Books in Crisis

I was extremely disheartened by the news in October that Radio National listeners had banded together and voted Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton the greatest book of the 21st century. "I love you, Australia", said Dalton in response to the news. One of my email correspondents put it better: "faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark this". A perk of occasionally writing negative reviews is that whenever a book you've been even a little snide about attains a badge of success, be it an award listing or othersuch, people will email to let you know, as if to remind you that you are fallible and probably wrong. This is especially the case when a famous author disagrees with your assessment. Peter Carey apparently thought that Richard Flanagan's Question 7 might be the "most significant work of Australian art in the last 100 years" (come on, be serious) – the comment is all over Flanno's North American promo material. My review of Question 7 for ABR was unambiguously unenthusiastic and yet I was asked several times whether Carey's praise had given me pause.

And what of Dalton's continuing success? Book after crappy book, Australian readers are mesmerised by the guy. What do you make of this, I was asked via email and chat after the RN poll results were reported. RN listeners aren't dummies, are they? Is Trent Dalton in fact a Great Australian Novelist? Have you changed your mind? Actually, I have not – and I challenge anyone to tender a single page of fiction authored by TD that could sustain an argument that he is a good novelist, let alone a great one.

Book polls are bunk but this one did make me wonder whether there is any audience left for Australian literature, good, great or middling. It goes to show too that you can write a tough review of a book, as I did of BSU and All Our Shimmering Skies in 2022, and leave nary a dint. I still chortle to recall the Dalton fan who occasionally took to Twitter to muse on how hurt TD must have been by my review, to rebuke me for elitism, punching down and sundry offences, and never failing to @mention me. I'm long gone from Twitter/X, maybe she's still doing it. Honestly, I think Trent Dalton is probably able to leach some immunity to critical disdain from his massive commercial success and the continued fawning of most Australian media and cultural institutions. James Ley went to town on Dalton's latest, Gravity Let Me Go, in this month's ABR. Sample: "The conclusion is a monstrous ham sandwich with triple cheese served with a bucket of schmaltz. It is hands down the most ridiculous, most contrived, most offensively stupid Scooby-Doo nonsense ending to a novel supposedly written for adults that I have ever read." I gave myself a reprieve from reading Gravity Let Me Go; having survived the ordeal of close-reading TD's prose, I know Ley is right. And yet, the Adelaide Writers' Week, from whom, sorry to be snotty, one expects better things, because their programming is usually the best of the big festivals, has programmed a Living National Treasure event devoted to Trent Dalton. Spare me.

I have found it difficult to read much commentary on the awful shootings at North Bondi over the weekend. Bare bones reportage is all I can manage as I try to process images of violence transposed onto a place I know well; the gradient and camber of the road from Dover Heights to the beach, which I love to run down, the summer skies, the ocean. Some of the commentary I have read on Bondi has struck me as not unlike a Trent Dalton novel, which is to say, it is characterised by sentimentality, regressive nationalism, infantile moral prescriptions, racist stereotypes, and also a rush to resolve the deep divisions in our country, as if a country founded on genocidal violence and dispossession can just hug it out, or wish those divisions away. I was grateful for the clarity brought by Jewish Council of Australia EO Max Kaiser in Deepcut News: “It’s clear we are all hurting and all see the great danger of this moment,” Kaiser said. “The worst thing that could happen now would be responses that demonise people and further empower the far right.” I feel the burn of anger as I hear Barnaby Joyce and Pauline fucking Hanson do their best to reap political advantage from this horror, and see Sussan Ley call for denaturalisation powers like some two-bit Antipodean Trump, but also as the Daltonians write soothing columns that extract easy moral lessons from this terrible, complex tragedy.

Books will be written about the Bondi shootings, no doubt about it. Perhaps they've already been commissioned and the publicity departments of the various big publishers are being circumspect about their deal announcements. I hope – and it's a vain hope, I know – that the market-tested colour and sentimentality model provided by Trent Dalton doesn't set the tone. We get the books that we buy and that we vote for in silly reader polls. I am cynical about publishing, at least the way its practiced by the big players, where even the best editors and publishers going are still in thrall to the sales teams. No company, though, is actually obliged to barrel in and take advantage of the grim opportunity of the moment by rushing to publish sensational and reductive books about it, not even if they're dressed up in sombre literary prose. Still, I shudder to think of the books that will be released in April, May, June 2026.

I do not need to remind readers of this newsletter of the all-hands-on-deck approach taken to getting new books out after the trial of Erin Patterson. I reviewed The Mushroom Tapes for Guardian Australia in November. Bestseller! And I'm sure that in two or three years, when RN has figured out how to repackage its Top 100 poll once more, The Mushroom Tapes will be ordained alongside Boy Swallows Universe as one of the greatest books of the 21st century by its listeners. Indeed, the events featuring Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein sold out before the book hit the market. But it's a slight book, full of moral hedging and frankly puerile projections. The tone is different to a Dalton novel, but shares a conviction that any reader can identify easily enough with both the victims and perpetrators of crime, a kind of syrupy self-involved humanism. As I wrote in my review, The Mushroom Tapes is haunted by the books that these authors might have written about the trial, whether in collaboration or alone, had they been given the time to do so. Perhaps there will be a great book written about the Erin Patterson trial at some time in the future, one that takes seriously the pain and isolation of rural communities, one that doesn't peddle bargain basement bush gothic tropes. I'll take a lot of persuading to read it.

The unbelievably speedy turnaround for The Mushroom Tapes set a troubling precedent for the publishing industry, which already puts pressures on authors and editors to deliver books too quickly. (You'll hear more from me on this topic in the new year.) And now, this shocking crisis in Bondi sits as something of a test for the industry. Will there be a scramble to get the first book out? Of course there will, and whoever writes and markets these books will make grandiose claims about their respect for the victims and their families and communities. They won't be the ones cashing in. No one ever is. I'd be happy to be proved wrong and see this terrible shooting be the event that finally jams the hot take non-fiction book machine, but I'm not hopeful.

Other notes: I admired Hossein Asgari's Desolation and wrote about it for Guardian Australia; I was able to work through some developing ideas about Australian literature, provincialism and international audiences in a long piece about Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood for the SRB.

I want to remember Moya Costello, a true original of Australian literature who died recently. We corresponded often when I was working at the SRB and met only once, at an SRB event. I'm sorry I didn't have the chance to know her better. Nick Jose's 2015 essay on Moya's novel Harriet Chandler is a terrific discussion of her work and of the idea of independent, experimental, feminist writing in Australia. This 2017 essay by Moya on Helen Garner, Murray Bail, and Bernadette Brennan's Garner bio is a good guide to the kind of passionate reader she was. Passionate is one of those adjectives that get bandied around in a dismissive manner but in Moya's case, I think it speaks to the intensity of the decades-long relationships she maintained to the texts and authors that were important to her. I would take that any day over a cliché-ridden publicity sheet or any nonsense about national treasures.

Over the break I am continuing to read Solvej Balle's On Calculation, book by book, re-reading EM Forster's novels, listening to Rosalia. We've got a Pineapple Express situation here in BC. It might snow over Christmas. I haven't crossed the border into the US since late 2024. Happy Holidays, friends and strangers. May your passage into 2026 be safe and steady. x