Theory & Practice - by Michelle de Kretser (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new novel of startling intelligence from prizewinning Australian author Michelle de Kretser, following a writer looking back on her young adulthood and grappling with what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art

It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students--and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.

What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? Michelle de Kretser's new novel offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in the gap between our values and our lives.

Review Quotes

"You don't need to have gone to graduate school in the 1980s, or know your Derrida from your Deleuze, to revel in de Kretser's sendup of an era when lumbering Apple desktops were considered a 'technology of enchantment' and scholars hopped up on theory waged war on politically suspect 'texts.' . . . A comic and, ultimately, moving window onto the universal human capacity for self-deception." --Emily Eakin, The New York Times Book Review

"A curious book, an ambiguous mixture of nostalgia and satire, and of fiction and memoir . . . De Kretser, a sharp, nimble stylist, seeds in charming flashes of dry humor throughout." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"A Sally Rooney-ish, political/feminist picaresque, whose fiercely truth-seeking narrator both acts within and reports upon the shape-shifting social and academic organisms she's part of . . . De Kretser's writing is unfailingly smart . . . Fearless lines zap every page." --Joan Frank, The Washington Post

"In many ways, Theory & Practice is like a coming-of-age novel or perhaps a coming-to-writing novel, and De Kretser is a beautifully sly writer . . . As De Kretser shows us from its very beginning, Theory & Practice is anything but conventional. It is something new, born of the recognition between holding two truths in mind at once." --Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times

"A slim novel that manages to be both intellectually thrilling and stunningly intimate. A warm and funny read by one of Australia's finest writers." --Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

"Theory & Practice is sly, spiky, and brilliant: an intellectual coming-of-age story that accounts for all that can't be learned in the academy--or in books . . . [It] flits confidently between modes: memoir and novel, personal and political, fact and fiction. Essayistic asides commingle with tender memories; heady emotions intrude on serious philosophizing. The aim, the narrator says, is to capture a sense of 'formlessness and mess'--in other words, real life." --Sophia Stewart, The Atlantic

"This appears to be De Kretser's impetus: to tread where Woolf refrained, to push the margins of what a novel can look and feel like. It also asks questions of the act of reading itself . . . This is a book of intrusions: of unacknowledged inequalities, of flawed maternal figures, of raw human emotions (our 'morbid symptoms') . . . So much is condensed into its brief length, not least of which is a probing interrogation of novels and why we write them . . . As De Kretser accomplishes in Theory & Practice, they allow witness of life's 'messy, human truth, ' told without shame." --Jack Calill, The Guardian

"[De Kretser] has blown the doors off completely . . . Theory & Practice has something for everyone. It is a book that revels in the complexity of real life, the messy practice of things that theory tries to smooth over . . . It's just a damned good book." --John Self, The Times (London)

"An evocative, shifting novel of time and place . . . De Kretser [is] alive throughout this ever-inventive novel to the urgent necessities of desire and their unforeseen consequences. Her ending returns you to her beginning, to the mythical-seeming story of the boy in the outback throwing all that glitters into oblivion; to the false start that leads to her latest quest for fictional truth. It is a measure of De Kretser's beguiling talent as a novelist that she holds both these tales in balance without the whole ever threatening to fall apart." --Tim Adams, The Observer [UK]

"An exceptional novelist--perhaps among the ten best at work in English today . . . An innovative, compelling book which takes ingenious steps to persuade us that we are not reading fiction but documentary truth . . . Like de Kretser's other work, Theory & Practice is a novel of considerable wit and brutal comedy . . . Humour in de Kretser is a sign of keen understanding and intelligence. She is writing about something of significance, but a novelist of this grace, linguistic bravura and inventiveness could write about nothing of significance and still hold our attention and admiration . . . This is an author working at the top of her game." --Philip Hensher, The Spectator

"De Kretser is one of the most quietly thrilling writers around--so sharp, funny and inventive that I can only envy anyone who hasn't had the joy of reading her . . .The winningly candid protagonist is delicious company." --Anthony Cummins, The Daily Mail

"De Kretser's seventh novel . . . follow[s] the experience of the narrator, a young Sri Lankan Australian woman, as she attends graduate school in Melbourne. While working on a thesis about Virginia Woolf, she considers what it means to be a 'modern woman' in an intellectual milieu saturated with French theory. Drawn into an affair with another student, she grapples with her feminism and discovers unexpected points of contact between ideas and physical passion." --The New Yorker

"Startlingly intelligent and stylish." --Jasmine Vojdani, New York

"A complex, lyrical story of relationships, feminism, and academic pressure." --People

"The most thrilling fiction of the year . . . [De Kretser] tackles colonialism, gender politics and the slippery bond between mother figures and daughters in a slim work that also offers a heady, pulsating evocation of 1980s Melbourne, in which, on the surface at least, 'beautiful, radical ideas' abound. It is an enviable and astonishing accomplishment." --Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

"Theory & Practice is a timely work for left audiences. As much as literature can illuminate injustice, in its personal and structural dimensions, De Kretser's message is clear: art cannot be a substitute for political action." --Molly McLaughlin, Jacobin

"De Kretser writes in short, diaristic bursts that leap confidently between different experiences . . . She delivers epiphanies through precise, understated observation . . . De Kretser makes a case for the power of a skilled and empathetic novelist: one engaged in what the critic James Wood calls ' serious noticing.' A precisely observed novel, de Kretser suggests, is the rare textual container that can reconcile transformative theories and deeply held values with the messy realities of individual experience . . . The only way to catch a nugget of meaning in this novel--and, de Kretser argues, in our lives--is to pay very careful attention." --Irene Katz Connelly, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Excellent, genre-defying . . . De Kretser captures a time when, for her protagonist, adult life is just beginning, open and chaotic, filled with possibility. It's witty and erudite on life and art and more than achieves the author's aim of 'a novel that reads like memoir, like truth'." --Alice O'Keeffe, The Bookseller

"De Kretser's writing is elusive and playful, jumping from one thread to the next and imposing layer over narrative layer. Deceptively simple language evinces weighty ideas . . . De Kretser's novel itself becomes an imaginative response not only to Woolf's novel [The Years], but to the greater question of the many ways a person might choose to employ the knowledge they have and to live in the world with others . . . Theory & Practice is relentlessly daring in its form, surprisingly generous in its exploration of events and ideas, and quietly provocative in the connections it makes." --Elisabeth Cook, BookBrowse

"De Kretser continues to shapeshift formally with each novel, but offers her characteristic blend of moral clarity, bite, and sumptuous style. A ferociously intelligent novel from a writer at the height of her powers." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Sharp-witted and mesmerizing . . . The narrator's clever political insights and beautiful depictions of art and literature offer readers a view into a captivating mind. De Kretser is at the top of her game." --Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)

"Michelle de Kretser is to my mind one of the finest writers alive and Theory & Practice a lightning strike of a book." --Ali Smith

"Theory & Practice is a thrillingly original hybrid work that seeks truthful answers to the most difficult questions of the day--questions about the nature of love, art, and desire, about the thorny legacy of colonialism and the unappeasable human yearning for connection." --Sigrid Nunez, author of The Vulnerables

About the Author