Theory & Practice

The narrator of Theory & Practice relocates to Melbourne from Sydney in the mid-1980s to take up a place in the Masters program in the English Department at the University of Melbourne. She’s going to write a thesis on Virginia Woolf. Theory (with a capital ‘T’) has arrived in full force to wreak havoc on the metaphoric foundations of that institution, and her supervisor, the department’s ‘Designated Feminist’, gives her a reading list, telling her, ‘We find it helps Sydney graduates get up to speed’. Enough said. She signs a lease on a one-bedroom dive in St Kilda. She meets her people in the grunge of this seaside bohemia, including Kit, a person of sexual interest. Kit is in another relationship, which he calls ‘deconstructed’ (or is that code for a vogueishly postmodern take on infidelity?). Her widowed mother remains in Sydney, left to mother her from afar via phone calls and letters, worrying about her daughter’s progress.

I really enjoyed this book and its clever thinking on academia, postcolonialism, privilege, power, and the literary canon, and was entertained by so many of de Kretser’s pithy observations that manage to capture and critique entire debates in a phrase or two with pure perfection. Anyone who has had an academic education in the wake of the turn to theory will find much to enjoy here, but the greater intent of Michelle de Kretser’s cross-genre piece is more broadly appealing. What is the connection between the theory and the practice of living? If life must be experienced as practice, is theory a simple distraction or affectation? Or is the practice itself beside the point, while the theoretical reigns? Of course, it’s not an either/or situation here (or at all), and this novel sparkles with de Kretser’s many excursions, surprising the reader right to the final page. Indeed, the form of this narrative is both the practice and the theory, and the author pushes the reader to swerve around and beyond the writing conventions that often inform and frame our thinking and reading. The result is not a straightforward narrative or reading experience and so it’s an exciting one, an essential novel for anyone interested in the expansive possibilities of the literary form.