'This chapter focuses on three late-career Carey novels, namely My Life as a Fake, Parrot and Olivier in America, and Amnesia, on the thread to complete my analysis of Carey’s ongoing engagement in and around his fiction with the status of the Australian author in the transnational literary marketplace. Carey’s visibility in this period is marked by his shifting position in relation to the globalising publishing industry, the rise of digital publishing, and the mutations of academic and political recognition into convertible cultural capital in the literary field. These changes in practice and modes of recognition are analogous with the aggressive move towards monopoly capitalism by corporate systems in liberal democracies, including Australia.' (Publication abstract)
'Analysing one of Peter Carey’s hallmarks—fact vs fake or fiction, truth vs untruth —, this article explores the wide-ranging implications and ramifications of the Ern Malley affair in Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake, a story published in 2003, but which still resonates in 2020 given the current global attention for “fake news” and “fake truths” often used in Donald Trump’s toxic propaganda. This timely recovery of a debate in Australian literature that started in the 1990s is instrumental in making a case for rigorous textual analysis while tying it up with questions of legitimacy which have always haunted colonial and postcolonising Australia. By probing the text/context issue and linking it to the critique of New Criticism’s isolation of the text from contemporary circumstances as insufficient to capture textual meaning fully or appropriately, Vernay’s analysis attempts at reconciling the word and the world.'
Source: Abstract.
This essay examines how Carey displays the multiple fakeries of fiction in My Life as a Fake. It notes the multiple inter-textual references to the Ern Malley hoax and the gothic horror of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It examines the three unreliable narrating voices, the uneven characterisation of Christopher Chubb, and the magic realism seeking to animate Bob McCorkle and his present/absent book My Life as a Fake. It argues that the dazzling display of meta-fictional complexity, much celebrated by reviewers, contributes to the book's failure to create engaging characters and a credible narrative. [From the journal's webpage]
