Theory and Practice

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. (Feb.)