Do women​ hate art? ‘I’m going to focus on making art that doesn’t look like art. Art that has the feel of women talking everyday crap, like you and me here, me solving all your problems.’ This is Anti (short for Antigone) talking to the unnamed narrator of Theory and Practice, a graduate student at the University of Melbourne. It is 1986. You can still write a fan letter to Simone de Beauvoir – at least for a few more months – and in addition to quoting Shakespeare, Shelley, Elizabeth Bishop and Joseph Brodsky to your friends, you might be memorising apothegms from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, because even though you are enlightened and liberated, you are in pain over a man and jealous of his official girlfriend (you are, of course, the unofficial girlfriend). You say things like ‘Liberal humanists are the worst, Lenny. They’re the forces of reaction and must be destroyed.’ It is the era of young women in Doc Martens, professors in leather jackets and parties thrown to celebrate the purchase of an Apple computer. It is the dawn of the Mac. It’s also the dawn of theory in English departments:

After a day spent with Theory, I’d come away from the library feeling headachy and crushed. My undergraduate years had taken on the aspect of a wasteland. The foundations on which I’d expected to build were mere rubble underfoot. To understand Theory, I had to master Continental philosophy going back to the Greeks. I had to read Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, Foucault, Lacan, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari.

But it isn’t theory that the narrator and her friends want, and it doesn’t quite seem to be art either. Rather than focusing on the novels of Virginia Woolf, as agreed with her thesis adviser, the narrator finds herself captivated by the five volumes of Woolf’s diaries, whose covers show various personal items found on her desk: ‘Notebooks lying open provided glimpses of her handwriting. It occurred to me that those notebooks were probably the very diaries I was reading, and the realisation was thrilling. Woolf’s spectacles were part of the array – the roundness of their lenses was especially touching.’ Why should Woolf’s handwriting, or a necklace of blue shells, matter more than the novels? ‘These intimate objects that Woolf had handled so often made a vibration in time, bringing her close.’

They need a mother, these girls – or a ‘Woolfmother’, as the narrator calls her favourite heroine. Obsessing over A Room of One’s Own seems slightly more respectable than producing ‘passionate, alarming, footnote-free essays about “Sylvia”’. But it’s the same ‘morbid symptom’, the way diaries are morbid symptoms. ‘When the symptoms could no longer be contained by her diary, she waded into a river with her pockets full of stones.’

A lot of contradictions are laid out in Theory and Practice, and one’s tolerance for graduate students – clearly infantilised by their milieu, despite being in their mid-twenties – may be sorely tested. Is this a novel of ideas, or a novel about people who like to talk about ideas? I suspect the latter. And yet I wasn’t sure if it was the ideas or the people that made the book veer wildly between the entertaining and the banal.

The contradictions of love, for instance. How piquant is it that the narrator, as an undergraduate, is devastated by a cheating boyfriend but then goes on, as a graduate student, to become a side dish herself? Is it so surprising that she hates Lois (her ex’s lover) and fixates on Olivia (her current rival) despite being (theoretically) a feminist? Is it maybe a little overdetermined that the young man, Kit, over whom the narrator and Olivia have a love bite competition, is so charmless that the reader is nonplussed rather than swept up in her infatuation? Is that the point, that infatuations are fatuous? (Kit assures the narrator that he and Olivia have a ‘deconstructed’ relationship.) Or is it also meant to bolster the point that women have much more of a claim on one another’s imaginations than men? ‘I hissed at the patriarchy, but that battle didn’t spark my imagination. It was plugged into the creative-destructive energies of the Maternal line.’ But then why is Olivia a pill?

My coffee and Olivia’s tea came. She’d asked for her tea bag on the side, and she dunked it briefly in her cup before taking it out and adding milk. She offered me the sugar, and I declined. She added two spoonfuls to her tea, saying, ‘That’s why you’re so slim.’

The paradoxes multiply whenever there’s a theory – hence the gulf between theory and practice, especially when the theory is feminism. Is it OK that your thesis adviser ripped apart another feminist in a book review? How can you love your embarrassing flesh-and-blood mother? And how can you love your Woolfmother when, despite being a great novelist and champion of women, she is also a snob and an antisemite and a racist? Having come across a ghastly put-down in Woolf’s diaries about the Ceylonese freedom fighter E.W. Perera (‘the poor little mahogany coloured wretch … the same likeness to a caged monkey, suave on the surface, inscrutable beyond’), the narrator, who is the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants, has a crisis. Does it help that Woolf lost her mother young, that she was molested by her half-brother? (The narrator has also experienced sexual abuse.) Where do the commonalities of identity begin and end – and what does theory tell us?

This is one of the more serious contradictions on offer. Professional hypocrisies are played for laughs:

Elise also said that a tenured lectureship was coming up in English at the end of the year. ‘There are three lecturers on contracts and they’re all after it. The department should appoint Paula, really, she publishes heaps, but Myron wants Guy. Have you come across Guy? He’s an Althusserian Marxist.’

‘Is that a Marxist who strangles their class enemies?’

‘Going by my sample of one, it’s a Marxist with an E-Type Jag.’

Michelle de Kretser is one of Australia’s leading novelists. She emigrated from Sri Lanka with her family as a teenager, and the mores of educated liberal Australians is her imaginative terroir. Her first book, The Rose Grower (1999), a historical novel set during the French Revolution, was something of an anomaly: although she has dabbled in different genres, de Kretser’s most celebrated books have all considered the lives of Asian Australians. Theory and Practice is her eighth novel. There is some ambiguity about whether it’s autofictional: the cover of the Australian edition sports a photograph of de Kretser from the mid-1980s, and the jacket copy suggests that the book ‘bends fiction, essay and memoir into … new shapes’. The nameless first-person narrator encourages us along these lines and makes a point of wrongfooting us. For the first ten pages or so, we find ourselves reading a story set in Switzerland in 1957, written from the perspective of an Australian geologist. It ends abruptly: ‘At that point, the novel I was writing stalled.’ The narrator turns out to be a writer. Like other autofictionists, she declares:

An artist once told me that she no longer wanted to make art that looked like art. I was discovering that I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels. Instead of shapeliness and disguise, I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess. It occurred to me that one way to find that form might be to tell the truth.

It is now a truism that art (form) is bad and truth (mess) is good, but even when it is as cunningly argued as it is at the end of Rachel Cusk’s Parade, I don’t buy it. Then again, Cusk’s paean to the extreme naturalism of Éric Rohmer’s films was itself ensconced in a formally elaborate book. (Could she be messy if she tried?)

Theory and Practice is also formally elaborate: there’s the false beginning, the start of a manifesto, then the dive into the past. Towards the end of the book, narrative gives way to more philosophising, and a reunion of old Melbourne friends from the 1980s takes place in Paris in the present day, bringing the circle round to narrative again. I’m convinced it is a rewriting of an earlier de Kretser novel. The Life to Come, published in 2017, is a longer book of interlinked stories involving arty coteries and female graduate students (one of whom becomes a novelist); the burden of assimilation placed on immigrants in Australia, especially those from South Asia; the grades and shades of difference between Sydney (where de Kretser now lives) and Melbourne (where she went to university). Paris, too, is a node of reconnection and reminiscence. All these elements come into play in Theory and Practice, whose form is shorter and tighter.

De Kretser is not a woman who hates art – she wrote a book on Shirley Hazzard and credits Penelope Fitzgerald’s Gate of Angels as an inspiration for her fifth novel, Springtime (2014). Bishop’s poetry runs through her work; she borrowed from her the title of her prize-winning novel Questions of Travel (2012), and the poem ‘Cirque d’Hiver’ is a recurring motif in Theory and Practice. (Its last line – ‘Well, we have come this far’ – is almost the last line of the novel.) So, yes, art – in theory. In practice – mess, as she hinted in an interview in 2020:

But the form of my last two novels (especially The Life to Come) arose from another concern as well. They are both novels about the contemporary world, and that is a world in which many if not all of the old certainties and continuities have been ruptured. The ‘broken’ form of those novels reflects widespread psychological, social and historical rupture.

The significant moment in Theory and Practice arrives when the narrator’s mother dies. Until that point she has been a source of irritation to her daughter: a maudlin widow, an unassimilated donner of bright colours and bangles. But she is one of those casualties of ‘widespread psychological, social and historical rupture’. ‘As it aged,’ the narrator notices, ‘my mother’s body had shrunk everywhere except in the middle. In the last year of her life she looked like a pregnant child. In death, her contours annihilated by a heavy quilt, she attained the truthfulness of formless form.’ Then, a couple of paragraphs later, the narrator’s name is belatedly, anticlimactically, revealed to us. It’s Cindy.

At the end, Cindy is reunited with her university friend Lenny in Paris. He and some of his friends survived the Bataclan massacre of 2015. If these characters were blithe and banal four decades ago, now they are broken. But they are still divided by their theories, which look more and more like narcissistic excuses to turn away from one another. One of the men has been so changed by the Bataclan massacre that his wife leaves him: ‘Women were mocked for Bovarysme, but in her experience it was men who were swayed by well-worn narrative tropes. Life was random and cruel, she said, and she’d lost patience with his unwillingness to face that fact.’ Appearing as she does on the last page, this passing character exemplifies de Kretser’s theory of randomness and underscores the novel’s category error: form isn’t interchangeable with theory, any more than messiness is interchangeable with truth.