James Ley

In the opening pages of The Casual Vacancy, a man named Barry Fairbrother collapses and dies in the car park of the Pagford Golf Club. For the next seven chapters, news of his premature demise spreads through the small English town. Reactions vary

Murray Bail’s fiction has often been interpreted in light of its explicit rejection of a prevailing tradition of Australian realism that someone once described as ‘dun-coloured’. This rejection has manifested itself in his willingness to appropriate some of Australian literature’s hoariest tropes – the harsh beauty of the landscape, the issue of national identity, the inherited cultural anxieties of the New World – and subject them to the ironising pressures of fictional constructs that wear their conceptualisation on their sleeve. The result is fiction that occupies the shifting ground between the formal rigours of modernism and the reflexive playfulness and generic self-consciousness associated with postmodernism. Bail’s later novels, in particular, beginning with his best-known book, Eucalyptus (1998), are concise, concentrated affairs that organise themselves around the kinds of overt structuring oppositions whose apparent simplicity seems to invite allegorical readings.

Richard Ford has earned a place among the most venerable practitioners of a durable brand of American realism. His fiction draws strength from its stolid traditionalism: its faith in the idea that formal conservatism, respectful attention to the lives of ordinary people, and a line-by-line dedication to the craft of writing are the surest paths to literary significance. His aesthetic, broadly speaking, is that of a writer who reveres Anton Chekhov and John Cheever, thinks everything James Joyce wrote after The Dead was a mistake, and believes with Ernest Hemingway that the only eloquence manly enough to deserve respect is a plain-spoken eloquence.

Here are some of the interesting things you may learn if you read John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists:

↓ that James Fenimore Cooper was expelled from Yale for training a donkey to sit in the professor’s chair

↓ that Evelyn Waugh once attempted suicide but was prevented from drowning by a passing shoal of jellyfish

↓ that Fanny Burney underwent a double mastectomy without anaesthetic and lived to write a toe-curling description of what it felt like

Literary biography is an often derided genre. Writers, in particular, tend to be suspicious, if not openly hostile, toward what they are apt to regard as a secondary or parasitic form. And there are valid reasons for this wariness. The assumption behind a biography is, reasonably enough, that the writer’s life informs the work, but establishing the precise relevance of the life to the work is a treacherous business. Because it is possible to argue that anything a creative writer experiences is at least potentially significant, there is no obvious line between a legitimate and a trivial, or even a prurient, interest in the details of a writer’s personal life.