Deftly crafted ... The excesses of 1980s academia are ripe fodder for de Kretser’s mordant wit, but her aim here is more ambitious — and the results more rewarding. An Australian novelist of the first rank... de Kretser has long been fascinated by the gap between our ideals and our actions ... A taut, enthralling hybrid of fact and fiction impossible to disentangle, situates itself firmly in the mess.
Sharp-witted ... Sly, spiky, and brilliant: an intellectual coming-of-age story that accounts for all that can’t be learned in the academy—or in books.
Bristling and formally inventive ... A Sally Rooney-ish, political/feminist picaresque, whose fiercely truth-seeking narrator both acts within and reports upon the shape-shifting social and academic organisms she’s part of ... De Kretser’s writing is unfailingly smart.
Like a coming-of-age novel or perhaps a coming-to-writing novel, and De Kretser is a beautifully sly writer ... Anything but conventional ... At the end of the book, our narrator has grasped — like Woolf’s moth drawn to the light — that when held together, theory and practice is the truth we seek.
A curious book, an ambiguous mixture of nostalgia and satire, and of fiction and memoir ... A novel that has no plot and only a shifting, ambivalent point of view relies heavily on its subject being inherently interesting. This is a book that presumes more significance than it earns, making it, in certain ways, as inaccessible to the general reader as the academic writing it professes to deride.
Becomes a vivid account of the excitements and opportunities of youth ... Has something for everyone. It is a book that revels in the complexity of real life, the messy practice of things that theory tries to smooth over. Some of the best writing is about de Kretser’s irascible mother ... or the most part, it reads like a memoir. Is it true? It’s true enough and anyway, to ask whether it is a novel or not, misses the point. Who cares? It’s just a damned good book.
Excellent ... In another kind of book, unflinching recognition of one’s own morbid symptoms might eradicate them fully. In Theory & Practice, that’s not the case ... The only way to catch a nugget of meaning in this novel—and, de Kretser argues, in our lives—is to pay very careful attention.
Extraordinary ... It is unsettling and outstanding ... In a less-skilled writer, this all could be overwrought. But de Kretser has crafted a resonant voice that propels the story forward; the narrative somehow maintains immediacy throughout.
De Kretser is a master of the sentence. Also, therein, she provides the rare gift of expressing a problem simply while retaining its complexity ... While not perfect, this book is truly elegant, its tone one of generous curiosity.
De Kretser gradually, delicately, picks and plucks at the notion of 'truth' in literature – questioning first the trustworthiness of the novel and then the trustworthiness of autobiography – until, by her book’s end, all certainties have been dismantled, and it’s hard to know what it is, exactly, we have read. Her excellence as a writer lies in the fact that she manages to make a novel that effectively acts as a deconstruction of the novel form feel like a pleasure, rather than a chore. She offers us the theory, while revelling in the practice; she exposes the lie to us, but permits us to love it anyway.
Starts as an evocative, shifting novel of time and place ... It is a measure of De Kretser’s beguiling talent as a novelist that she holds both these tales in balance without the whole ever threatening to fall apart.
This exploration is sharp and unsentimental, with prose that is nimble and erudite, yet entirely unpretentious ... Isn’t for everyone. It’s shambolic, pragmatic, a touch angsty and its fragmented structure, along with the absence of a conventional narrative arc, may frustrate some readers. But for those who appreciate the elasticity of form and the generative tension between what we profess to believe and how we actually behave, this is a book you’ll carry – with you and within you – for a long time.
Vivid ... The nonfiction elements woven into the novel...resonate with the book’s exploration of who has a voice and why. At times, though, these inclusions feel a bit shoehorned rather than seamless. But it’s hard to ignore that this is a book of intrusions.
I really enjoyed this book and its clever thinking on academia, postcolonialism, privilege, power, and the literary canon, and was entertained by so many of de Kretser’s pithy observations that manage to capture and critique entire debates in a phrase or two with pure perfection.
De Kretser mines autobiographical details in an intriguing portrait of a writer as a young woman viscerally struggling between the lofty theories of her evolving feminist education and life’s realities as an immigrant daughter ... Spare.
