In Theory & Practice, De Kretser gradually, delicately, picks and plucks at the notion of “truth” in literature – questioning first the trustworthiness of the novel and then the trustworthiness of autobiography – until, by her book’s end, all certainties have been dismantled, and it’s hard to know what it is, exactly, we have read. Her excellence as a writer lies in the fact that she manages to make a novel that effectively acts as a deconstruction of the novel form feel like a pleasure, rather than a chore. She offers us the theory, while revelling in the practice; she exposes the lie to us, but permits us to love it anyway.
Hybridity is fashionable; fragmentation is part of the world in which we live. What, after all, does it mean to be ‘truly known’? It’s difficult now to write a serious realist novel like Adichie’s earlier works. But that – the full imagining of other lives from both inside and out – is where I think her heart and deepest talents lie.
“Emily Dickinson was a letter writer before she was a poet,” professors Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell state in the opening sentence of their introduction to their new edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson. That may be true, but we learn that writing letters and poetry became nearly inseparable activities for much of Dickinson’s life. Not that you would fully appreciate that fact by reading through the previous “definitive” edition of Dickinson’s letters, edited in three volumes by Thomas H. Johnson in 1958 and also published by Belknap/Harvard. As I flip through my copy of Johnson’s Selected Letters, I see fragments of poems, often just a stanza, attached to the prose correspondence. In contrast, skimming through the 2024 Letters of Emily Dickinson, readers will encounter a book that seems almost to be a hybrid of epistles and poetry.