Floating Life

Link.

Amanda Lohrey used to have dreams about Paul Keating, is not attracted to short men, and does a reasonable Fay Weldon impression. These are just some of the things I learn about her during the course of our interview, along with the fact that she is down to earth, mercurial and almost recklessly forthcoming, resulting in our conversation often being punctuated with “that’s obviously off the record”.

She is also technologically challenged, and we spend the first couple of minutes working out how to switch off her mobile phone. That achieved, the discussion turns to the topic currently preoccupying many politicians and much of the media: the work-life balance. This is the subject of Lohrey’s new novel, the Philosopher’s Doll, which focuses on a professional couple in their late 30s struggling with the issue of when to have children. Much of the book deals with an intense few weeks in which the wife, Kirsten, has actually become pregnant and is deciding when to tell her husband, Lindsay, while he, completely unaware of this biological incident, is arranging to buy her a dog in order to temporarily satisfy her procreative yearnings. ..

I have just made a start on this Surry Hills Library treasure. A taste:

The waiter arrives at their table, one of those slim young men with black hair cropped close in a chic stubble and chalk-white skin the colour of urban angst, worn lightly. This one has the manners to go with it: condescending, but not in the studied way of head waiters, more offhand than that, as if he has something better to do — play Hamlet at The Playbox in spring, perhaps — and will be out of there soon.

Yes that is a stereotype, but such a well observed one. And not quite predictable little touches. I am reading Amanda Lohrey’s The Philosopher’s Doll (2004) and it is delicious but depressing, reminding me constantly as it does that I really can’t write — well, not like this anyway.

They need their philosophy enlivened by the cheap tricks of narrative, by gossip and scandal, and he maintains a fund of these in reserve for that pedagogical moment when he senses he has lost them — those restless first-years, lured to enrol in philosophy by a fervent hope that, within a few semesters, they will be able to rebut the sombre and oppressive logic of their parents. But when the dull penny drops, when they realise that this will be a long, drawn-out apprenticeship — that there is no strategy that will guarantee them a quick rout — their earnestness begins rapidly to fade. Ten minutes into any lecture the minds of all but a few unflinching note-takers will have drifted, on a tide of hormones or heroin, to the contemplation of some love object, and it’s then that their eyes become warm and cloudy with the inner reality of daydream. At this point he might drop in the story of La Mettrie.

Death by satisfaction, and how to achieve it.

Romana Koval’s interview with Amanda Lohrey from Radio National’s Books and Writing is very informative.

…Ramona Koval: What about your decisions about structure and about who is telling this story?

Amanda Lohrey: The novel, as you know, makes a radical shift about two thirds of the way through in point of view, and that was deliberate on my part. There wasn’t any elaborate or complicated aesthetic reason for that; it was a lot to do with my own reading position: I’m now a very jaded reader and that’s to do with age, I think. If I pick up a book or go to a movie, the minute I think I’ve worked out the plot or the writer or film director’s project, I start to lose interest.

So part of the pleasure of reading, for me, is always surprise, always that the writer or the film director is ahead of me, that I can’t second-guess her or him. There’s a very intense and pleasurable ambush in reading – that you’re caught unawares, something delightfully unexpected happens that makes you rethink the whole project – but in a pleasurable way, not in a baffling and annoying way.

Now, it’s always a risky move to do that and some readers will like it and think – terrific – and some readers will think – wait a minute. I thought I was in one novel and now I’m suddenly in another one – and they’ll be baffled and provoked. Basically it’s just a gamble you take and you win some readers, you lose some readers. There’s one other thing about the shift in point of view that takes place in the novel which is: I think I wanted to pull back. There’s a very intense close-in focus very early in the novel on the husband and wife, and it starts to read as if this is just a book about whether or not to have a baby. I wanted to pull back and say there are larger issues at stake. In order to do that I thought… it’s like if you’ve been in close-up for a long time you pull back with a wide shot, with the camera, and you see there is a lot else going on in the landscape. I wanted to bring in those larger issues about fate and destiny and it seemed to me that if you switch into the other heads of other characters at that point and if you jump in time down the track, you can get a much more panoramic and even epic take on what has started out as a very small, intense, moral dilemma.

Ramona Koval: I think you’re right about that and I think that it functions really well in the novel, that moving back, and also that sense that you can actually do a big time jump if you’re suddenly talking from another person’s point of view.

Amanda Lohrey: You can, and I think we’re all very literate with narrative now, much more so than people were 50 years ago. I think we can fill in the blanks. I don’t think we need every step, every scene of a story. I think we sometimes like to cut to the chase, we like to go ten years on and go – oh, so that’s what happens. That’s how it worked out.

Well I have been warned: I haven’t reached that shift in perspective yet.

We Australians can be rightly proud of our writers and thinkers, and proud that we have access to material like that just quoted. Well, have access at the moment… The Canberra Philistines are sharpening their razors as we speak.