Review: The Woolfmother ( A Review of Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser)

By Hugh Blanton

Virginia Woolf was "more than just a women's writer," the National Endowment for the Humanities needlessly pointed out in their magazine's May/June 2015 issue. Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with Woolf's work already knows that, but she's been so co-opted and revered by feminists the Endowment probably felt like they were coming up with a shocking headline when they ran it. The feminist protagonist of Michelle de Kretser's latest novel has decided to write her college thesis on Virginia Woolf and even keeps a poster of Woolf above the desk in her rented flat, referring to her as "the Woolfmother." However, the more she studies and learns about Woolf, the less enamored she becomes. She moves the poster from above her desk to another wall elsewhere in the flat. Then takes it down and stomps it with her boot (and inexplicably tacks it back to the wall, bootprint intact). Then later takes it down again to burn it in the bathroom sink. And washes the ashes away forever. Goodbye, Woolfmother.

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Theory and Practice is Michelle de Kretser's latest novel. At sixty-seven years old, it's disappointing to see de Kretser stooping to the same publishing fads of the debut novels rolling off the presses from just-out-of-college twenty-somethings (it's a feminist, gender/sexuality, racism, and anti-capitalism polemic) but at least she spares us the anti-Trump rants that come with so many of them.

Our first-person narrator is an aspiring novelist attending university in Melbourne in 1986. Some reviewers of Theory and Practice have said our narrator is unnamed, and in fact we do not see her name through nearly all of the novel. However, her name is insidiously slipped in on nearly the last page, easily missed. The nameless narrator is part of the reason the story, and herself, seem so detached from us. It's as if she's a ghost just casually observing people and things around her and giving us a bland report, making it difficult for the reader to be drawn into the story, or to even care about it.

 

One of the many problems with this novel is a dozen-page long passage where we suddenly find out nothing that we've been reading has actually happened. No, not a dream, but the protagonist's novel-in-progress. "At that point, the novel I was writing stalled," we're told. Just like those infuriating stories where we find out it was all just a dream, there were parts in the narrator's novel that are related to our story at hand—as if that makes it all forgivable. De Kretser has odd and limiting ways of describing her characters that adds to the detachment—two women at our protagonist's uni (Amabel and Olivia), are described as marble-fleshed, the people of Switzerland are described as apple-fleshed. Our narrator and all her friends want to destroy the state, destroy the bourgeoisie, and destroy the patriarchy, but none of them do anything about it. One, in fact, Kit (our narrator's part-time lover), is getting a degree in mine engineering.

 

Our narrator is originally from Sri Lanka and much of her animus for Virginia Woolf stems from a Ceylonian character in a Woolf novel who is not given a speaking role. She also becomes slowly more angry about Woolf's remarks about her husband Leonard—she sometimes referred to him as "the Jew" or "my Jew." She continues on with her thesis, though, under the guidance of her Designated Feminist, Paula. (Yes, really, a Designated Feminist.) Our narrator titles her thesis "Adventuring, Changing: The Gendered Self in the Late Fiction of Virginia Woolf." She still wants to write her novel, but she "no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth." Of course telling the "truth" isn't exactly a radical idea and we aren't told what her idea of a novel was before this "epiphany."

 

Our narrator is a jealous woman, when she found a letter to her boyfriend from a woman (Lois) he was having an affair with, she had lurid fantasies of disemboweling her. She herself is having an affair with another student at her uni, Kit, and she stalks the streets around Kit and Olivia's (Kit's girlfriend) flat looking for opportunities to break in and steal or destroy Olivia's clothes and other things. At one point our narrator and Olivia are having coffee together in a cafe and when Olivia goes to the restroom, our narrator steals items from Olivia's purse—but this turns out to be another "gotcha" moment like the novel passage: she merely fantasized stealing the objects, she didn't actually do it.

 

Unnamed narrators aren't really all that uncommon, it can add allure to the story if done well. However, in Theory & Practice it's just a nuisance that arrests the story development. In fact, we are taunted at not knowing her name:

I wondered, not for the first time, why my parents, Leslie and Jean, had given me a name that signified Common and Dumb. I asked my mother. Full of indignation, she said, 'It's a lovely name!' It was a modern name, free of family associations, so that might have been why my father and mother, each named for a parent, had chosen it for me.

Our narrator goes on to say that nobody at her uni has her name, she's never read a novel written by anyone with her name, she's never even read a fictional character with her name. We finally learn her name at the end of the novel, not in some big reveal, but slyly slipped into a phone conversation. The "Common and Dumb" name? Cindy.

 

In an interview in Books + Publishing, de Kretser said that memoir is only a sliver of Theory & Practice, the question of course comes up because there are whiffs of autofiction throughout. There are a couple of stories shoehorned into the novel that don't exactly fit seamlessly; a story about Israeli army raids into the West Bank and about a pedophile, Australian Donald Friend, who molested boys in Bali. They are part of the theme of colonization that pervade the book but have nothing to do with the story. De Kretser's efforts at giving us the interiority of our narrator fail despite the near insane jealousy she feels and fantasizes about—Cindy just feels like someone out of reach, mostly unknown. And that pretty much goes for the rest of the characters in the book as well.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X: @HughBlanton5