a deft tale of theft and deception skewers Australian literary culture

Written by Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology

“Writers who write about writers,” cautions Richard Yates, “can easily bring on the worst kind of literary miscarriage.” He continues:

Start a story with ‘Craig crushed out his cigarette and lunged for the typewriter,’ and there isn’t an editor in the United States who will feel like reading your next sentence.

Australian novelist Dominic Amerena’s debut, I Want Everything, doesn’t quite begin with its unnamed narrator “lunging” for his writing implements or keyboard, but it comes close.

Review: I Want Everything – Dominic Amerena (Summit Books)

Newly released from an extended hospital stay, Amerena’s protagonist decides to visit a public pool in Footscray before returning to his flat. While there, he sees an elderly woman – part of a cohort from a nearby aged care home – whom he immediately identifies as Brenda Shales.

Shales is a famously reclusive feminist Australian author, who published two controversial cult novels in the 1970s before mysteriously vanishing.

By the time he has left the pool, the narrator has already determined his goal. He will track Brenda down and learn her story, unravelling this “great mystery of Australian letters.” His hope is that this will finally give him the subject for a book that will win him publication and literary acclaim.

Dominic Amerena’s debut novel is about a writer who tracks down a ‘famously reclusive’ cult feminist author. Anna Tagkalou

But in his first meeting with Brenda, he allows a nurse to misidentify him as a previously unknown grandson. Convinced this is the only way that she will share her story, Amerena’s narrator resolves to continue this deception, which almost inevitably spirals out of control.

Early in the novel, the narrator makes a telling confession to Brenda, not about his identity, but his ambition.

I want everything. I want to write a book about you: the how, the what, the when and most pertinently, the why. I want to be the next great Australian novelist. I want to be you.

The selfish side of literary life

I Want Everything is about this drive, which lurks uneasily beneath all the niceness, the sensitivity, the false modesty, the breathless conversations about writing craft and communities. It explores the selfish, avaricious and exploitative side of literary life, particularly the desire to have a subject, a real story, no matter who it belongs to or what it may cost.

This plays out through the novel’s dual narratives. Brenda’s story unfolds across a series of interviews, which gradually reveal the dark origins of her books. They are rooted in the circumstances of her claustrophobic upbringing in an oppressively misogynistic 1950s Australia. And, also, in a transgressive act of theft or appropriation, which resulted in the legal case that prematurely ended her literary career.

These episodes are entwined with the unnamed narrator’s account. He might be fairly described as a familiar Melbourne literary type. He has spent his previous years working on “a thinly veiled autofiction, a novel about novel-making”, while floating through the purgatory of journal editing, grant applications and literary dinner parties. Acutely aware that he is, at best, a “style machine with no substance”, he is feverishly admiring of his partner Ruth, a “Melbourne famous” essayist who may be on the cusp of achieving some actual fame. The opportunity to lay claim to Brenda’s story gives the narrator his own, tantalising shot at genuine success and fame. It also leads to a subtle shift in his relationship. While she is at first supportive of the narrator’s project, and his professed aim to restore an unfairly neglected Australian author to prominence, Ruth comes to resent the narrator’s growing fixation on Brenda. The narrator’s story becomes a delicate balancing act, as he tries to maintain his charade for long enough to extract Brenda’s narrative, while allaying Ruth’s growing suspicions. The strength of his own ambition almost surprises him, as do the risks he is ultimately prepared to take for the elusive chance of literary success. He ultimately proves more than willing to compromise both his ethics and his relationship for the sake of what his arts administrator friend calls an “eminently fundable project”. Brenda’s story provides him, at last, with a seemingly meaningful subject for his writing, though it gradually emerges she may have a concealed agenda of her own. The best kind of writing about writers Despite Yates’ warning, I Want Everything offers the best kind of writing about writers you could hope for. It is a deft, funny and tightly plotted critique of Australian literary culture. Reviewers have compared it, appropriately, to R.F. Kuang’s blistering publishing satire, Yellowface. Writing for Kill Your Darlings, Emmett Stinson considers I Want Everything as part of a tradition of recent novels “that have skewered contemporary literary culture in its bourgeois, institutionalised form”. I was most reminded of Philip Roth’s 1980 novel The Ghost Writer, which uses a similar scenario – a younger writer latching onto an older and more accomplished figure – to examine the intensity and occasional absurdity of literary ambition itself. Like The Ghost Writer, I Want Everything focuses on a writer who is struggling not only with their desire for material success and recognition, but also with the thinness of their own experience and imagination. I Want Everything is a highly enjoyable and occasionally horrifying study of the lengths – and depths – this writer will go to in laying claim to a sense of substance and authenticity they feel they ultimately lack. Authors: Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology

a deft tale of theft and deception skewers Australian literary culture

The selfish side of literary life

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