'Set in Sydney, Paris and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is a mesmerising novel about the stories we tell and don't tell ourselves as individuals, as societies and as nations. It feels at once firmly classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.
'Pippa is a writer who longs for success. Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time. Driven by riveting stories and unforgettable characters, here is a dazzling meditation on intimacy, loneliness and our flawed perception of other people.
'Profoundly moving as well as bitingly funny, The Life to Come reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform, distort and undo the present.' (Synopsis)
For Chris
and in memory of faithful Oliver
'The refugee novel is a problematic classificiation, especially when one adds a national label to it. This chapter examines the writing of Behrouz Boochani, Michelle de Kretser, and Felicity Castagna in the context Australia’s treatment of refugees. It argues that refugee fiction can play a vital epistemological and ethical role in the Australian context, while also emphasizing the dangers of commodification that dog the category of “refugee writing.”' (Publication abstract)
'The making of the Asian Australian novel is the unmaking of oppressive notions of history, subjectivity and literary form. Locating ethnic representational politics within power structures of race and nation, this chapter contends that Asian Australian identity is a site of hybrid instability realised through nonlinear forms of storytelling. The chapter examines national and diasporic paradigms across historical and contemporary trajectories of this literature: earlier Chinese Australian novels that blur boundaries between fictional and factual claims; Bildungsroman novels that trouble ethnocentric narratives of either assimilation or return; multicultural novels that unveil ongoing racism in liberal-pluralist ideals; and transnational novels that reimagine the Australian relationship with postcolonial and globalising Asian modernity. Reflecting on the limits of a critical humanist agenda, the chapter identifies an alternative paradigm of Asian Australian storytelling that employs speculative tactics to depict the land, species, climate change and Asian–Indigenous connections. This ecocritical paradigm challenges a normative ideal of the modern, autonomous and sovereign individual as one the migrant subject should integrate into, while pointing to an under-explored terrain for Asian Australian writers whose focus on diversity and justice would offer important insights into the shifting human condition.'
Source: Author's summary.
'As compared to American or British literature, Australian literature has had far fewer overtly political novels or poems, particularly those attuned to actual electoral politics or public ideological configurations. Yet recently more concrete references to actual political figures occur in poetry, and contemporary Australian poets have spotlighted not only the sheer fact of the politician but the way the political affects the limits and conditions of the literary. In fiction by Peter Rose, Ellen Van Neerven, and Alexis Wright, fictional Prime Ministers represent possibilities and dangers of the political imaginary, while Charlotte Wood, Michelle De Kretser, Sara Dowse, and Alice Nelson pursue a literary path of writing around the nation rather than in or of it, showing how politics can at once be tacit and focal, interstitial and implicit. Importantly, these writers show that politics cannot just be included in narrative but can operate as a narrative.'
Source: Abstract.
'Pippa Reynolds is a novelist on the rise, one who draws greater critical and popular attention with each work. Exhaustive in her artistry, she carries a notebook everywhere she goes, jotting down scraps from other people's lives, meanings for unfamiliar words, observed details of place and space. Her husband's musical background and his way of speaking "with the force of poetry" are his chief charms. Pippa asserts, "He'll be good for my writing" (188). She eyes a future of winning awards. Pippa is ambitious, willing to work hard, determined; in fact, she has "everything needed for greatness except talent" (205).' (Introduction)
'Humans are narrative creatures. We tell stories to make sense of ourselves, but our stories – be they historical, political, fictional, or personal – shape us as much as we shape them. In the service of narrative expediency, we often sacrifice nuance. We turn chance to prophecy, and accidents into choices. We justify and excuse ourselves. We anoint heroes and villains. As novelist Michelle de Kretser warns, it is ‘frighteningly easy’ to turn the people around us into characters and to forget that: ‘The only life in which you play a leading role is your own.’ De Kretser’s new novel, The Life to Come, cleverly exposes the perils of narrative egocentrism by refusing to create a centre. Rather, she splits the book into five distinct sections that overlay rather than interconnect, and in which human complexity is privileged over narrative simplicity.' (Introduction)
'Near the end of Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, an elderly woman named Christabel throws two novels she has been reading into the bin. One of them is by a writer named George Meshaw, whose work ‘concerned itself with the brutal and inadequate mechanism of the world. As if that were any kind of news!’ The other is by Pippa Reynolds, a contemporary version of the ‘silly lady novelist’ who once attracted the withering disapproval of George Eliot.' (Introduction)
'Pippa Reynolds is a novelist on the rise, one who draws greater critical and popular attention with each work. Exhaustive in her artistry, she carries a notebook everywhere she goes, jotting down scraps from other people's lives, meanings for unfamiliar words, observed details of place and space. Her husband's musical background and his way of speaking "with the force of poetry" are his chief charms. Pippa asserts, "He'll be good for my writing" (188). She eyes a future of winning awards. Pippa is ambitious, willing to work hard, determined; in fact, she has "everything needed for greatness except talent" (205).' (Introduction)
'Winner of the 2018 Miles Franklin Award, The Life to Come is an expansive story that explores the microaggressions that occur in contemporary life.'
'Pippa used to be Narelle when she lived up north with her mum. She changed her name the day she turned 18 because she was convinced that no one named Narelle could ever win the Booker. And Pippa desperately wanted to win the Booker. She still does. For as long as she can remember she has wanted to be a writer – a successful writer.' (Introduction)
'Among the subversive pleasures of Paul Theroux’s travel writing are his intermittent encounters with Australians. To use the local vernacular, he hates our guts.Over the decades, Theroux has happened across us everywhere — mountain highways, city parks, remote deserts, tropical islands — and invariably he finds us tanned, crude and vapid. Our presence affronts his efforts to venture forth in the bazaar of the global exotic, unmolested by the ordinary.“The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume,’’ he writes at one point. After one night on a train, closely confined with a batch of Aussie backpackers, he calls their company ‘‘a reminder that I’d touched bottom’’.Theroux doesn’t get Australians. We pop up in the most outlandish places, like some noxious weed. We move bravely through the world, but always in a bubble of unthinking privilege. We are inveterate wanderers, though in Theroux’s cantankerous view also rubes who don’t understand or appreciate the places we go. Why, he seems to be asking, do we bother?' (Introduction)
'Children of Australia’s long boom – who travel the world only to complain about lack of good coffee, who signal virtue by retweeting an asylum seeker story, who couldn’t imagine living in a house with only one bathroom, who are “really into food” – may find Michelle de Kretser’s new book an uncomfortable read.'(Introduction)
'Michelle de Kretser is shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize. In this special Stella interview, Michelle shares her favourite Australian women writers from the recent past and what inspired The Life to Come.' (Introduction)
'Six years ago, The Stella Prize burst onto the Australian literary scene with an air of urgency. The A$50,000 award was the progeny of the Stella Count – a campaign highlighting the under-representation of women authors in book reviews and awards lists. In the years since, the prize has challenged the gendered ways in which we think about “significance” and “seriousness” in literature.' (Introduction)
