foreordained, linear, orderly sequence which concludes with the ebbing away of the conditions that caused the bushfires. Falconer, on the other hand, splits her book into five sections that veer, haphazardly, from the evanescent to the tactile — “Ghosting,” “Dreaming,” “Living,” “Sweating,” “Showing Off” — and allow her to explore Sydney through a range of vignettes whose structure is too associative to be foreordained, too digressive to obtain linearity, too chaotic to satisfy any yearning for orderliness.

Being in the world, as Falconer’s five sections suggest, is an experience both visceral and transient. Melbourne will often allow you to forget that, but Sydney never does. Perhaps that’s why there persists an attraction to decay and detritus, to fallibility and failure, among some of us who come from up north. To outsiders, of course, that attraction can seem abrasive or callous, but really, beneath the surface, it’s the wellspring for an idiosyncratic regional humanism. Keep an eye out often enough for decay, fallibility, and all the rest, and you’ll find it impossible to avoid the realisation that people everywhere are inescapably united by our being held hostage to unruly bodies in an unruly world. Patrick White put it better than I can. ”Some critics complain that my characters are always farting,” he once wrote. “Well, we [all] do, don’t we? Fart. [Even] nuns fart according to tradition and pâtisserie. I have actually heard one.”

Those words touch the bedrock of what you learn from living in Sydney: that there’s a certain satisfaction to be drawn from seeing the pretenses of propriety, decorum, and civilisation undermined and gnawed away at the edges by the very things — the natural things — that have been vanquished so that the pretense might stand. In a small way, I was reminded of that in Melbourne when I stumbled upon the urban green. Those sights struck a resonance with something I felt deep inside, something perhaps invested in me by my years in a place in which it cannot be ignored, and that’s why I felt that impulse to preserve what I saw in photographs. Cunningham helped me to better understand that through an exploration of Melbourne that illuminates what I think are its most coarse characteristics, and Falconer helped me to better appreciate it by articulating it more clearly than anyone else has ever done.

Lieutenant William Dawes is one of [Sydney's] first, and most likeable, dreamers. … Street grids and measurements were Dawes’s day job, the stars and Eora language his night-work. Almost as soon as he landed, he began to build an observatory near where the southern stanchions of the Harbour Bridge now stand. … Dawes spent as much time as possible camped out, making his observations, to the point that colonist Elizabeth Macarthur described him famously and, one think, fondly as, ‘so much engaged with the stars that to mortal eyes he is not always visible.’ In this rare verbal portrait, Dawes appears as a dreamy, gentle man. … Certainly Dawes’s curiosity, or a quality of kindly stillness, must have allowed him to form a relationship of trust, the exact nature of which remains uncertain, with the teenage Patyegarang. In fact, a large number of Eora companions appear to have shared the bluff with Dawes; he names sixteen in his notebooks.

These ‘language notebooks,’ which are now regarded as among the most precious of our colonial records, remained virtually unknown until they were discovered at the University of London in 1972. The softness of night can be felt everywhere inside them. Like the stars, the Eora words Dawes recorded are fragments now of something grander, as suggestive and ungraspable as the far-off ice-light of other planets. From Patyegarang, Dawes learned the words meaning ‘snot’ and ‘hiccough’ and ‘the point of a spear’; but also more intriguingly intimate constructions such as ‘to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person,’ ‘we shall sleep separate,’ and ‘to extinguish a candle.’ Many other words — ‘to embrace, to hug’ and ‘when will you be sick again’ — seem to wear a night-time mantle. It is impossible to guess, beyond the fellowship that radiates from these pages, what dreams the Eora held for the transmission of their words to Dawes as they watched the stars together. …

But Dawes’s notebooks are not dry grammars. Instead, as the academic Ross Gibson has noted, they became something more visionary, soon drifting away from Dawes’s table of nouns and verb declensions to record more complicated transactions. At one point in the notebooks, Patyegarang, or Patye as Dawes sometimes calls her, tells him that the Cammeraigal are fearful ‘because of the guns.’ At another, praising his ability to speak, she tells him he has a ‘good mouth.’ Other vignettes offer tantalising glimpses of lost moments: ‘My friend, he sings about you’; ‘My friend, let us (two) go and bathe’; ‘I am very angry’; ‘Take hold of my hand and help me up.’

Recently it has become possible to pull up Dawes’s notebooks on the internet, and track through the tidy, browning pages in order, an activity which has all the drama of a gripping poem, as the imagination jumps in to fill the gaps. What is the story behind the phrase, ‘Thou pinchedst’? Or ‘You beat her while she was alseep’? One has to imagine, too, how close to the city’s geological heart, to the raw edges of its harbour, Dawes must have felt as he watched the milky spread of stars above him, or watched the morning mist hang above the water. Like so many of the city’s visionaries who would follow, he opened himself up to this landscape, let it pour in; but, unlike so many others, he does not appear to have suffered any derangement, perhaps because he let it call to him in its own language. Scroll to the last page of his third notebook and you will find a kind of poem, each word on a separate line, which perfectly captures the future city’s mix of the grossly material and the stellar: ‘the Penis, hair, Scrotum, Testicles, Moon.’

Delia Falconer, Sydney

Here’s the review in question. It runs to 900 words. The first 300 words comprise a summary of Didion’s previous book, The Year of Magical Thinking, which is a precursor to Blue Nights. The next 150 words comprise a summary of the circumstances in which Didion published The Year of Magical Thinking, the difficult months following the death of her daughter Quintana, which now occupy the foreground of Blue Nights. At this halfway point of the review, however, Riemer still hasn’t mentioned Blue Nights itself: Quintana’s death is folded into his coverage of The Year of Magical Thinking. Only after 550 words does he mention that Blue Nights is “an account of the illness and death of Quintana” — that’s after he expresses moral misgivings about The Year of Magical Thinking and after he discusses its stage adaptation — and then, almost two-thirds of the way into his review, he devotes only one paragraph to a description and evaluation of the book he is reviewing. At 154 words, it makes up just seventeen per cent of the entire review:

Didion’s skill is as evident in her new book as it was six years ago when she was working on The Year of Magical Thinking. The form and style are identical. This account of Quintana’s death, coming as it did at a time when Dunne’s sudden death was still raw and immediate, is surrounded by Didion’s memories: her marriage; the years during which the couple worked on screenplays; Quin-tana’s childhood; the fate of relatives, friends and their children. A few details glossed over in the earlier book are highlighted here, particularly the fact that Quintana was an adopted child — this is only hinted at in The Year of Magical Thinking. There is, in addition, a new note sounded here: the panic of old age, the suspicion that both body and mind are decaying, the awareness that the familiar life — the people you had known and loved — has come to an end.

In my experience with book reviews and book reports, there are three key flaws that suggest that a writer hasn’t actually read the book they’re writing about.

First: an absence of quotes from the book itself. Despite his remarks on “Didion’s skill” and on “[t]he form and style” of Blue Nights, Riemer does not use even one of his 900 words to quote Didion so that she might speak for herself, relying instead on paraphrasing and summarisation.

Second: a disproportionate focus on authorial biography and historical context, combined with a tendency towards contextual repetition, at the expense of a focus on the book. One-third of Riemer’s review of Blue Nights is a summary of The Year of Magical Thinking. One-third of the review is a summary of the context in which that book was published and adapted. Of the remaining one-third, half consists of the paragraph quoted above and half consists of Riemer’s repeated misgivings about Didion’s work combined with his repeated acknowledgement of her stylistic gifts. “[S]peaking here personally,” he writes, “I think the choice [to write publicly about the death of her husband John in The Year of Magical Thinking] was questionable.” “As I have said,” he continues, “Didion’s skill, sensitivity and intelligence go some way towards redeeming this book. …  I cannot, however, banish my sense of uneasiness.” Didion is a brave and stylistically skillful writer but her choice of subject matter makes Riemer uneasy: he repeats this notion three times in his review. Whether the stirring of such uneasiness might be part of Didion’s aesthetic project in Blue Nights — whether she is carefully preying on some innate voyeurism in her readers in a way that calls attention to it — doesn’t seem to occur to Riemer, much less to add complexity to his existing moral misgivings.

Third: factual errors which suggest that the writer has relied on his or her memory of an event rather than consulting a record of it. Riemer, as quoted above, has this to say of the adoption of Quintana: “A few details glossed over in the earlier book are highlighted here, particularly the fact that Quintana was an adopted child — this is only hinted at in The Year of Magical Thinking.” Now here’s Didion “hint[ing] at” Quintana’s adoption, at the end of chapter ten of The Year of Magical Thinking, although I’d call it a lot more than just a hint:

In 1964 and 1965, when we were living in the gate house with the beach and the peacocks but could not afford even to tip the parking boys at restaurants, let alone eat in them, John and I used to park on the street on Canon and charge dinner at The Bistro. We took Quintana there on the day of her adoption, when she was not quite seven months old. They had given us Sidney Korshak’s corner banquette and placed her carrier on the table, a centrepiece. At the courthouse that morning she had been the only baby, even the only child; all the other adoptions that day had seemed to involve adults adopting one another for tax reasons.

Other flaws are added spice. Didion’s career as an esteemed essayist and political analyst falls by the wayside — you’d never know from Riemer’s review that she has written anything other than screenplays and The Year of Magical Thinking – and the last word goes not to Didion, nor even to anyone writing about Didion, but to Ludwig Wittgenstein, halfheartedly invoked. Riemer’s review of Blue Nights offers no sense of Blue Nights beyond the barest consideration of its subject and the fact that Riemer is unsettled by it. You won’t get a taste of Didion’s own words; you’ll only get an overlong survey of The Year of Magical Thinking and a factually erroneous one at that. The whole review smacks of the sense that this writer has written about a book that he has only read about, rather than a book that he has read directly and with care.

It’s possible that Riemer wrote something closer to 1,500 words before some senseless editor axed the better part of his review and ripped out a fistful of Didion quotes for good measure. For Riemer’s sake, I certainly hope that’s the case, not that the rest of us would be any better off. This sort of review does a disservice to everyone associated with it: Didion’s work isn’t given the respect of careful consideration, readers who may or may not turn to that work are not given any sense of it, Riemer looks a fool for attaching his name to something so underdeveloped, and the Sydney Morning Herald tarnishes its own prestige by pretending that this sort of writing deserves a place in a paper of record. Can’t Australia do better than this?