Don Anderson

Don Anderson is the author/editor of eight books, collections of essays and reviews, and anthologies of prose, largely of texts from the Americas, Australia, and Europe. For fourteen years in the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular literary columnist in the National Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. He was for thirty years a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, where he taught American, Irish, and Australian literature, and literary theory. He was for some years a member of the Advisory Panel of ABR.

Don Anderson reviews 'I'm Dying Laughing' by Christina Stead

July 1987, no. 92 • 01 July 1987

There has been altogether too much talk recently about literature and bliss, and not enough about sadness. Think of the gloom that descends when you have read all the works of a beloved author, and no fresh fields and pastures new remain. Years ago, I suffered this depression after reading all the works of William Faulkner. There was a brief respite when Flags in the Dust, an ur-version of Sartori ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'The Idea of Perfection' by Kate Grenville

September 1999, no. 214 • 01 September 1999

‘Few evade full measure of their fate.’ Hart Crane, ‘The Bridge’ Just before the publication of her novel Dark Places in 1994, Kate Grenville said that she was thinking about her next book, ‘a heart-warming old-fashioned love story’. Well, The Idea of Perfection – and isn’t that what all love stories are about? – is that love story, though it warms both heart and head, ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'The Prosperous Thief' by Andrea Goldsmith

November 2002, no. 246 • 01 November 2002

‘History always emphasises terminal events,’ Albert Speer observed bitterly to his American interrogators just after the end of the war, according to Antony Beevor in Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002). Few events in recent history were more terminal than the Holocaust, it might be urged. Yet the singularity of that ‘terminus’ has been questioned in recent years. Is it, however, perilous for ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'Reliable Essays: The best of Clive James' and 'Even As We Speak: New essays 1993–2001' by Clive James

October 2001, no. 235 • 01 October 2001

Clive James needs no introduction, though he asked Julian Barnes to provide one for Reliable Essays, a selection from three decades of James’s literary journalism made by his publisher, Peter Straus. The Kid from Kogarah is, as The New Yorker once famously observed, ‘a brilliant bunch of guys’: literary essayist (his ‘best work’, Barnes insists), television critic, poet, novelist, autobi ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'N' by John A. Scott

June–July 2014, no. 362 • 27 May 2014

The last words of the endnotes to John A. Scott’s most recent novel – earlier ones have won the Victorian Premier’s prize for fiction and been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award – and thus the last words of this book, if we exclude back-cover plaudits, read: ‘An additional narrative strand, chronicling the history of Surrealist André Breton in Melbourne, 1952, omitted from this ve ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'The Following' by Roger McDonald

October 2013, no. 355 • 27 September 2013

Towards the end of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), at the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher’s funeral on an April day in Chicago, Menasha Klinger, one of three mourners, points to a spring flower and asks Charlie Citrine, the novel’s narrator, to identify it. ‘Search me,’ Citrine replies, ‘I’m a city boy myself. They must be crocuses.’ This exchange has stayed with me for some thi ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'A World of Other People' by Steven Carroll

April 2013, no. 350 • 25 March 2013

Novels have been appearing in the last decade or so in which one or more of the characters are actual historical figures, often themselves writers, appearing in propria persona, not considerately disguised and renamed, as Horace Skimpole was in Bleak House, for example. Perhaps the most notorious instance in recent years is Virginia Woolf in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), made even more ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'Lost Voices' by Christopher Koch

December 2012–January 2013, no. 347 • 29 November 2012

‘There is another world, but it is in this one.’ That is Paul Éluard, channelled by Patrick White as one of four epigraphs to The Solid Mandala (1966), a ‘doubleman’ of a novel avant la lettre.Other quotations appended to this story of Waldo and Arthur Brown are taken from Meister Eckhart (‘It is not outside, it is inside: wholly within’) and Patrick Anderson (‘… yet still I long ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'Alfred Kazin: A Biography' and 'Alfred Kazin’s Journals' by Richard M. Cook

April 2012, no. 340 • 01 April 2012

If his biographer and editor of his Journals is to be believed, by the early 1960s the Brooklyn-born Alfred Kazin was ‘arguably the most sought-after and widely published critic’ in the United States. Kazin (1915–98) claimed that 1956–61 was ‘the greatest period in my life’. Having returned from a teaching post in Amherst to New York City, he succeeded in making a living as a freelance ... (read more)

Don Anderson reviews 'Hergesheimer Hangs In' by Morris Lurie

November 2011, no. 336 • 25 October 2011

‘A writer is writing even when he’s not writing, maybe even more then, even if he never writes again. Got it? Class dismissed.’ (Morris Lurie, ‘On Not Writing’, in Hergesheimer Hangs In) In Wild & Woolley: A Publishing Memoir (2011), Michael Wilding recalls: ‘Morris Lurie sent us a collection, too. I think if he had sent it eighteen months later I would have published it. But when ... (read more)