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.
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.
