Sociopath-free Ann Patchett’s new book The Dutch House has been a refreshing reading experience for me. Every other book I’ve read recently seems to be about sociopaths, and it’s nice to read about characters I’d be happy to meet in real life. It’s beautifully written—a very literate book—and full of fairytale and allegory. All of this is underneath the surface, while the narrative drives along with a most compelling plot, and extremely engaging characters. Danny is the narrator, and we first meet him and his sister Maeve as young adults, sitting in a car, watching their old house. This house is the eponymous Dutch House—a marvellous old mansion, that either bewitches or repels the characters in the book. Patchett takes us back and forth in time, unfolding the story of the inhabitants of the house. Danny and Maeve are abandoned by their mother very early on in the book, and their father remarries Andrea—a great admirer of the house, but an unwilling stemother. Full of surprises, the plot unravels and reveals itself in a most compelling way. Wonderfully detailed descriptions of the house, with its secret nooks that charm Danny and Maeve, and its opulence that alienates their mother; the family portraits of the original owners, (and one of the beautiful Maeve) dominating the house, and its wooden panels full of flying swallows, all of this adds layers of symbolism to the book, and adds to sense of place, and the mystery of the house, that resonates throughout. It is full of literary allusions too, The Great Gatsby comes to mind, as well as Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella, and later in the book, when two of the characters reunite, they discover they both love Marilynne Robinson’s masterpiece of parental abandonment, Housekeepng—a small but revealing detail. The Dutch House is a memorable book, it’s stayed with me since I read it, and I can’t wait to read it again. Louise
Cultural Studies & Criticism
Seduction & Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick
Sidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick dissects the history of women and literature. In her most virtuoso work of criticism, she explores the lives of the Brontës, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the destinies of fictional heroines from Richardson’s Clarissa to Ibsen’s Nora. With fierce empathy and biting wit, Hardwick mines their childhoods, families, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. Shattering the barrier between writing and life, she asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor. Both urgently timely and timeless, Seduction and Betrayal explodes the conventions of the essay: and the result is nothing less than a reckoning.
Fixed It by Jane Gilmore ($35, PB)
On average, at least one woman is murdered by a current or former partner every week in Australia. Finally, we are starting to talk about this epidemic of gendered violence, but too often we are doing so in a way that can be clumsy and harmful. Victim blaming, passive voice & over-identification with abusers continue to be hallmarks of reporting on this issue. And, with the 24 hour news cycle journalists & editors often don’t have the time or resources bring new ways of thinking into their newsrooms. Jane Gilmore demonstrates the myths that we’re unconsciously sold about violence against women, and undercuts them in a powerful look at the stories we are told—and the stories we tell ourselves—about gender & power, and a call to action for all of us to think harder & do better.
Sontag: Her Life by Benjamin Moser ($65, HB)
Susan Sontag’s writing on art & politics, feminism & homosexuality, celebrity & style, medicine & drugs, radicalism, Fascism, Freudianism, Communism & Americanism, forms an indispensable guide to our modern world. Sontag was present at many of the most crucial events of the 20th century—when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down, in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel & in besieged Sarajevo. Benjamin Moser tells these stories and examines her work, as well as exploring the woman behind her formidable public face—the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, her agonizing construction of herself and her public myth. This is the first biography based on exclusive access to her restricted personal archives & on hundreds of interviews conducted with many people around the world who spoke freely for the first time about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz.
Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya and the singular life by Vicki Hastrich ($30, PB)
Vicki Hastrich takes a voyage through her writer’s life & across her chosen patch: the private byways of Brisbane Water, north of Sydney, where she has spent much of her life. She fuses her intimate knowledge of a tiny arena of Australia’s natural world with the grand influence of ideas from throughout civilisation—from the baroque to the American Western, and artists as diverse as Zane Grey, Tiepolo & Goya—to create a deeply pleasurable collection. The book unfolds as a series of expeditions or essays, undertaken in the spirit of the philosopher scientist. All the while Hastrich reveals the ordinary & remarkable detail of her life, from her childhood by the sea to her life as a camera operator for the ABC, as a historian & amateur marine biologist, and as a single woman exploring her small stretch of water.
White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad ($35, PB)
When white people cry foul it is often people of colour who suffer. White tears have a potency that silences racial minorities. Ruby Hamad blows open the inconvenient truth that when it comes to race, white entitlement is too often masked by victimhood. Never is this more obvious than the dealings between women of colour & white women. What happens when racism and sexism collide? Hamad provides some confronting answers.
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray ($33, PB)
Douglas Murray examines the 21st century’s most divisive issues—sexuality, gender, technology & race. He looks at the new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools & homes in the names of social justice, identity politics & ‘intersectionality’. We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion & political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs & a weaponisation of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social & news media. Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more & more tribal and, as Murray shows, the casualties are mounting.
Christina Stead and the Matter of America by Fiona Morrison ($45, PB)
Christina Stead set 5 of her novels in the US, capturing & critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place & nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label ‘expatriate’ & her books defy easy classification. In this re-evaluation of Stead’s American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics & culture & their influence on her ‘restlessly experimental’ style. Through the turbulent political & artistic debates of the 1930s, WW2, and the emergence of McCarthyism, America provoked Stead to create new ways of writing about politics, gender & modernity. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead’s American novels reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid 20th century, and that Stead’s account of American ideology & national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.
A New Sublime: Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics by Piero Boitani ($30, PB)
Piero Boitani invites the reader to discover the timeless beauty and wisdom of ancient literature, highlighting its profound & surprising connections to the present—with their emphasis on the mutability & fluidity of identity & matter, their examination of the power & position of women in society, and their enduring treatments of force & subjugation, fate & free will, the ethical life, hospitality, love, compassion & mysticism. Ranging from Homer to Tacitus, with Thucydides, Aristotle Sophocles, Cicero, and many others in between, Boitani’s A New Sublime is a fresh, inspiring reminder of the enduring importance & beauty of the classics of the Western canon.,
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell ($35, PB)
In July 2015, a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. What went wrong? How do we make sense of the unfamiliar? Why are we so bad at judging someone, reading a face, or detecting a lie? Why do we so often fail to ‘get’ other people? Through a series of puzzles, encounters & misunderstandings, from little-known stories to infamous legal cases, Gladwell takes a journey through the unexpected—including the spy who spent years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the man who saw through Bernie Madoff, the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath & the false conviction of Amanda Knox.
Kim Scott: Readers, Language, Interpretation by Ruby Lowe et al ($35, PB)
Reissued this month How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton ($29, PB)
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Over a quarter of a century he has explored and unravelled the intertwined destinies of Aboriginal and Settler from the moment of invasion, contact and occupancy to the contradictory aspirations and government policies of today. In carrying out this project Scott consistently engages with the history and discourses that shape the national imaginary. These 12 essays deal with all of Scott’s novels to date, along with his collaborative non-fiction & his work in the Wirlomin Noongar Stories & Language Project. The collection as a whole amounts to a case for Kim Scott as Australia’s most representative novelist today.
