PositiveSydney Review of Books (AUS)Savage is sharp in her critique of the cultures and institutions of ‘aggressive accumulation’ and ‘expansion\' ... Blueberries evokes most powerfully the pressures and forms of complicity that govern the lives of young white women in the patriarchal, neocolonial, neoliberal place called Australia ... These are the best moments in Blueberries: when Savage’s intensely critical gaze is turned to her own life and to those whose lives, like mine, are set in some of the same grooves. Yet there are other moments—sometimes in the very same essay or even paragraph—when she comes close to co-opting the lives of others, making them refer too quickly to her experience or minimising their differences in kind and scale ... I hesitate in charging Blueberries with solipsism, since...there’s a deep thoughtfulness and insight contained in this volume; some beautiful writing, too ... Gloomy like blue, Blueberries also has an uneasy energy ... Savage’s thought is always turning corners, or knotting about itself, or rushing forward as if she’s racing us to the finish line—only to collapse, exhausted, like a runner who’s peaked too soon ... At some points, however, Blueberries seemed to me overly invested in staging its own critical failure and, in the process, the droll knowingness of its author ... Savage spends the entire collection telling us she’s playing at being an intellectual—that it’s a ruse, yet another trick—and all the while the book provides an object lesson in the many ways that’s simply not true. The un-small line of her vision, the intricacy of her argumentation, the richness of her sources, the cultivation of her contradictory style, pitched between brashness and eloquence, and the pleasures of her experimentation: Blueberries testifies against its author. Which is to say that it testifies in her defense.
