Reflecting a pessimism that’s almost refreshing in its candor, The Life to Come is mordantly skeptical about mankind’s capacity for empathy. Its characters are largely unburdened by hidden depths. On balance, they’re exactly as vain and dull and silly as they appear to others ... The novel is filled with brilliant, quick-fire characterizations ... The Life to Come is a scalpel-sharp work of Flaubertian social realism—but now the provincial setting whose customs it mercilessly dissects encompasses all Australia, if not all the world.
The émigré is one kind of traveler, portrayed here with sympathy and lyricism. But de Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka and came to Australia at 14, saves her startling satirical firepower for another — the expats of the global West, or those who can travel on a whim ... Pippa is as close as de Kretser gets to a protagonist. It is Pippa’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances whose stories we learn via impressionistic flashbacks. In the late 1990s, when we meet her, she is an idealistic undergraduate in Sydney who announces 'I love India' after watching a documentary on TV. Over time, she becomes a more interesting character, a full-fledged writer who seeks experiences in the world with which to animate her fiction. Yet Pippa remains naïve. She preaches empathy for refugees on Facebook, but is careless of the inner lives of others ... For a novel concerned with dislocation, there’s a lot of grounding humor in The Life to Come. Most of it comes at the expense of Pippa and her ilk, but de Kretser’s observations are so spot on, you’ll forgive her even as you cringe.
De Kretser...has again written a perceptive and articulate novel that blends acute observation and well-chosen details to create a sweeping story that is painfully close to home. With fascinating characters and beautifully nuanced writing, The Life to Come is a powerful exploration of the human condition and a compelling examination of how we look at each other and ourselves.
Her writing captures, with unflagging wit, grace and subtlety, the spiritual as well as physical journeys of people on the move — between cultures, mindsets and stages of growth ... Devotees of the tight-knit, linear plot will, as often with De Kretser, trip over her loose ends. Sentence by sentence, though, she sustains a unity of voice and eye ... De Kretser’s writing can drive that wedge into the most ordinary of scenes.
With a tone that often refuses to indicate whether a detail is important or trivial and that wavers between satire and sincerity, the book is a difficult read at times. It can feel like staring at a page in a Where’s Wally? puzzle book, hoping for a reassuring glimpse of a hooped shirt among all the lovingly described weather, Australian landscapes, flora, clothing, fragments of history and multiplying minor characters. Storytelling is certainly reductive, but its simplifications are the means by which human beings make sense of themselves and of each other. It’s not until the book’s brilliant final act that De Kretser allows the reader to fall in love with a character, Christabel, whose particularity grips and moves, and who achieves the ultimate revenge against the writers who have wounded her, by throwing their novels in the bin.
While each section can stand alone, together they create a joyful and mournful meditation on the endless small pleasures and complications of life: the difficulties of immigration, the logistics of infidelity, the creativity and insight born of jealousy and spite. In de Kretser’s sure-footed and often surprising prose, life is rendered as something that’s 'tedious yet require[s] concentration, like a standard-issue dream.'
These characters give de Kretser, herself a native of Sri Lanka who lives in Sydney, a chance to explore the complexity of societies in the long throes of mistreatment of their ethnic minorities, whether those are Aboriginal people, Indians, Sri Lankans in Australia, or Algerians in Paris ... But if all these sound like dense, heavy ideas (and they are), there is also much pleasure to be found in de Kretser’s lovely prose, whose every sentence fiercely shines. A thought-provoking novel of both beauty and brains.
