Chapter 1: What books are discussed in this episode?
Hi, welcome to The Bookshelf on Radio National. I'm Kate Evans, still speaking to you from my lounge room.
And I'm Cassie McCullough, joining you from the ABC Studios with a new Fiction Week. And once a month, we're asking you to join us for a book club discussion too.
Yes.
And in the first week of June, we're getting ready to talk Australian fiction. But Cassie, some people are finding it a bit hard to get hold of Shirley Hazard's book, The Transit of Venus.
Yeah, we thought it would be easier. I got mine at a second-hand bookshop. By that, I mean I had to ask one before I found a copy. And Kate, you borrowed yours from a friend. But with so many libraries still closed, it's been hard for people to get a copy of Shirley Hazard's Transit of Venus.
But if you do have a copy, keep reading it. But what we're going to do is we're going to make another suggestion for a book that we know is much easier to find. And that's Joan London's The Golden Age.
Which is actually a brilliant choice. It's set in Western Australia in the 1950s during a polio epidemic. The Golden Age was the name of a real institution for children with polio in Western Australia, but Joan London has made a fictional story from it with children and refugees and a changing Australia.
I read it when it was first released about six years ago and look forward to reading it again. Poetic and beautiful and with the sound of a beachside industry of some kind in Perth, if I've remembered it correctly.
So Joan London's The Golden Age. Read it for the first week of June and we'll also still be talking about Shirley Hazard's Transit of Venus 2. But now on with the show.
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Chapter 2: How is Joan London's The Golden Age relevant to Australian fiction?
I think it wouldn't be correct to say business is booming, but business is doing okay, is doing well.
And Simon, do people know what they want or do they ask you for advice?
I think for the most part, during these current circumstances, people are coming to the bookshop knowing precisely what they want. They know they can't browse the shelves as they normally would.
So shows like this one, for example, and podcasts like Nicole's really help readers identifying the books that they want to read so they can come to us and have an idea of what they want right away and we can just pass it across to them immediately. No more browsing. No more browsing. Well, that's changed this weekend. People have started to be able to browse again.
But yeah, for a good couple of months there, we were just serving people from the front door. It was a little bit surreal.
Well, you've both read all the books that we've assigned for this week, so this is going to be a different type of all-in book discussion today, Cassie.
Yeah, let's get into it. Let's start with Curtis Sittenfeld's latest novel. We talked about Sittenfeld a few weeks ago, I think, because she also rewrote Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which one of our guests, Aoife Clifford, was saying was a perfect read for isolation.
Well, that book is called Eligible and it's funny and it's witty and it combines these Austen-ish Bennett sisters who are entirely contemporary ratbags. They've got terrible parents, their money crises are all about the American healthcare system and there's a reality TV show thrown in there too.
I'm rereading that one but I'd have to say, Cassie, that her new novel isn't anything like that one which was eligible as light and fluffy and funny.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in Curtis Sittenfeld's Rodham?
But at these early stages, when he's smitten with Hilary because of her brains and her personality, I really felt for him.
And so we get a depiction of this young woman who's very smart, who's savvy, who's outspoken, who's quite happy to stand up to the most powerful men in the room at a time when as a law student, there were other law lecturers who made a point of putting the young women in the room down and treating them in just awful ways.
And this is where as a piece of fiction, that's quite interesting because she's drawing on known stories of this real woman and turning it into a life. What did you make, Simon, of that early portrait of Hillary?
I love the first portion of the book. I've read both of her autobiographies in Living History and the more recent one, What Happened? And I just had a real, I'm just really intrigued by Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton as this sort of power political couple. And I thought it was, I was absolutely enamored by Curtis and Field's ability to just sort of reenact those early years of Hillary's life.
I was absolutely captivated by that.
That's really interesting, Simon, because as I was reading it, I was thinking, gosh, if I'd ever read a biography or autobiography of Hillary Clinton's, I would know where to place this as a piece of writing. But because I haven't, I didn't know whether it was being fresh or a bit tongue in cheek or caricature-ish of them. What did you see?
I certainly didn't feel it was caricatured, but I do think certain elements were sort of whisked over, obviously, because this isn't an autobiography and where Sittenfeld doesn't want to sit the author or marinate in these sort of duller passages of Hilary's life.
But I really thought that was very true to what I'd read about Hilary in the books that she'd written about her own life, just sort of sped along a little bit for the sake of the narrative momentum.
But as you say, Cassie, it is a curious book to get your head around, particularly because the first 150 pages or so seem to be very close to a real life before she then turns it off and does something else with it. So I want you to hear what it is that Curtis Sittenfeld herself has to say about this. I asked her about how she decided when to make things change in her fictional version.
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Chapter 4: How does the portrayal of Hillary Clinton differ in Rodham?
He's never been married. And he runs his own computer repair business. He's an unusual man, I think. Regimented is definitely the word. He goes for a run at the same time every day. He has a different day of the week for each household task. So the kitchen might be Monday. Mopping the family room floor might be Wednesday. He prides himself on his very careful driving.
He answers to someone he calls the traffic god. He polices the other people in his building to make sure that they follow the recycling rules. He's a fairly uptight man. He comes from a big family. He's got four sisters who are all pretty rowdy and rambunctious, and they see him, they tease him quite a lot for being what they call, quite accurately, a fuss budget.
I think he's a sympathetic character, but... I wasn't wild about him myself.
So Cassie, you read the beginning of the book and I have to confess the beginning of it drove me insane. And I have a high tolerance for domestic details in books, but I couldn't see the point of the details at first. I found him dull. I was getting quite irritated until I got to the section where he saw the redhead at the side of the road and when we started to hear about the traffic god.
So what did you make of that beginning, Cassie?
I love the writing. I think the writing is just some of the best I've seen in, well, in, well, weeks, Kate, weeks. Just short sentences. I love that. I think he's, Micah, the character, I kind of, oh yeah, I could see him straight away. I knew what was going on. I understand what you're talking about. But the dialogue... What a master of dialogue she is.
I read something, Cassie, really interesting in an interview that she gave that she writes things out in longhand and then she reads the book into a tape recorder and she listens back to it to make sure that the dialogue rings true for her, for each character. Yeah.
Well, there's a lesson for young writers because it works for sure.
Because there's a scene later on when we meet his family and we get such a portrait of all of these people, these very chaotic, noisy people. And I think that's almost all done by dialogue. And it is so effective. I mean, you can see and hear these people as they're moving in and out of the room. I thought that was just a fantastic scene.
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