A work of fiction feeling its way between idea and execution

A few dozen pages into Michelle de Kretser’s new novel, “Concept & Apply,” she runs into the granite wall between fact and fiction. The narrative entails a younger man dreaming of a lady. He has an “thought of a feminine musician, which is predicated on an engraving of the younger Clara Schumann that hangs within the establishment the place his mom is housed,” however his idealized idea all of the sudden falls away. “At that time,” De Kretser’s voice interrupts, “the novel I used to be writing stalled.”

De Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Australia, is already the writer of six novels. She doesn’t want one other one, and maybe what “Concept & Apply” suggests is neither can we.

Two issues occur to the narrator of this new novel. She is a graduate scholar who desires to write down about Virginia Woolf. However Woolf is problematic; she is “the Woolfmother,” as our narrator calls her, and as any lover of Woolf is aware of, that loving comes with baggage. Firstly, our narrator discovers, after watching a buddy’s movie, {that a} sort of artwork could be finished in regards to the mundane: “I believed, I didn’t know that this may very well be artwork. It was the primary time I’d seen my on a regular basis, unglamorous world in a movie.” She additionally discovers a brand new manner of writing: “I wished a type that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one option to discover that type is perhaps to inform the reality.”

Why, in spite of everything, is she so drawn to Woolf’s diaries, when she may very well be writing and researching on Concept (with a capital T)? “Concept had taken ebook, essay, novel, story, poem, and play, and changed all of them with textual content,” she tells us. “Concept rejected binaries, uncovered aporias, and posited.” She’s too busy residing her life, having a love affair with a person named Package, who’s in a relationship with one other lady, Olivia. It’s piping sizzling with Package. He tells her that when he first noticed her, “I wished to seize your arm and let you know, ‘What do these individuals matter? Why are we nonetheless right here?’” For her half, the narrator struggles between the lifetime of the thoughts and the expertise of residing. With Package, she works out what principle “meant by jouissance, acquainted solely to me in a non-textual context.”

Maybe, like our narrator, we’re drawn to Woolf’s diaries as a result of they mirror each worlds — the world wherein Woolf is writing, and the fact of her residing, of getting been actual, been flesh. “Did Woolf’s diary characterize one self, whereas her fiction and essays represented one other?” The battle between principle and apply is, in spite of everything, the title of the ebook. And the way many people battle to place into apply our theories, as small or nongenius as they might be? Additionally, we’ve to grapple with the truth that individuals are individuals, and individuals are not all the time good. We aren’t all the time good.

The Woolfmother didn’t have her principle and apply aligned, both. Our narrator takes her to process in a paper she writes referred to as “Virginia Woolf’s Tea.” In it, she mentions that an Indian visitor seems at a celebration in Woolf’s novel, “The Years.” However, “she offers him nothing to say.” In a strikingly apt summation of Woolf’s contribution to literature, De Kretser writes: “I contrasted the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the continued immiseration of the tea pluckers. The previous was made doable by the latter, by the exploitative colonial practices that underwrote British progress and wealth. … ‘The Years’ remained enclosed within the highly effective fiction that the self-fulfillment of British girls transcended the imperialism that enabled it. That was The Story Below the Story in ‘The Years.’ Just like the Indian on the celebration, it was a story presence denied a voice.” Not unhealthy for somebody who struggles with principle.

Our narrator’s love affair fizzles out and Package strikes away. She sees him later in an architectural journal. He has “grown jowls … and was clad in Scandi fawns and whites.” Her thesis, too, disappoints her: “When it was finished, ‘Adventuring, Altering: The Gendered Self within the Late Fiction of Virginia Woolf’ was completely shapely and completely fulfilled the necessities of the college. I consider it now with a shiver of disgrace.”

In some ways, “Concept & Apply” is sort of a coming-of-age novel or maybe a coming-to-writing novel, and De Kretser is a fantastically sly author. “A few years needed to cross earlier than I’d realise that life isn’t about needs coming true,” the narrator tells us, “however in regards to the gradual revelation of what we actually wished.” However as De Kretser exhibits us from its very starting, “Concept & Apply” is something however standard. It’s one thing new, born of the popularity between holding two truths in thoughts directly. On the finish of the ebook, our narrator has grasped — like Woolf’s moth drawn to the sunshine — that when held collectively, principle and apply is the reality we search.

Jessica Ferri is the proprietor of Womb Home Books and the writer, most just lately, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”