Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser review – shame, desire and the ghost of Virginia Woolf

A vivid outback tale, an anguished 80s love triangle and real life are cleverly held in play in the Australian novelist’s inventive memoir-novel-essay hybrid

This book starts as an evocative, shifting novel of time and place: a young man travelling in Switzerland, distracted by thoughts of a beautiful music teacher he met in London, recalls how, in his Australian childhood, he was evacuated to live with his grandparents at a sheep station in New South Wales in the second world war. There follows a brief story of how the boy that he was pocketed an emerald ring owned by his grandmother and chucked it away in the nearby woods. The shame did not end there. A young Aboriginal maid was blamed for the theft, and he did not have the courage to step in to save her from dismissal.

Just as you are losing yourself in this immersive little story, however, its author, Michelle de Kretser, steps in to inform you that “at this point, the novel I was writing stalled”. She goes on to explain how that writer’s block was a product of her difficulties with the “theory and practice” of her novel’s title: the gap between ideas about the novel – particularly those promoted by those French deconstructionists of the 1970s, and earlier by Virginia Woolf – and the impetus for storytelling.