Millennial woman lost

Three novels about female identity

Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Pip Finkemeyer’s Sad Girl Novel (Ultimo, $34.99 pb, 304 pp) is likely to divide readers, based on its title alone. For this reader, the immediate response was cynicism: another début about a young woman adrift and feeling sorry for herself? While unhappy women have populated art – and created it – for centuries, in 2023 the ‘sad girl’ is an aesthetic shorthand that conjures images of Ultraviolence-era Lana Del Rey, pale Tumblr girls with dripping makeup, Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People. Female pain, flattened into a marketable package.

In actuality, Finkemeyer’s titular sad girl, Kim Mueller, isn’t all that miserable. An Australian living in Berlin, Kim sees a therapist, whom she likes and does not need to pay. She is writing a ‘sad girl novel’, yet worries little about its specifics or how to support herself while she writes. Her Turkish-German bestie, Belinay, has inherited wealth, as does American literary agent love interest, Matthew, who inspires Kim to write full-time. The question of whether Kim’s pursuit is worthwhile is undercut by her lack of obligations and by her humorous, self-aware narration.

Kim’s voice is a highlight and lends sharpness to scenes that might otherwise lack direction. Whether detailing the disappointing bleakness of Frankfurt Book Fair or the fashion choices of Berghain fuckboi Benedict, her observations make her an enjoyable companion. Yet Kim’s self-awareness has a distancing effect, placing her – and the reader, by extension – at an ironic remove. It is difficult to care all that much, since Kim herself does not seem to care: about her novel, about art in general, about anything besides a vague longing for external validation.

Finkemeyer attempts to draw comparisons between Kim’s desire to write and her best friend’s new motherhood. ‘I would collapse if I gave birth to a living being who was more important than me, that was also alive (unlike a book),’ Kim reflects, in the novel’s final quarter. ‘A baby would relegate me to the periphery of my own narrative, as a supporting cast member.’ While these parallels and their implications are interesting, they feel at once underdeveloped and overexplained, given Kim’s distance from her creative process. Despite the narrator’s occasional remarks about class, privilege, her economic precarity (compared with Matthew and Belinay), and the guilt over leaving behind her unwell mother in rural Victoria, none of these concerns is palpable enough to lend weight to her plight. Sad Girl Novel may broadly be a novel about female sadness and creativity under late capitalism. Ultimately, it sheds little light on either of these things.

Marnie Fowler, the heroine of Genevieve Novak’s sophomore novel Crushing (HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 368 pp), is another millennial woman lost. After being dumped by her fifth consecutive boyfriend in the space of a decade, Marnie must grapple with the dilemma of who she really is, single and twenty-eight years old. In a culture where turning thirty can feel like a death knell for women, the late-twenties identity crisis is fertile ground for excavation. Crushing sits comfortably in the company not only of Novak’s début, No Hard Feelings (2022), but other recent Australian releases such as Sad Girl Novel, Ella Baxter’s New Animal (2021), and Ewa Ramsey’s The Morbids (2020).

If Marnie’s eventual self-acceptance seems preordained (and it does), her path to getting there is entertaining. While her ex, Eddie, remains a cipher, as do his predecessors, Marnie’s postbreakup existence is populated by a cast of supporting characters who challenge her habits, boundaries, and assumptions. Among these is extroverted housemate Claud, with whom Marnie forms a codependent friendship that mirrors her serial monogamist patterns, and Isaac, a happily coupled-up southside Adonis whose (largely text-based) flirtations plunge Marnie into uncharted grey areas. There is also misanthropic café owner Kit and Nicola, the older sister whose imperfect family life Marnie alternately envies and sees as a waste of potential.

Novak paints an affectionate portrait of contemporary Melbourne, drawing on her characters’ lockdown memories to inform their present realities in a way that never feels ham-fisted. Sections that deal with Marnie’s career – or lack thereof – are particularly well executed. ‘Even though I could probably have done the job under anaesthesia, I had no complaints,’ Marnie muses about her position as second in command at a struggling CBD café. ‘I knew I was supposed to want more … a salary that curved upward, responsibility, five-figure bonuses.’ That Marnie does not want more, and is relatively content with her lot, is a refreshing departure from the either-or aimlessness and aspirationalism that often characterises the (typically white, middle-class, tertiary-educated) heroines of millennial fiction. It also feels naturalistic, in light of changing conversations about work and ambition in the pandemic era.

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Although consistently engaging and light-hearted in tone, Crushing could have easily been one hundred pages shorter without losing much in the way of character development or narrative coherence; indeed, more selectivity with regard to scene inclusion would likely have added momentum. I sometimes had the sense that Novak was overly enamoured of her characters’ banter and wanderings through present-day Melbourne, at the expense of plot. This structural looseness has its upsides – Novak’s enjoyment of her characters and the world they inhabit is contagious – yet it does reinforce the predictability of Marnie’s trajectory, such that her revelations about singledom on the threshold of thirty, when they finally arrive, feel less than revelatory.

It would be easy to assume, from the current abundance of ‘sad girl’ literature, that identity crises are exclusive to women in their late twenties. Toni Jordan’s Prettier if She Smiled More (Hachette, $32.99 pb, 400 pp) makes a case for mid-life growing pains. A sequel of sorts to comedy of manners Dinner with the Schnabels (2022), Jordan’s latest effort centres on Kylie Schnabel, a forty-three-year-old firstborn so excessively Type A she rocks a navy suit and block heels to her job at a suburban pharmacy. Over the course of one miserable Monday, Kylie learns that said pharmacy has been bought out by a Priceline-like conglomerate and that her partner is cheating. Ruts are broken. Shenanigans ensue. Personal growth is a foregone conclusion.

Kylie is drawn in broad strokes. In the main, this appears to be done deliberately, to capitalise on the set-up’s comedic potential. Yet it does render Kylie, with her prudish distaste for makeup and her monologues about the importance of healthy eating, cartoonish; her need for change starkly one-dimensional. Supporting characters, such as passive-aggressive pharmacy manager Gail and interfering mother Gloria, likewise have an exaggerated quality, which diminishes their humanity and leaves an echo of shrillness.

Jordan’s sense of humour, while ever-present, is occasionally undermined by a tendency towards obviousness. Take, for example, a description of a pizzeria near Kylie’s workplace, whose ‘unappetising menu and improbable hours … made Kylie suspect that their customers ordered their pizza with an additional, offmenu extra – meth’. There is nothing groundbreaking about the notion of a dodgy suburban business doubling as a drug-front, and the specification of ‘meth’ serves only to highlight the banality of using methamphetamine addicts as a punchline.

Overall, Prettier if She Smiled More functions well as a standalone novel, though I did wonder whether prior familiarity with the Schnabels would have endeared me more to them. Certain characters, like Kylie’s veterinarian pal Alice and half-sister Monica, were so sparsely introduced and inessential to the plot that I suspected they were only included for cameo purposes. Fans of Dinner with the Schnabels may gain some amusement from revisiting these characters. Nevertheless, Kylie’s evolution is the crux of the novel. In this regard, Jordan delivers a technically satisfying arc. I only wished that more care had been taken in humanising all players, rather than simply hitting the expected beats. g

Laura Elizabeth Woollett is the author of two novels: Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018) and The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021).

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Lust for life

Three novels about artists

A. Frances Johnson

Popular Western culture remains fascinated with the figure of the artist. This fascination is perhaps a more interesting object of study than the many depictions arising from it. The figure of the artist has been represented as predominantly masculine, replete with tics of grandiosity, addiction, and suffering. Cheesy and/or technically inadequate depictions of artistic process often attend. Artists are too often presented as savant thunderbirds unable to do the washing, let alone hang it out. How can such figures hope to solve complex conceptual and material creative problems? Such tropes can seem indestructible, causing domino effects of plot to swirl with tedious predictability.

Poststructuralism, postmodernism, and feminism have placed representations of the genius artist under pressure. Seminal feminist art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin have inspired revisionist art histories and encouraged generations of women artists to move front and centre, creating art as acts of resistance to the dominant culture. Institutions and museums are also on watch to redress gender and race imbalances in their collections and in their scheduling of solo, group, and retrospective shows.

A scatter of novelists have contested simplistic tropes of creative identity. Notable works in the Australian sphere include Sue Woolfe’s The Painted Woman (1989) and Emily Bitto’s The Strays (2015). Internationally, Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Map and the Territory (2011), Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988) and Marie Darrieussecq’s fictionalised biography Being Here: The life of Paula Modersohn Becker (2017) offer challenging portrayals of art ecosystems. Three new Australian novels consider the role of the artist with varying degrees of success.

Girl in a Pink Dress by Kylie Needham (Penguin, $27.99 hb, 188 pp) follows Woolfe’s novel in the sense of it being that rare Künstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Despite this début novel’s derivative title, Frances is an affecting character–narrator. Living in a lonely Sydney flat with her mother, she opines that art has always been ‘my company, my comfort, my free ticket to elsewhere …’ She reflects on Australian women artists sidelined throughout history, though this knowledge is never expressed.

Frances falls for her saturnine art lecturer Clem, who is classically mad, bad, and dangerous to know, a painter of De Kooningesque abstract expressionist lineage, while she is a landscapist, compelled by effects of light. The pair soon set up house in an old goldmining town, Bald Hill, escaping the gossipy intensities of the Sydney art scene, including those of Clem’s famous painter father, Albert. The truth that dare not speak its name is that Frances is likely more talented than the somewhat two-dimensional Clem. Nonetheless, Clem is ‘painting’s heir’ and his forthcoming solo show takes on that very anxiety-of-influence title, a grandiose tag if ever there was one. What could possibly go wrong?

While Clem has insight into his bad-boy-of-the art-world PR, such images serve him financially and professionally. In poignant contrast, Frances settles for thirty per cent income from her disreputable gallerist. Given that many commercial gallerists extract fifty per cent commissions, a return of thirty per cent is punitive indeed, but Frances does not demur. Love alone speeds her past such rampant exploitations.

Things turn rocky in the campagna when Frances is enlisted to paint in background and detail in Clem’s solo show paintings. Thus she nails her professional and personal coffin as both art assistant and muse. Clem, a painter of strewn female body parts, is averse to planning, drawing, and even underpainting, so his request for detailing perplexes the reader. As Clem instructs Frances in relation to her own paintings: ‘Just hit it with a first mark.’

The dramatic denouement at Bald Hill is striking, if reminiscent of a similar scene from Bitto’s The Strays. By the novel’s close, a mature Frances, still painting, makes peace with Clem’s accolades, too much peace perhaps. She notes Clem’s ‘impressive career’ without any of her earlier sharp insights into avant-garde clichés.

The Prize, by Kim E. Anderson (Pantera Press, $32.99 pb, 322 pp), is a début historical novel that revisits the 1943 Archibald Prize scandal, when portrait painter William Dobell was temporarily stripped of his prize win for his expressionistic portrait of Joshua Smith. Vexatious competitors Mary Edwards and Joseph Wolinski took the Art Gallery of New South Wales trustees to the Supreme Court of New South Wales, claiming that the winning painting was a caricature, not a portrait. Bizarrely, Dobell’s once willing sitter threw his lot in with the plaintiffs. The prosecuting barrister, and later chief justice of the High Court of Australia, was Garfield Barwick (he lost his argument that caricature and portraiture were distinct, but the case made his name). The proceedings were a distraction from World War II horrors; thousands flocked to court to leer at the portrait and await Justice Roper’s measured remarks. Roper ruled ultimately that the Dobell image bore a strong likeness to Smith and was in fact a portrait within the meaning of the words of the Archibald will. Fallout from the case, an ‘artistic Pearl Harbor’ in Anderson’s words, was devastating for both men; afterwards, they never met again.

The novel’s other dramatic driver is that Dobell and quite possibly Smith were gay men and likely lovers in socially conservative, homophobic Sydney. Both had worked as wartime camouflage painters, but notwithstanding any coded queer knowledge in Smith’s scant papers, Smith’s homosexuality is unconfirmed. Anderson takes a brave plunge and confidently presents Smith as Dobell’s lover of many years’ standing.

The novel is divided into two sections. The first twelve chapters laboriously domesticise Dobell and Smith’s relationship, though wonderful snapshots of cosmopolitan European refugee culture around Kings Cross punctuate domestic longueurs. Occasional technical anomalies arise as Dobell’s portrait of Smith is completed in a single sitting. That aside, there are simply too many cups of tea.

Dobell, confident and intelligent, was not a closeted gay man. Smith apparently was. Anderson describes Smith as intelligent and sensitive, but these qualities are not dramatised. Thus, the romance lacks credible erotic or emotional charge. Smith comes across as a sniping mummy’s boy. Even the sitter of Smith’s 1943 Archibald portrait, Dame Mary Gilmore, snaps at him in a rousing cameo as she drives the artist to court:

‘Oh Joshua do grow up and stop whining,’ snapped Mary. […]

‘Dobell is a master,’ she said. ‘His portraits are captivating, darling. I like them. It is not meant to be an exact likeness. That is old school.’

What doesn’t come across is that Smith himself was an excellent painter, as his portrait of Gilmore (runner-up in the 1943 Prize) and uncanny Group Portrait (1942) attest. Smith went on to win the 1944 Archibald Prize for his portrait of John Solomon Rosevear.

The novel really takes off midway as a compelling courtroom drama that brings to life a fascinating event in Australian cultural history. Here, Anderson deftly plumbs legal, journalistic, and cultural archives as dynamic scenework. No mean feat, though she makes us wait.

Prize culture also features in Che’s Last Embrace (Arcadia, $ 32.95 pb, 176 pp) by Nicholas Hasluck. Hasluck’s fourteenth novel is a meticulously researched account of revolutionary South American politics, focusing on Che Guevara’s efforts to foment broader South American revolution. Moving between past and present, the circuitous plot hinges on the supposed existence of Guevara rebel and journalist Marvic Laredo, aka El Australiano, whose Australian forebears founded the utopian socialist community in 1890s Paraguay. Laredo’s writings open the novel, and the reader quickly learns that the archive, like Guevara’s death, may not be what it seems.

The thriller shades are focalised by Australian archaeologist Ian, working on the restoration of Jesuitical missions in the Chiquitos region outside La Paz. He is being mentored by a distinguished, rather Graham Greeneish archaeologist known as ‘The Maestro’. Mysterious contacts, often untrustworthy barflies or jaded journalists, crop up as recognisable, enjoyable genre types, all poised to help Ian come closer to the man or myth that was/ is Marvic Laredo.

Strangely, we never see Ian or The Maestro at work. There is a lot of café sitting and authoritative disquisitions on truth, memoir, politics, and art. But no digging or restoring. An art subplot soon appears, explaining Ian’s persistent interrogation of old revolutionary intrigues. Back in Australia, Ian’s ‘argumentative’, ‘excitable’ sister Anita is out to win a prize designed, implausibly, to sit on the entablature of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Determined to fashion a sculptural likeness of Marvic Laredo, Anita hounds her brother via email to confirm Laredo’s heroic identity. Meanwhile, the Maestro, ever a paternalistic brother in arms, shores up Ian’s perception of his sister as ‘impulsive’, ‘talkative’, and as someone who may not know what she is doing. Anita, differently mad, bad, and dangerous to know, is set in contradistinction to the methodical, rational mien of the sober, male archaeological researcher.

Anita is only developed through occasional emails to her brother. Former Guevara rebel Canela Dochera is given more nuance, but she, unlike Anita, appears in active scenes. The novel potentially succeeds as a political–historical thriller, butted up against an unconvincing art narrative and a main character who, inexplicably, gives up his day job to research his sister’s ‘weird’ project. Art can do that to you. g

A. Frances Johnson is a poet and Honorary Associate in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Literary Studies

Dodging bullets

The state of literary studies today

Paul Giles

Professing Criticism: Essays on the organization of literary study

by John Guillory

University of Chicago Press

US$29 pb, 407 pp

John Guillory is an eminent professor of English at New York University who has written extensively on English studies as an academic discipline. Professing Criticism brings together in revised form a selection of essays he has written on this subject over the past twenty years, together with some new material. Overall, the book offers a very knowledgeable and incisive analysis of the state of literary studies today.

Guillory’s central theme is that ‘professing criticism’ is something of a contradiction in terms, since criticism has more traditionally been considered something for amateurs. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critics tended to range widely, addressing broad social issues in their popular journalistic pieces. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, this version of the critic was considered lightweight by the literary scholars and philologists who took it upon themselves to professionalise English studies in universities, as what William James described as ‘the PhD octopus’ gathered momentum. ‘Impressionistic’ was for many years a term of abuse that textual scholars would hurl at critics who privileged their own idiosyncratic style of response above the meticulous business of archival or bibliographical research.

As Guillory points out, it was not until 1950 that the word ‘criticism’ was added to the constitutional statement of purpose by the MLA, the Modern Language Association of America,