Reading - January 2019

I discovered Rachel Cusk last year, and spent most of an overnight stay in St Florian reading her recent trilogy, while my husband tossed and turned, disturbed by monastery bells. Now I have read The Country Life, Arlington Park, The Temporary  and In the Fold as well. I am looking forward to reading everything she writes

Interviewed about that recent trilogy, (Outline, Kudos and Transit) Cusk has declared the death of character. While I think such a statement is ridiculous in general, inasmuch as it applies to her own enormous but particular talent it is probably sensible. That is to say, character is not her strength. Nor is plot. What she is good at is analogy and what she is truly brilliant at is clear, careful, detailed observation. Her descriptive writing is, as someone I know put it, "forensic".

As I read most of the books that I have read by Cusk on a Kindle, I have an electronic list of all the parts of them that I highlighted because I thought them so strikingly good. Looking through them, I see that Cusk can be very, very funny, but, to reiterate, the thing I especially admire in her work is her ability to describe with perfect accuracy phenomena that I have observed and long wished to describe, without ever finding the words.

Rather than download my full and very lengthy collection of admirable quotes from Cusk's writing, I have chosen just one as an example, taken from In the Fold. In it, Rachel Cusk describes the kind of busy road one drives along so often in overcrowded Britain, the kind that slices through an area of housing that was never built with motor vehicles in mind. Her careful - forensic? - choice of words means an everyday scene that on the face of it is dull and ugly, a scene that many writers would simply ignore, is evoked as the unbearable place to live that such places are in reality for so many:

"There the coast road passed through, a fuming, hooting, rattling cascade of metal the narrow, decorous terraces struggled to contain. Great lorries like dinosaurs manoeuvred on the small roundabouts. Dirty trucks freighted with skips and scaffolding roared past, driven by men who gazed blankly through their spattered windscreens. Beside them the pavements and brick walls of front gardens looked miniature: the gardens and the facades of the houses shook like toys as the lorries passed and the daffodils seemed to jolt from side to side in the grass. The houses looked so vulnerable next to the pounding road that it was difficult to believe in the world in which they had been constructed. Some of the terraces were only fifty or sixty years old but they seemed rooted in a past that had become meaningless. Great weights hurtled back and forth at high velocity past the little, unaccustomed rows of houses, four feet from their front gates."

Helen Garner shares Rachel Cusk's  ability to observe the physical world and the people she meets “forensically” and then to translate her observation into words. Although she is one of my favourite writers, given that I don’t like the intrusive nature of biographies,  I don’t quite know why I borrowed Bernadette Brennan’s prizewinning biography of Garner from the library. I must admit that, within its genre, it is an excellent book and almost as readable as Garner’s own works. However, by the end, I felt that I had been nosily rummaging about in the subject’s underwear drawer and, unsurprisingly, had emerged with a slight sense of disappointment.

Until I read the biography, there was only one element of Garner’s work that I did not admire - that was a slight tendency to overblown emotion, tipping into sentimentality. Unfortunately, the picture of Garner that emerges from the book suggests that she is capable of an impulsive emotional volatility. This made me suspect that the sentimentality I detected in some of the work might be the mere tip of the iceberg. I  was left with a disturbing impression of someone more narcissistic and less wise than I had imagined.

I was also shocked that Garner identified with Anu Singh, the murderer of Joe Cinque and that she does not believe evil exists. To me the story of Joe Cinque’s death is a story of how evil does exist, but only when we make the choice to embrace it. In my view, every day of our lives is a day in which we make countless decisions about whether to be good or not - impatience, my besetting fault, is a small concession to evil, because it usually entails a choice not to be kind. Kindness is a denial of evil and evil is a decision to love yourself instead of others. I’m shocked that Garner does not recognise this, as I thought her writing was at heart deeply moral.

Forensic is not a word one would,use about Bill Shorten - although ruthless might fit the bill. David Marr’s Quarterly Essay about the man who I am almost convinced will become Australia’s next Prime Minister at the federal election due in May is not very edifying. Our probable next leader is a man who understands power, who wants to be Prime Minister, but who seems to believe in nothing. You need to be tough in politics, but this person appears to have no loyalty to anyone or anything. He also does not seem very interested in ideas or the life of the mind. I suppose everything will muddle along though, just as before, bug with a few more taxes and a lot more irritating initiatives to remodel society in the shape of whichever new identity interest group shouts loudest on the day. Marr is a good writer, capturing vignettes of party conference scenes and plotters’ meetings very well, but there is, inevitably, quite a lot of detail about the process of Shorten’s political career within the union movement and later the Labor Party that I found hard going.

I also read Cure by Jo Marchant. It describes a number of cases and studies that have demonstrated that placeboes are effective, even when those being given them know that they are placeboes. It is one of the most staggering things I have ever read, seeming to prove irrefutably that physical health is intimately tied up with mental state. Fascinating.