James Mcnamara

Hopes and dreams

The Life to Come, chronicling the hopes and dreams of an intricately woven cast of characters, is one of the best Australian novels of the past decade

Twenty-odd pages into Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come, I pounded the table and bellowed an Australian-accented ‘fuck yeah!’ This startled my wife, who startled the cat, which startled my gin and tonic into my lap. But it was worth it, and remains my unvarnished critical opinion. To varnish it a bit: The Life to Come is de Kretser’s sixth book, her first full-length novel since her 2013 Miles Franklin Award, and for my money one of the best to have been published in Australia in the past decade.

De Kretser follows a group of characters all dreaming of the titular life to come: Pippa is a middling Sydney novelist, creating a persona as she chases literary glory; Cassie seeks a deeper connection with Ash, her British-Sri Lankan boyfriend; in Paris, the French-Australian Celeste wants more than the interstices of her married lover’s life; and from Sri Lanka to Sydney, Christabel overlooks her loving companion Bunty and hankers for a more brilliant existence.

These stories are non-linear and largely separate — connected only by Pippa, Australia and recurrent themes and images. They read more as exquisite loops and furls of memory, lofting the reader back and forth through years of hopes and dreams, across wasted chances and regrets, to give an abundant sense of the characters’ internalities.

This evocation of memory — redolent of James Salter — never drifts too far into the characters’ own self-pity or regard, balanced as it is by an arch third-person voice that offers up their foibles and small prejudices to a carefully whetted knife. De Kretser’s satirical observations — on the literati, self-congratulation, suburban pretension —are so subtly deboning they remind me of Jane Austen’s.

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