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 fantastic 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 old 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 fall 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?

For her first nine years on the planet, Big Red had lived a life of compromise. She wanted to be beautiful, but she’d had to settle for being nice. She wanted to see the Aquanauts for her birthday, but she’d had to settle for the gimp lobsters at the Crab Shack. She wanted a father, but she’d had to settle for Mr. Pappadakis. Mr. Pappadakis smells like Just for Men peroxide dye and eucalyptus foot unguents. He has a face like a catcher’s mitt. The whole thing puckers inward, drooping with the memory of some dropped fly ball. Big Red’s mother has many epithets for Mr. Pappadakis: “our meal ticket,” “my sacrifice,” “vitamin P.” He is an obdurate man, a man of irritating, inveterate habits. He refuses to put down toilet seats, or quit sucking on pistachio shells, or die.

Karen Russell, ‘The City of Shells’

No such luck with my most recent article, though, which was published on September 11, 2011, and has since drawn a response from Lars Iyer, author of Spurious, who scores a mention in the article itself. The article, as its publication date suggests, was commissioned as part of a broader academic consideration of American culture in the decade following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. With my general research area being American literature, I was asked to write about the literary legacy of ’9/11.’  The usual suspects sprang to mind – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Falling Man, Netherland, and so on — but rather than trying to find something new to say about these ‘classic’ post-9/11 novels, which invariably leave me underwhelmed, I tried to make the case that critical analyses of ‘post-9/11 literature’ should expand the scope of that term to encompass much more than simply literature about 9/11.

I attempted to bring Spurious into the fold, for reasons too convoluted to summarise here, alongside a few other recent novels including Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Lee Rourke’s The Canal. I wish I had more space to discuss the particularities of these novels. Given the constraints of the journal format, though, I had to settle for pointing to them as symptoms of the greater literary phenomenon that I did set out to discuss. That phenomenon had to do with the favourable American reception of these three novels and other works like them. Obviously these novels were not written by American authors, but they have benefited immensely from the institutional apparatus of the American literary scene — American publishing houses and critical venues — even as they seem to me to stand opposed to the prevailing mode of American literary responses to 9/11 and its aftermath. In other words, I think they represent something that is essentially what American post-9/11 literature is not, and the fact that they have been warmly received by an American readership suggests to me that many readers are not content with what post-9/11 literature supposedly is. They are a type of post-9/11 literature that is the negative image of literature about 9/11, a type that formally internalises the crisis of 9/11 rather than externalising it for narrative purposes.

I titled the article “Rebirth of the Nouveau Roman” and made the suggestion that these sorts of novels adopt a stance towards what is now called post-9/11 literature which resembles the stance of the mid-twentieth century nouveau romanciers towards the social realism of Balzac, Stendhal, et al. Lars Iyer and his interviewer at 3:AM Magazine, David Winters, have been generous enough to take seriously an article that I wrote in sincere anticipation of a readership of zero, although neither one of them is sold on what I see as a resemblance between the novels mentioned above and the nouveau roman. “Wood,” Lars says of me, “is quite elastic with respect to his notion of the nouveau roman, which seems, for him, to name a free-floating suspicion of realism and a messianic promise for literature.” That’s true to an extent, and I’ll wear the criticism, except to quibble with the words “free-floating” and “messianic.”

The sort of fiction I’m trying to identify here does not exhibit “a free-floating suspicion of realism” in the sense that the work of David Foster Wallace, for instance, exhibited such a suspicion. Its suspicion of realism manifests in a way that is much more contained or constrained, more austere, more obsessive or self-obsessive — one might say, more like the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet — than that of the sprawling, discursive, digressive, and self-consciously ‘difficult’ novel. There’s a reason I make no mention of Steven Moore in my article: the sort of fiction I’m trying to identify does exhibit a suspicion of realism, but not all fiction that exhibits such a suspicion is the sort of fiction I’m trying to identify. Nor would I say that this sort of fiction — or any sort of fiction — advances what Lars calls a “messianic promise for literature,” a promise which I presume he sees as the impossible antidote to the situation he sketched out in his recent literary manifesto after the end of literature and manifestos. A promise for literature? Really? Here and now, in this day and age? And a messianic promise at that? No, not a chance: just a brute hope that the literature of circling the drain — Spurious, Remainder, The Canal — can show literature itself how to circle the drain in style.

There’s more to be said on this, of course, and with a little luck I’ll find a chance to say it before the year expires. For now, though, the Lars Iyer interview and manifesto await.

More than its perfect prose, tone, characterisation, and narrative momentum, what impressed me about Stoner was the subtlety of its self-awareness. I expected a reprise of the startling but unwavering realism of Williams’ previous novel, Butcher’s Crossing, which is arguably one of the half-dozen or so truly outstanding New Westerns and which offered me my first taste of Williams’ work. What I found instead was a work of literature that acknowledged and justified its own literariness right from the very first page, and continued to do so throughout:

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910. … Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.”

An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

That’s how the novel opens. Straight away it marks out its literary territory. On the one hand, by noting the inadequacy of the sole surviving written record of the life of William Stoner, it implies that what is required is something like itself: an account of Stoner’s life that is both more elaborate and more specific than what currently exists. On the other hand, by noting the “casual” questioning of Stoner’s life and the variations in the verbal accounts offered in response, it implies also that what is required is not only a more elaborate and specific account but, crucially, a written one. What Stoner wants, from its very first page, is an account of Stoner’s life that becomes more elaborate and specific the more it both supersedes the inadequate written record in the University of Missouri library and militates against the transience and ambiguities of speech as an alternative means of superseding that record. Time and again throughout Stoner, as the novel goes about setting the record straight, it casts speech as an act through which its task might be accomplished if only speech was not so capable of misdirection via rhetorical seduction, distraction, and outright deception.

Here, for instance, is the young Stoner’s adviser, Archer Sloane, whose speech mannerisms seduce Stoner into devoting himself to the study of literature:

The instructor was a man of middle age, in his early fifties; his name was Archer Sloane, and he came to his task of teaching with a seeming disdain and contempt, as if he perceived between his knowledge and what he could say a gulf so profound that he would make no effort to close it. … His voice was flat and dry, and it came through barely moving lips without expression or intonation; but his long thin fingers moved with grace and persuasion, as if giving to the words a shape that his voice could not.

And here is Stoner’s first contact with the woman who will become his loveless wife — who will eventually do everything in her power to ruin him — as she, too, seduces him with words, and less with the words she actually speaks than with the simple act of speaking:

Stoner had turned back when she began to speak, and he looked at her with an amazement that did not show on his face. Her eyes were fixed straight before her, her face was blank, and her lips moved as if, without understanding, she read from an invisible book. He walked slowly across the room and sat down beside her. She did not seem to notice him; her eyes remained fixed straight ahead, and she continued to tell him about herself, as he had asked her to do. … And [later] something unsuspected within her, some instinct, made her call him back when he started to go out the door, made her speak quickly and desperately, as she had never spoken before, and as she would never speak again.

And here is Stoner’s first in-depth encounter with Charles Walker, the arrogant student who will destroy Stoner’s professional life just as Stoner’s wife destroys his life at home:

[Walker's] voice rose and fell, his right hand went out with its fingers curled supplicatingly upward, and his body swayed to the rhythm of his words; his eyes rolled slightly upward, as if he were making an invocation. … Walker’s voice dropped to a conversational level, and he addressed the back wall of the room in a tone that was calm and equable with reason. …

Anger, simple and dull, rose within Stoner [when he realised the extent of Walker's intellectual vapidity], overwhelming the complexity of feeling he had had at the beginning of the paper. His immediate impulse was to rise, to cut short the farce that was developing; he knew that if he did not stop Walker at once he would have to let him go on for as long as he wanted to talk. … He had waited too long to interrupt, and Walker was rushing impetuously through what he had to say. …

After he became used to his anger Stoner found a reluctant and perverse admiration stealing over him. However florid and imprecise, the man’s powers of rhetoric and invention were dismayingly impressive [and] Stoner became aware that he was in the presence of a bluff so colossal that he had no ready means of dealing with it.

And here is Walker again, delivering a presentation followed by a question and answer session that has been scripted by his supervisor, Hollis Lomax, precisely in order to distract Walker’s listeners from noticing his limited intellectual capabilities:

Walker’s presentation was lucid, forthright, and intelligent; at times it was almost brilliant. Lomax was right; if the dissertation fulfilled its promise, it would be brilliant. Hope, warm and exhilarating, rushed upon [Stoner], and he leaned forward attentively.

Walker talked upon the subject of his dissertation for perhaps ten minutes and then abruptly stopped. Quickly Lomax asked another question, and Walker responded at once. … Walker’s voice continued, fluent and sure of itself, the words emerging from his rapidly moving mouth almost as if — Stoner started, and the hope that had begun in him died as abruptly as it had been born. … Lomax finished his questioning, and Holland began. It was, Stoner admitted, a masterful performance; unobtrusively, with great charm and good humor, Lomax managed it all. … He rephrased [other listeners'] questions… changing them so that the original intent was lost in the elucidation. He engaged Walker in what seemed to be elaborately theoretical arguments, although he did most of the talking. And finally… he cut into [other listeners'] questions with questions of his own that led Walker where he wanted him to go.

During this time Stoner did not speak. He listened to the talk that swirled around him. … He was waiting to do what he knew he had to do, and he was waiting with a dread and an anger and a sorrow that grew more intense with every minute that passed.

At one point, when Lomax threatens to charge Stoner with professional misconduct and construes actual events in a way that makes them appear sinister, Stoner cries out: “How you make it sound! Sure, everything you say is fact, but none of it is true. Not the way you say it.” And later, when Stoner’s retirement dinner offers him an opportunity to publicly construe events however he pleases, he is rendered powerless by his inability to speak:

As the applause dwindled someone in the audience shouted in a thin voice: “Speech!” Someone else took up the call, and the word was murmured here and there. …

[Stoner] got to his feet, and realized that he had nothing to say. He was silent for a long time as he looked from face to face. He heard his voice issue flatly. “I have taught…” he said. He began again. “I have taught at this University for nearly forty years. I do not know what I would have done if I had not been a teacher. If I had not taught, I might have–” He paused, as if distracted. Then he said, with a finality, “I want to thank you all for letting me teach.”

And finally, at the end of his life, Stoner receives news of Katherine Driscoll, the colleague and lover he was forced to abandon when their affair jeopardised both of their careers, and this last encounter with Katherine affirms the strength of the written word:

In the early spring of 1949 he received a circular from the press of a large eastern university; it announced the publication of Katherine’s book, and gave a few words about the author. … He got a copy of the book as soon as he could. When he held it in his hands his fingers seemed to come alive; they trembled so that he could scarcely open it. He turned the first few pages and saw the dedication: “To W.S.”

His eyes blurred, and for a long time he sat without moving. Then he shook his head, returned to the book, and did not put it down until he had read it through. … The prose was graceful, and its passion was masked by a coolness and clarity of intelligence. It was herself he saw in what he read, he realized; and he marveled at how truly he could see her even now.

Whether or not he can “truly” see her is, of course, an open question, and is just one aspect of the broader question of whether or not the written word is in fact more capable than speech of conveying the “truth” of a human life via the elaboration and specification of circumstantial detail. But with its continual ambivalence towards speech, Stoner seems to me to close off that broad open question in favour of the written word and thus in favour of richly detailed humanist realism as the literary mode best suited to its purposes — although, unusually for that sort of realism, it senses its own lack of intrinsic authority and works hard to accrue and justify it.

She saw her waist disappear into reflectionless water; it was like walking into sky, some impurity of skies. All was one warmth, air, water, and her own body. All seemed one weight, one matter — until as she put down her head and closed her eyes and the light slipped under her lids, she felt this matter a translucent one, the river, herself, the sky all vessels which the sun filled. She began to swim in the river, forcing it gently, as she would wish for gentleness to her body. Her breasts around which she felt the water curving were as sensitive at that moment as the tips of wings must feel to birds, or antennae to insects. She felt the sand, grains intricate as little cogged wheels, minute shells of old seas, and the many dark ribbons of grass and mud touch her and leave her, like suggestions and withdrawals of some bondage that might have been dear, now dismembering and losing itself. She moved but like a cloud in skies, aware but only of the nebulous edges of her feeling and the vanishing opacity of her will, the carelessness for the water of the river through which her body had already passed as well as for what was ahead. The bank was all one, where out of the faded September world the little ripening plums started. Memory dappled her like no more than a paler light, which in slight agitations came through leaves, not darkening her for more than an instant. The iron taste of the old river was sweet to her, though. If she opened her eyes she looked at blue-bottles, the skating waterbugs. If she trembled it was at the smoothness of a fish or snake that crossed her knees.

Eudora Welty, ‘The Wanderers’

Europe may be the birthplace of the all-encompassing philosophers… who attempted to stuff the whole world into a theoretical system, but the US is where this urge found root in storytelling. Or at least it was.

In every decade from the 1950s to the year 2000, the US produced a novel that took a great deep breath and attempted to capture all the systems of modern life at work: William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow (1966 and 1973), Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996).

All these novels bulge and hum with a theory of how the world is run: the market economy and the economy of language — the twin broadcast networks of global power. You see in each of these books how the systems interlock, creating what Fredric Jameson described as “the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs”.

In other words, this generation of postwar novelists foresaw how alienated we would all feel. They imagined our pain and dislocation. They understood how this malaise would be a gateway to the domestication of imperial violence and the circular logic of compulsive capitalism: I exist to spend, I spend to exist.

That’s all debatable enough on its own — and I’ll come back to it in a moment — but then, for reasons only he can understand, Freeman takes a flying leap from his discussion of the above novels to a discussion of their authors’ biographies, essentially construing the lives of the authors as “systems novels” experienced by flesh-and-blood human beings:

[I]n many ways, these novelists were perfectly placed to tell this story. They had all spent time in the industries that slowly helped the US encircle the globe: Gaddis, whose father worked on Wall Street and in politics; Pynchon, the one-time Boeing employee; DeLillo, the former copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather; and Wallace, the former addict, dependent of anti-depressants.

In their collective biographies one glimpses a world where language was a system for control, for abstraction and for destruction. They were perfectly placed to interpret the new world order.

If only Freeman spent less time considering the role of language in the lives of these authors and more time considering how they use it in their novels, he might gain a better sense of their achievement. Instead, he passes over the language of the novels — their very literariness — and treats them simply as their author’s attempts at representing and commenting on the real world. Then he suggests that they fail at their ostensible task of representing and commenting on the totality of the world because their authors were not relegated to America’s socio-political margins, and, as such, he celebrates the post-9/11 demise of the systems novel:

Even the best of those novels from postwar America, such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, with its Shakespearean language and awful knowledge of war’s lethal algorithms, was not a complete world. It was constructed to feel like one but it abstracted at the edges, as did DeLillo’s White Noise and especially Gaddis’s The Recognitions.

After all, they all presume a world in which the US is the centre; all of them narrate a tale in which whiteness is the neutral value; their leaps to the other side, the US within a US that does not see itself as part of a dominant narrative, are not nearly as broad as books that were being published around the same time, such as the early novels of Toni Morrison or the stories of Raymond Carver. There is not much of a glimpse into how the rest of the world lived. In other words, as much as these novels reveal the systems that would enable the US to become an imperial power, they have imperial blind spots.

Why Freeman believes that these conspicuously overwritten and absurd novels should stand as works of social realism — or should try to do so — is beyond me. His ultimate aim, of course, is to depreciate the value of these novels, and to downgrade the reputations of the novelists who wrote them, in order to champion the work of novelists on the political margins of the contemporary world. Such marginal novelists, he declares when he names names, are “important young storytellers,” “artists who can channel the anxieties of their time into powerful narratives” — and there’s the rub. You can hardly fault Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, and Wallace for being inattentive to storytelling. Indeed, one of the most famous and most persistent criticisms of such systems novelists is that their work overflows with stories, and stories within stories. What really irks Freeman is that these novelists don’t write narratives with his degree of interest in what he thinks of as verisimilitude, and — perhaps worse — they don’t use the form of the novel as exclusively, or even primarily, a means to a narrative end. He’s offering a warmed-over version of the shtick we heard last year from David Shields, Ted Genoways, Lee Siegel, et al: that fiction broadly conceived, and American fiction in particular, once was and should still be — but is no longer — journalistic reportage with a light imaginative veneer.

When you take this view of fiction, however, you’re ultimately less interested in reading and evaluating literary work on literary terms and more interested in doing so on terms that are essentially cinematic. For the cinematic imagination, the value of a novel lies in its capacity to show, to illustrate, to depict; and the task of a novelist is to observe and understand the workings of the contemporary world and then to manipulate characters, storylines, settings, and so on, in order to show, to illustrate, to depict what has been understood. Don’t think about the ways in which the novelist might instead manipulate the very concept of depiction, or the supposition that he or she carries some responsibility towards depiction, in order to generate a particular experience for a reader. If the world depicted in a novel becomes “abstracted at the edges,” this is a flaw in the novel rather than a product of deliberate and purposeful decisions made by its author. If the post-9/11 world seems increasingly small, increasingly connected, increasingly transnational, then a pre-9/11 novel that seems, on the surface, to ”fore[see] how alienated we would all feel” is clearly a failure. The purpose of using words to create a work of fiction is to offer a reader a clear vision of the workings of the world, and any other use of words — to overwhelm or mystify, to provoke or to irritate, to offer ambiguity instead of clarity, even to use words for their own sake — is self-indulgent frivolity.

Ah, how easy it is to dismiss something when you assign it a purpose that it does not assume on its own and then disregard all the complexities associated with what it does try to do.