Chapter 1: What themes are explored in Ceridwen Dovey's Life After Truth?
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Strangely empty streets, politics and reunions in fiction. Hi, welcome to the Bookshelf on Radio National. Broadcast, podcast and on the ABC Listen app. I'm Kate Evans.
And I'm Cassie McCullough, and we have three big new books today, Kate.
Don DeLillo's novel, The Silence, which inhabits just one strange day in 2022.
And Keridwyn Dovey's new novel, Life After Truth, where we spend a long weekend on campus at Harvard University.
And in Martin Amos's Inside Story, well, he covers decades of a fictionalised memoir with real friends and possibly invented lovers.
Well, let's start with Keridwyn Dovey's life on campus as old friends reunite.
Then I see you, you're walking across the campus Go professor, studying romances How am I supposed to fix it?
Australian writer Keridwyn Dovey was born in South Africa, but she grew up mostly in Australia. And then she received a scholarship to study at the prestigious Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since then, she's written a number of award-winning books of fiction, including Only the Animals and In the Garden of Fugitives, which we spoke about back in 2018, Kate.
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Chapter 2: How does Don DeLillo's The Silence reflect on contemporary society?
And a high school principal named Rowan. So these are the main five who we meet.
And helpfully, right at the beginning of this novel, we get their little praises that they've put in the Harvard Red Book. Now, this is a bit like, you know, the old, what a Facebook originally was before Mark Zuckerberg. Interestingly, also a Harvard, well, I think maybe did he finish? I don't know. where he got the idea from.
So we get these little potted histories of their lives and what they've been doing since they all last caught up. So we learn a little of their lives. Although it has to be noted that Jules's entry is very brief. It just says, address care of, you know, and her agent's address. Which is kind of good.
But it's almost like reading those ghastly Christmas cards that some people send out where they do the story of what they've done and it's all full of achievement. Ghastly?
Kate, they're great. I love those. You're going to be crossed off quite a few little lists this Christmas, I reckon.
Sometimes they're ghastly, sometimes they're fabulous. But it's also highly codified in terms of not just Harvard, but its reunions, because we see that these reunions are structured in very particular ways so that it draws on, well, it's sort of playing around with nostalgia. You go to your fifth year reunion or your 10th year reunion.
year or 50th year or whatever and they put you back in the rooms that you were stayed in at college and they put you together with the people who were your roommates so you're deliberately playing around with a sort of spatial memory and then it's not just going to one night of a reunion it's a whole four-day series of events and talks and dinners and cocktail parties
what could possibly go wrong? Obviously there's a scenario where all the ghosts of the past are eventually going to be dredged up. And in a way, this reminded me of The Big Chill and also Charlotte Wood's The Weekend, you know, like it's, It's sort of a bit of nostalgia, people getting back together and going, oh, wow, we didn't really know each other or maybe we do too well.
And life didn't turn out the way we imagined it. And look at us. We remember how beautiful each other were when we were younger. And here we all are with the weight of age beginning to show.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of nostalgia in Life After Truth?
Yes, and there's a dead body in the prologue of this. And on the Sunday morning of the weekend, Mariam's looking out the window of the courtyard and she sees a man who's asleep on the bench. And it is Frederick... P. Rees II, who is the son of the President of the United States, Gerald Rees. And she looks a little more closely and she realises his eyes are open and he's dead.
And he is the son of a buffoonish, tyrannical President of the United States. And we should say, Cassie, that as we're having this discussion right now, we still don't know who the next President of the United States is. will be because we're recording this before the election.
But that's very much the context of this novel is Trump's America, a group of people from a range of different backgrounds playing out both their politics and their private lives in this supercharged environment.
And, I mean, it's worth noting, and I read the Harvard magazine for alumni. I read their review of this, and it does point out in there that in Jared Kushner's year in the Red Book, some people did criticise him in the same way that people in this fictional version of this story criticised Frederick Rees.
And so after that prologue with the smoking gun of the dead body, just to horribly mangle an image there, we then go back to the very beginning of this four-day weekend. And although it's ostensibly structured to build up to how the dead body got there, it's really more concerned with the relationship between these five friends, what's going on in their lives, as well as a whole lot of sort of
philosophical and ideological questions that they're grappling with about their own identity, their relationships, what it means to have got older, where they are in their lives. So I guess one of the first characters we meet in detail is Eloise. who, well, what's going on in Eloise's life?
She's quite instantly recognisable as a character. She's this academic. She's had success with her academic work, but also writing this line of popular psychology books. And she's all about hedonic studies, the study of happiness. How do you make yourself happy? And she has this much younger wife.
who was actually one of her students, who is a post-humanist, who's writing all these and reading all these works about, well, basically, you know, the thinking beyond the body. So they're this totally right-on lesbian couple who... in a very, I guess, you know, sexually charged but also intellectually feisty relationship.
With a fembot in the basement because they're really very actively playing around with post-humanist ideas.
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Chapter 4: How do the characters in Life After Truth navigate their past relationships?
But Eloise studied... Well, she's now an academic psychologist. When they were undergraduates, one of the other friends, Rowan, was also very good at psychology. He got very high marks. He is now a high school teacher, married to Marianne, who's also a part of the group. And he's clever and bitter and a bit depressed and not quite sure what's happening in his life.
So he's almost the polar opposite of...
eloise yeah rowan and mariam have turned up with their kids which eloise um has unhelpfully barred from any of the cocktail events but they're also doing it a bit tough and so mariam's embarrassingly brought along some tupperware containers um so they can which they can fill up from the table of all these
events that they've been brought to because this costs a lot of money to go to one of these reunions you know like a 300 bucks for this dinner or it's you know you got to pay for your accommodation you travel all these kind of things and then on top of that they've got to pay for babysitting or a nanny
And so Rowan is both a bit righteous and bitter. But with Mariam, there's a lot of exploration about the drudgery and wonder of being a parent. And I think Keridwen does that. Keridwen Dovey does that in a really quite interesting way because they're delighted to be parents. But of course, they can't catch up with their friends.
They can't do all the things they want to do because they're also having to drag around their children to the bouncy castle and have very tedious conversations with other parents.
Yeah, and that's a really great and accurate description of that part of parenthood, I think. The other characters, Jomo now, and Jules. So Jules is the actress who's being recognised by the waiting staff who are also probably studying at Harvard. So they're not exactly, they're not outsiders coming into Gauke, but even they can't help sort of looking at her.
And there's a sort of frisson every time she's around because people instantly recognise her. But she's trying to act normal. Jomo is this guy who, as you said, is a gem trader. So he goes around the world looking to buy gems. And I don't know if you know this, Kate, but increasingly gems are becoming rare. Certain types of gems are getting more and more rare.
It's a real trade, you know, and he'd made a lot of money on it, but lost a whole lot and he's clawing his way back. But he and Jules from university had been the fastest of friends and he's quite charismatic. And when Jules first sees him, Dovey describes him as looking even better than he did back in the day. Like he's actually gotten better with 15 years on him.
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Chapter 5: What insights does Martin Amis provide in Inside Story?
than everybody else so there's a great kind of sense of them being part of this crowd of old friends but also having always been a bit special yes and it's interesting what keeps on what's uncovered as this book goes on because these i mean this isn't just a campus novel i mean there's all these strange rituals that go with these high-end
campuses so there's all that Phi Beta Kappa mysterious stuff that happens in American universities and these exclusive drinking clubs and Jomo had belonged to one at university where he sort of had to charm his way in but having a celebrity best friend didn't hurt but also he's there as a young young
black man who's not from a wealthy background and he says at one point that he liked those clubs because it was a way it was a safe space for playing around with all the different identities that you could adopt so this is both a novel set right in that world but it also takes quite a critical look at them and how they work which I enjoyed actually because some of it I didn't really understand and
And I felt like I was getting a bit of an explanation for what they were and why they mattered.
Now, one of the interesting things about this, and I think Keridwyn Dovey's description and her lightness and deft handling of the language is one of the absolute joys of this book. There's no wasted effort. If our attention is being drawn to something, it's for a very good reason. A pleasure to read. But I was struck, I was imagining...
a much more serious novel, and it wasn't until I started to read it I realised the tone was funny. I was taken aback that it was in America, given that she's, you know, Australian and also South African by birth. And so that language was very interesting and she inhabits it perfectly. You have no idea that she is nothing but a Native American speaker, I think, in this book.
And then I learned that, in fact, she wrote this book more than a year ago and it was released as an Audible original and this book has actually been around in the world for a year as an audio book and the contract, the deals of the contract were it wouldn't be published in print until a year after that release. And so it was crafted specifically for...
for the audio environment, which kind of, once I learned that, it made a lot more sense to me of what she was doing. Well, look, why don't we just get a taste of what the audio sounds like? It's read by Rachel Butera, who is an American actress who many people might know from the TV series Family Guy.
The turbulence was worse than any Jomo had experienced. In London, the plane had soared up into blue skies, but through his window soon after, he'd seen the electric storm approaching, the lightning stabbing the clouds beneath it soundlessly. He had never seen lightning from above the cloud layer before. Down on Earth, it felt as if it came from the clouds.
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Chapter 6: How does the concept of memoir versus fiction manifest in Amis's writing?
And so when I turned to this one, which, as you say, it's got a light touch, it's very engaging, it's very easy to read. I had to sort of shift my thoughts about what it was that she was doing.
Very interesting.
Keridwyn Dovey's Life After Truth is published by Viking.
Lying in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you Caught up in circles, confusion is nothing new
This is The Bookshelf on ABC Radio National, your weekly fiction broadcast and podcast. I'm Cassie McCullough here, as always, with Kate Evans, and we're ready to meet this week's bookish guests, beginning with the Australian's chief literary critic, Geordie Williamson, who's also a former publisher for Picador. Geordie, hello. Hi, Cassie. How are you doing?
Now, I thought I'd be talking to you from your home in Tasmania, but in fact, you're at the other end of the country. You're in Darwin right now.
Yeah, we managed to get two kids, two cats, a dog and our worldly goods across a continent in the middle of a plague, just in time for the build-up. All the locals think we're quite insane, but we're loving it so far.
Well, if that's not a great beginning for a novel, I don't know what is. So maybe in some of your spare time, perhaps, you could get pen to paper. I'll look into it.
And also with us is novelist, teacher and critic Tegan Bennett-Daylight, whose first novel was Bombora, and I can still remember a friend giving it to me and insisting that I just had to read it, which I did. And her latest book is a collection of essays on reading, writing and paying attention. It's called The Details. Tegan, welcome.
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Chapter 7: What role does friendship play in Amis's Inside Story?
So Cassie, I guess one of the things that you and Tegan were talking about was her, Tegan's new book, The Details. And so Tegan, in that book, you make a case for the importance of the sensory detail in both reading and writing. And I wonder what you mean by that.
It came out of many, many years of close reading and many, many years of teaching. I would often get students saying to me, nothing's ever happened to me. I have no story to tell. And my response was, yeah, well, there are only about three or four stories. So you're probably right about that. But one thing that does belong particularly to every person is detail. So I'm always encouraging them.
I got a beautiful piece from a student the other day where she wrote about the way the caravan rocked under her parents' footsteps when they went away on holiday. So it's those things that I'm talking about when I talk about detail. And I think it's that that I notice most of all in a book.
And Geordie, that telling detail or the closely observed moment, how important is that for you as a reader, do you think?
I think that it is the thing, the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle that sets something in motion. I must say that I adore the details. That collection of essays by Teagan is just the work of a glorious and proper reader. And it was a book that recalled me to this really crucial notion, which I first encountered in the work of Nabokov. who talked about a crow sitting on a fence.
But then when you had the crow extend its feathers and fan them out, it was that detail of noticing the fanned feather that quickened what could just be a few words on a page into something that lived and breathed. So really, it's all in the details.
And it's in the details across all genres, really, isn't it? I mean, it's something that Michael Connolly writes about or talks about in terms of detective fiction, that it's the attention to detail that works with his characters. So it's something that's about both literary and genre fiction, I guess, Tegan.
I absolutely agree with that, and actually I've been a big reader of good genre fiction for a long time, and I used to love the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, and there's something about she does light really beautifully, she does smell really beautifully. There's something very vivid about the way she writes. I could not tell you a single one of her plots, but I can remember the feel of the books.
Same with Conan Doyle, actually.
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Chapter 8: How do the discussions in this episode relate to the broader literary landscape?
He's so good on the sensory details, particularly the smell. And all you have to do with his novels is open it up, one of his maigres, and you're in Paris, and it's so redolent. So for me, yes, it's not about the plots, which are all uniformly, you know, kind of tidy and cleaned up by the end of, you know, 120 pages. But the sensory kind of universe remains.
It's interesting. isn't it? When I think of what detail has meant to me in the last few years of reading, I think of Melissa Harrison's All Among the Barley, which describes rural England in the 30s and just this incredible sense of season and nature and animals and insects and crops and just this incredibly beautiful detail.
Also, Richard Flanagan's latest book, which I can't even remember the name of it just off the top of my head. I only read it about two weeks ago, but he has some beautiful detail. But there can sometimes just be too much detail. Like sometimes I'm like, come on, get on with this damn story. I'm sick of hearing all this sort of accretion of atmosphere or... Or locale.
I almost can never get enough, to be brutally honest. I read Proust a couple of years ago for the first time. And in Proust, you just drown in detail. And I seemed to have just an endless amount of time for it. I used to have a friend who was a huge reader of Mervyn Peake, his Titus books, Titus Grown and Titus Alone. And even when you look on the page, it's crosshatched with detail.
Unbelievable detail. I've actually always loved that.
And it's that texture, which is also, I think, what makes Hilary Mantel's work so rich, is that she can layer, I think, the right amount of historical detail. So we don't always need to know how a button's made, but we'll know that it's different to a 21st century button.
Kate, you remember me raving on about that Patrick Gale book a year or two ago and his level of detail and I was complaining about how, I don't know, they were arriving at some house in the countryside and we had everything described to us about the building and the extension and where the stairs had been placed and it was just too much, for God's sake. Get on with it.
It is something that I think some historical writers give us every piece of detail. And what they want to show us is the detail of their research rather than the detail of observation. And it's not the same thing.
So true.
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