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Emily Perkins’ 'The Forrests'
Emily Perkins | Fiction | July 2012 | Literature | Arts & Letters
The Monthly
Hurrying towards the Museum of Contemporary Art’s screening of The Clock, I didn’t notice Emily Perkins, but she noticed me. We had met a few years earlier, but thinking only of Christian Marclay’s video installation, I had failed to see the familiar figure standing outside the auditorium....
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Books | Fiction | June 2012 | World War II | Arts & Letters | Noted
The Monthly
Elizabeth Harrower’s fiction obsessively circles the workings of power within the domestic sphere. Watchfulness, cruelty and the suffering of the innocent feed her work, as her titles hint: The Long Prospect, The Catherine Wheel. Harrower’s characteristic themes find their fullest expression in The...
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April 2012 | Fiction | Greece | Patrick White | World War II | Noted
The Monthly
The publication of an unfinished draft is the writer’s version of that nightmare in which you find yourself naked in the street. Writers donate manuscripts to libraries, of course, but there is usually a finished work to offset those drafts. Also, the toilers in archives are generally steel-nerved...
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France | German sheperds | Hollywood | March 2012 | Mercy dogs | Rin Tin Tin | World War I | Noted
The Monthly
In World War I, trained ‘mercy dogs’ roamed among the wounded on the battlefields of France. A soldier could call one over and hold it for comfort while he died. It’s one of the affecting factoids that stray through Rin Tin Tin, New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean’s exhaustive study of the most...
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Fiction | Guardian | Janet Malcolm | Literature | Non-Fiction | June 2011 | Noted
The Monthly
Courtrooms, like theatres, draw on claustrophobia to compel. The closed-door atmosphere, sealed off from the quotidian, lends contrived outcomes the inevitability of fate. If Iphigenia in Forest Hills offered no more than courtroom drama, Janet Malcolm’s instinct for story would still enthral. But...
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Anthropology | Biography | Linguistics | Psychoanalysis | Scholars | April 2011 | Noted
The Monthly
In 1938 an obscure French anthropologist, sporting a topee and with a monkey clinging to his boot, led an expedition into deepest Brazil. Part scientific enterprise, part youthful lighting out for the territory, its fieldwork was patchy, impressionistic and largely outdated. But it brought Claude...
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SOCIETY | Autobiography | Literature | November 2010 | Noted
The Monthly
It is one of the great ironies of our literature that Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, a novel steeped in autobiography, should be set in Washington rather than Sydney. The change was imposed by its American publishers, who believed this would make the book more marketable there....
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SOCIETY | Fiction | Literature | Psychology | Short fiction | October 2010 | Noted
The Monthly
In the United States, Lydia Davis has long been acclaimed for her experiments in short fiction. Elsewhere, she is best known as a translator of French literature and philosophy; in particular, for the 2002 translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where Davis provided the first volume...
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SOCIETY | Drugs | Fiction | Psychology | September 2010 | Noted
The Monthly
Artists in fiction are coded confessions. Freedom gives us Richard Katz, rock musician and homme fatal, pitched suddenly, just like Jonathan Franzen following The Corrections (2001), into fame. Since this is a novel that doesn’t fear platitude, liberal doses of sex and drugs attend Richard’s...
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SOCIETY | Biography | Drugs | May 2010 | Noted
The Monthly
Central to Lyndall Gordon’s biography of Henry James is an extraordinary scene. As daylight fades over Venice, James drops a dead woman’s dresses into the lagoon. But the garments fill with air and won’t drown, pressing up against the novelist’s gondola. The scene is riveting for what it tells us...
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Books | China | Fiction | New York City | New York Times | Noted | March 2010
The Monthly
In Thomas Hardy’s elegiac poem ‘During Wind and Rain’ there are “Clocks and carpets and chairs / On the lawn all day”. As any trawler of flea markets can attest, a terrible vulnerability attaches to private belongings exposed to public view. The pathos is heightened in Hardy’s poem because the...
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Books | Fiction | Non-Fiction | World War II | Noted | December 2009 - January 2010
The Monthly
“Hello, this is Paul Chowder, and I’m going to tell you everything I know.” That’s a good opening sentence: it’s colloquial and grabby, in a telemarketing sort of way, and it signals the didactic intent of the narrative. This beginning also encapsulates two characteristic features of Nicholson...
