With exactly a month to go before the official publication of At the Edge of the Solid World, I had the honour of writing for Meanjin about what I’ve been reading lately. As well as meditating on three impressive books, I took the opportunity also to think about the uncanny experience of finding the concerns of my own novel intimated in the work of other writers:
Narrative as a form of causal explanation is always too clean to encompass the mess of life as lived, not least because the language of narrative is finally expedient, therefore reductive, therefore unable to honour the unfathomable complexity of the world it purports to describe. That narrative is a double-edged sword — that to narrativise may be to liberate oneself from an experience while imprisoning oneself in an illusory construct — is something that I, too, have come to believe increasingly over the last few years. I cast a wary eye over anything that proposes a because: ‘this thing happened to me only because…’ or ‘I did that to them mostly because…’
Infinite Patience 