Tag: essay

Australia, Black Inc, Book review, Geraldine Brooks, long form essay, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘On Tim Winton’ by Geraldine Brooks (Writers on Writers series)

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Non-fiction – hardcover; Black Inc.; 76 pages; 2022.

On Tim Winton is the latest volume in an ongoing series — about Australian writers by Australian writers — which now spans 11 titles. I had previously read On Helen Garner and much enjoyed it, so I was keen to read this one which was published at the tail end of last year.

The subject of this long-form essay is Tim Winton, who is arguably one of Australia’s most decorated and much-loved writers. He’s also one of the few who is published abroad and enjoys an international reputation.

The same could be said of the essay writer. Geraldine Brooks grew up in Sydney, became a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and has six novels to her name, including March, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006.

I’ve read plenty by the former (see here) and none by the latter, but the match — that is, getting Brooks to write about Winton — seems ideal: Brooks has a well-honed eye for the cadence and feel of Australian writing because she’s lived abroad for so long (she became an American citizen in 2002) and Winton’s writing is quintessentially Australian.

My island home

Here’s how she describes discovering Winton’s award-winning (and beloved) Cloudstreet in a London bookshop in 1991:

Three pages into Cloudstreet and I could see it, smell it, taste it. Home. I could hear it: our idiom, in all its insouciant vitality, delivered with uncompromising fidelity. Australian writing. Cringe-free. No fucks given if people in New York and London don’t get it.
Tim Winton was writing for us.

What she really loves about that novel, which chronicles the lives of two working-class families sharing a house in Perth, Western Australia, was the way she could identify with its themes and characters.

I had never read a novel that grazed so closely against my own lived experience. It was an unvarnished vision, meticulous in its recollection of the banal, the mundane and the sometimes cruelly philistine nature of mid-century Australian life; vivid in its evocation of the straitened options of the working class, especially working-class women; subtle but frank in its portrayal of the negation and misapprehension of Aboriginal culture.
But it wasn’t only that. This was no cringy put-down. These lives were also funny and passionate, full of imagination and yearning, glimmering with the possibility of transcendence. It was a capacious, generous giant of a novel, Russian in its ambitions, Melvillian in its digressions, Marquezian in its flashes of magic realism. All this, but all ours.

She goes on to describe Winton’s fiction as “acutely class aware” and suggests that by remaining true to his Western Australian roots — “ignoring the siren song of expatriate cosmopolitanism” and the “gravitational tug of Sydney and Melbourne” —  he has “polished his parochialism to a diamond brightness”. She argues that it is this sense of place and the mining of his own experiences for his fiction that makes his writing so distinctively Australian.

Christian values

What also makes him different from many of his compatriots, Brooks argues, is his religious upbringing which was far outside of the Australian mainstream:

The biblical cadence in Cloudstreet is no accident. Winton grew up in a family that read the Scriptures the way my family read the daily newspapers: habitually, fervently, in the conviction that information important to the conduct of one’s everyday life was contained there.

His Christianity, she says, is most obvious in his 1986 novel, That Eye, the Sky, a story about an adolescent whose father is paralysed in an accident and then “rescued” by a visiting evangelist, a scenario which is mirrored in his own life — Winton’s father, a motorcycle cop, was almost killed in a road accident when Winton was a young boy and during his long convalescence was helped by an evangelist who “shifted the Winton family to an urgent, immersive form of worship”.

While his religious tendencies might be less obvious in his later work, Brooks suggests that all his writing is about love, mercy, kindness and liberation — and the Jewish concept of repairing the shattered world. “Winton’s protagonists are always shattered”, she writes. “No one is whole. Everyone is in pieces.”

Literary criticism

Later she discusses the criticism his writing has attracted from the literary establishment and academics. The first is that his novels are too focused on plot, something literary novels are not supposed to be preoccupied by, and second, that his female characters are “too damaged”. Brooks writes that it’s infantilising and offensive to suggest that novelists should only create ideal women:

Never mind that Winton’s men generally are in much worse shape than the women, each one of them staggering under a dense pack of human flaws and moral failings. But all of them, his men and women, are vibrantly alive.

His strength, she points out, is his ability to examine Australian white working-class maleness. To vilify him for this is ironic, she says, especially at a time when anyone writing outside of their lived experience is roundly condemned.

Winton, of course, has done some condemning of his own. His passion for nature, particularly the ocean, has turned him into an environmental advocate. On the rare occasions when he has “stepped out of his carefully woven cocoon of privacy” to lend his voice to a cause he has been impassioned, brave and instrumental in making an impact.

I can vouch for his no-holds-barred approach: I was in the audience at last year’s Perth Festival when he resoundingly called out the organisers for relying on sponsorship money from fossil fuel companies in a speech that Brooks describes as “blistering”. It’s an apt interpretation. (You can read more about his speech here and here.)

On Tim Winton is an eloquent and insightful essay about one of the most successful writers Australia has ever produced. It has made me itch to dig out all those Winton novels I’m yet to read — there’s about four in my TBR — and to re-read those I already have.

20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2022), Australia, Author, Book review, essays, Non-fiction, Publisher, Sean O'Beirne, Setting

‘On Helen Garner’ by Sean O’Beirne (Writers on Writers series)

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Non-fiction – hardcover; Black Inc.; 138 pages; 2022.

On Helen Garner is the latest volume in an ongoing series about Australian writers written by Australian writers. There are ten in the series so far (see below) and this is the latest to be published.

Sean O’Beirne is a Melbourne writer, so it seems fitting that he would write about Helen Garner, who is also a Melbourne writer. I’m not familiar with O’Beirne’s work, but according to the blurb, he wrote a satirical short story collection, A Couple of Things Before the End, which was shortlisted for several awards. He also works as a bookseller at Readings at the State Library Victoria.

In this essay, it’s clear he is a deep thinker and not afraid to write intimate details about himself, traits he shares with Garner.

His main thesis is that Garner writes a “closeness to self” that allows her to be completely honest and open, to say the things that others may think but never say, and in doing so this allows her to get closer to the truth.

He argues that she does this in both her fiction and her non-fiction. Her fiction, he says, is particularly close to the truth because much of it is based on her first-hand experiences or people she knows, and, indeed, Monkey Grip, her debut novel, was basically her diaries just with the names of people and locations and dates changed, something to which she confessed later on in her career.

He compares this approach with other writers, including himself, who may get to the truth but only by using fictional characters as a foil to say the things the actual writer would be too guarded to say in non-fiction. He puts it like this:

And I notice too that in this whole book I haven’t given you one specific incident, telling as me, about my family, my dad, my mum. About Mr and Mrs O’Beirne. I can’t, I can’t give them to you. But ‘Mr and Mrs O’Dingle’ — I’ll tell you what those people did. As soon as I make some new names, as soon as I get the freedom of some substitution, it is remarkable, I get a feeling in my head like all the lights coming on, my own lit-up feeling of permission.

He explains how it isn’t just as simple as the use of first-person narratives, of inserting an “I” in the story, to get to this truth. The use of “I” is to act as an eye witness, to give a “sort of limited verification” of being present, that “I was in the room, these things happened, I saw them”.

But for many writers, including Janet Malcolm whom he references (and whom I love), this is a device used to suggest that the writer is a “participant observer” and that they know about the subject and are reporting it with a level of intelligence.

But what Garner does, argues O’Beirne, is to go one step further and not be afraid to admit that she’s confused or frustrated or angered or is out of her depth in situations in which she is reporting. And in doing that, the veil of objectivity, of being a passive observer, is lifted.

The book looks at Garner’s novels and short stories as well as her non-fiction books to make these points. Anyone who is familiar with Garner’s back catalogue will enjoy the references.

I have not read much of Garner’s fictional work so these did not resonate as much as her narrative non-fiction, including The First Stone (read pre-blog), Joe Cinque’s Consolation, This House of Grief and her diaries. It does make me keen to explore those works of fiction, though.

Writers on Writers series

The 10 books in the series are as follows:

And there’s a new one forthcoming: ‘On Tim Winton’ by Geraldine Brooks, which I will look forward to reading when it is available.

This is my 6th book for #20booksofsummer 2022 edition. I bought it earlier this year because I am a Garner fan and thought this would make for an interesting read.

Allen & Unwin, Australia, Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2019, Book review, Bri Lee, long form essay, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Beauty’ by Bri Lee

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Non-fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 150 pages; 2019.

Earlier this year I read Bri Lee’s memoir Eggshell Skull, which was long- and shortlisted for many literary awards and was named Biography of the Year at the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards. It is one of the best books I’ve read this year and will undoubtedly make my top 10 when I compile it in a few days’ time.

Beauty is Lee’s latest work of narrative non-fiction. It’s essentially a long-form essay, which was initially written as part of the author’s MPhil in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland, and has since been published by Allen & Unwin in an attractive small-format book with a striking cover image (the painting is by artist Loribelle Spirovski) and French flaps.

It focuses primarily on body image and the ways in which young women are conditioned to think that being thin is the only route to happiness and acceptance. It charts Lee’s own struggles with body dysmorphia and eating disorders (topics she also addressed in Eggshell Skull) and examines how her own obsession with thinness has eaten away (no pun intended) at her self-esteem and self-worth.

These issues may not be new, but Lee’s book is the first I’ve read that focuses on how the obsession with thinness as a beauty ideal has worsened in recent times thanks to the influence of social media. She talks about the need to be “photo-ready” at every minute of the day because camera phones are so prevalent.

Until the proliferation of smartphones around 2010, we would only feel conscious of being observed in scenarios that were laden with photo opportunities, but now, with social media being the omnipresent mass-reaching norm, we self-police in perpetuity.

She goes on to explain why young women now spend extraordinary amounts of money on make-up and take forever to “put their face on” and highlights how this peer pressure can cripple everyday decisions such as what to wear at work and play.

Admittedly, as compelling and as readable as I found this highly personalised essay to be, it did make me feel about 40 million years old. It’s clear from Lee’s experience that Millennials feel enormous pressure to be thin and that they associate this (wrongly) with being successful, beautiful and sexually desirable.

I grew up in the 1980s. Yes, there was pressure to be thin — mainly conveyed via airbrushed magazine covers — but our pop stars weren’t sexualised (Kim Wilde, my hero at the time, was always covered up in a white t-shirt, and Banarama often wore overalls/dungarees as if they’d just done a shift on a building site). Nor were we under the constant surveillance of social media where our peers could judge us instantaneously and so unkindly. We weren’t living under the weight of having everything we did (or said) validated by a “like” or “share” button.

Nowadays (how old does that make me sound, starting a sentence with that word), it seems that young women feel so little in control of any aspect of their life that the only thing they can attempt to wage war on is their weight and the way they look on Instagram. It just makes me feel desperately sad.

Beauty isn’t pitched at women of my age, but I think it is probably required reading for teenage girls if only to make them aware of the social constructs that can make their lives so miserable and competitive and psychologically damaging. Lee’s experience should serve as a warning that appearances are not everything…

This is my 25th book for #AWW2019.

Alan Bennett, Author, Book review, London, memoir, Non-fiction, Profile Books, Publisher, Setting

‘The Lady in the Van’ by Alan Bennett

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LadyInVan

Non-fiction – paperback; Profile Books; 96 pages; 1999.

This short essay, labelled as Bennett’s “most  famous piece of non-fiction”, first appeared in the London Review of Books in 1989. It has since been made into a play, for both stage and radio. I decided I had to read it after hearing Bennett mention it in passing in a BBC4 documentary that I watched last year. I couldn’t quite get it out of my head that this famous writer and playwright had let a female tramp park her decrepit van, in which she resided, in his driveway for some 15 years! I mean, who does that sort of thing?

The piece, which is published in a delightfully small pocket-book format (14.8cm x 9.2cm, if you’re interested), is easily devoured in half-an-hour or so. But it’s one of those reads that packs such a powerful punch and reveals so much about the human condition that it lingers in the mind long afterwards and invites a second or third reading.

Miss Shepherd’s van

Essentially, the lady in the van was an elderly woman by the name of Miss Shepherd. She had been parked in the London street where Bennett resides and had become somewhat of a local attraction — and nuisance — since the late 1960s. By June 1971 “scarcely a day passes without some sort of incident involving the old lady” including a young man giving the van a “terrific shaking”, another banging on the side of the van to “flush out for his grinning girlfriend the old witch who lives there” and passing drunks smashing all the windows.

[…] to find such sadism and intolerance so close at hand began actively to depress me, and having to be on alert for every senseless attack made it impossible to work. There came a day when, after a long succession of such incidents, I suggested that she spend at least the nights in a lean-to at the side of my house. Initially reluctant, as with any change, over the next two years she gradually abandoned the van for the hut.

Eventually, when parking restrictions come into play, Bennett invites her to park her van in his driveway, and there it stays, sandwiched between Bennett’s front door step and his garden gate, for 15 years. If it wasn’t enough that visitors to Bennett’s house now had to squeeze past the van and be scrutinised by the mad woman living inside, they often got a glimpse of the interior, “a midden of old clothes, plastic bags and half-eaten food”. It sounds delightful, doesn’t it?

Sadly, the longer she stays put, the worse her living conditions become. Her hygienic practises, or lack of them, become questionable, and, at one point, when Bennett gets a load of manure delivered to fertilise the garden she complains that people passing might think the smell is coming from her van.

She wants me to put a notice on the gate to the effect that the smell is the manure, not her. I say no, without adding, as I could, that the manure actually smells much nicer.

A portrait of eccentricity

The book charts, diary-style, the ups and downs of having Miss Shepherd living in such close proximity. It’s a mixture of frustrating observations, outlandish humour, hopelessness, despair and melancholy. Bennett does a superb job of describing Miss Shepherd’s eccentric nature without mocking or denigrating her. While she quite clearly tries his patience — for instance, when she buys a Reliant Robin in 1984 Bennett has to constantly recharge it for her because she drains the battery by simply sitting in it and revving the motor every Sunday morning, driving all the neighbours mad — he never gives up on her.

The question that came to mind as I read this was not so much what made Miss Shepherd so kooky and “different”, but what made Bennett tolerate her for so long? There are hints of an answer in the postscript which accompanies this edition in which Bennett admits he has done almost anything to live a quiet life.

I mull it over too [a phone call he has with Miss Shepherd’s long lost brother], wondering at the bold life she has had and how it contrasts with my own timid way of going on — living, as Camus said, slightly the opposite of expressing. And I see how the location of Miss Shepherd and the van in front but to the side of where I write is the location of most of the stuff I write about; that too is to the side and never what faces me.

If you ever get the chance to read this essay then I urge you to do so. It’s a beautiful portrait of English eccentricity — and tolerance.