Theory & Practice

September 10, 2024
Theory & Practice is a quietly experimental new novel from two-time Miles Franklin winner Michelle de Kretser (Scary Monsters). Set mainly in St Kilda in 1986, it captures a snapshot in the life of its narrator, a young woman recently transplanted from Sydney to begin her postgraduate studies on the novels of Virginia Woolf. With a narrator who reflects on her evolving approach to writing, de Kretser has written a novel that doesn’t read like a novel but rather an artfully melded combination of fiction, memoir and essay. In this form, being not quite fiction but not quite nonfiction, Theory & Practice occupies a hazy in-between, exploring the intersection of its titular concepts and carving out a genre of its own. Reading as autofiction, the novel makes it impossible to know where de Kretser’s reflections end and her imaginings begin, but each moment and musing of the narrator’s chaotic inner life ring true. As ever with de Kretser, there is a timelessness to her prose—the novel feels entirely contemporary, and yet it reads as though it may have been in the canon for decades. ‘Writing back’ to Woolf’s literary legacy, Theory & Practice calls to mind Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s But the Girl and echoes Sigrid Nunez’s A Feather on the Breath of God, sitting at a neat intersection of the two, where it is sure to please fans of both.

Starred review from October 14, 2024
In this sharp-witted and mesmerizing outing from de Kretser (The Life to Come), a Melbourne graduate student navigates the disconnect between her feminist ideals and her messy love life. The unnamed narrator, who’s writing a thesis about the portrayal of gender in Virginia Woolf’s novels, recounts her childhood in Sri Lanka, where she was sexually abused by a British man at 11. She went on to embrace feminism, and she struggles now with French post-structuralist theory, which is in vogue on the Melbourne campus, because of its indifference to feminist issues and her desire to upend the patriarchy (“One could not overthrow the Father, who was always already dead, although his phallus was everywhere in society and culture”). She also ruminates on contemporary Australian films, such as Gillian Leahy’s Life Without Steve, which follows a woman over one year as she attempts to move on from an affair. The film resonates with the narrator because of her own tortured love affair with a fellow student who remains committed to his girlfriend (“I thought, I didn’t know that this could be art. It was the first time I’d seen my everyday, unglamorous world in a film”). The narrator also vacillates between prizing intellectual theorizing or direct action, reflecting on the anticolonial resistance of Ceylonese activist E.W. Perera. Taken together, the narrator’s clever political insights and beautiful depictions of art and literature offer readers a view into a captivating mind. De Kretser is at the top of her game. Agent: Sarah Lutyens, Lutyens & Rubinstein.