A work of fiction feeling its way between idea and execution

About a dozen pages into Michelle de Kretser’s new novel, “Theory & Practice,” she runs into the granite wall between truth and fiction. The narrative involves a young man dreaming of a woman. He has an “idea of a female musician, which is based on an engraving of the young Clara Schumann that hangs in the institution where his mother is housed,” but his idealized concept suddenly falls away. “At that point,” De Kretser’s voice interrupts, “the novel I was writing stalled.”

(Catapult)

De Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Australia, is already the author of six novels. She doesn’t need another one, and perhaps what “Theory & Practice” suggests is neither do we.

Two things happen to the narrator of this new novel. She is a graduate student who wants to write about Virginia Woolf. But Woolf is problematic; she is “the Woolfmother,” as our narrator calls her, and as any lover of Woolf knows, that loving comes with baggage. Firstly, our narrator discovers, after watching a friend’s film, that a kind of art can be done about the mundane: “I thought, I didn’t know that this could be art. It was the first time I’d seen my everyday, unglamorous world in a film.” She also discovers a new way of writing: “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.”

Why, after all, is she so drawn to Woolf’s diaries, when she could be writing and researching on Theory (with a capital T)? “Theory had taken book, essay, novel, story, poem, and play, and replaced them all with text,” she tells us. “Theory rejected binaries, exposed aporias, and posited.” She’s too busy living her life, having a love affair with a man named Kit, who’s in a relationship with another woman, Olivia. It’s piping hot with Kit. He tells her that when he first saw her, “I wanted to grab your arm and tell you, ‘What do these people matter? Why are we still here?’” For her part, the narrator struggles between the life of the mind and the experience of living. With Kit, she works out what theory “meant by jouissance, familiar only to me in a non-textual context.”

Perhaps, like our narrator, we’re drawn to Woolf’s diaries because they reflect both worlds — the world in which Woolf is writing, and the reality of her living, of having been real, been flesh. “Did Woolf’s diary represent one self, while her fiction and essays represented another?” The struggle between theory and practice is, after all, the title of the book. And how many of us struggle to put into practice our theories, as small or nongenius as they may be? Also, we have to grapple with the fact that people are people, and people are not always good. We are not always good.

The Woolfmother didn’t have her theory and practice aligned, either. Our narrator takes her to task in a paper she writes called “Virginia Woolf’s Tea.” In it, she mentions that an Indian guest appears at a party in Woolf’s novel, “The Years.” But, “she gives him nothing to say.” In a strikingly apt summation of Woolf’s contribution to literature, De Kretser writes: “I contrasted the modernising trajectory of Woolf’s Englishwomen and the ongoing immiseration of the tea pluckers. The former was made possible by the latter, by the exploitative colonial practices that underwrote British progress and wealth. … ‘The Years’ remained enclosed in the powerful fiction that the self-fulfillment of British women transcended the imperialism that enabled it. That was The Story Under the Story in ‘The Years.’ Like the Indian at the party, it was a narrative presence denied a voice.” Not bad for someone who struggles with theory.

Our narrator’s love affair fizzles out and Kit moves away. She sees him later in an architectural magazine. He has “grown jowls … and was clad in Scandi fawns and whites.” Her thesis, too, disappoints her: “When it was done, ‘Adventuring, Changing: The Gendered Self in the Late Fiction of Virginia Woolf’ was perfectly shapely and perfectly fulfilled the requirements of the university. I think of it now with a shiver of shame.”

In many ways, “Theory & Practice” is like a coming-of-age novel or perhaps a coming-to-writing novel, and De Kretser is a beautifully sly writer. “Many years had to pass before I’d realise that life isn’t about wishes coming true,” the narrator tells us, “but about the slow revelation of what we really wished.” But as De Kretser shows us from its very beginning, “Theory & Practice” is anything but conventional. It is something new, born of the recognition between holding two truths in mind at once. At the end of the book, our narrator has grasped — like Woolf’s moth drawn to the light — that when held together, theory and practice is the truth we seek.

Jessica Ferri is the owner of Womb House Books and the author, most recently, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”