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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
