Mother Pulse

Recent decades have seen no shortage of what might broadly be called diasporic Australian novels. Works by Brian Castro and Michelle de Kretser, among others, come to mind. Raeden Richardson adds fruitfully to this tradition with his complex début novel, The Degenerates, which sets out from then-Bombay and journeys to the streets of Melbourne and New York. It is not quite a ‘constellation novel’ (the term coined by Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk), in which textual fragments and polyphonic voices build a narrative. Richardson nevertheless offers a series of story threads that slowly accumulate and nudge the boundaries of conventional form and storytelling.