As the relationship with Kit unravels, so does the narrator’s grip on the truth of her emotions: “Everyone knows there are two types of mirrors,” she writes, “merciless and kind.” De Kretser charts a course between those reflections, however, alive throughout this ever-inventive novel to the urgent necessities of desire and their unforeseen consequences.
The narrator imagines this book as one way of fulfilling Woolf’s prospectus for the last novel published in her lifetime, The Years, which would alternate between essays and fiction to create a “new form”.
This book starts as an evocative, shifting novel of time and place: a young man travelling in Switzerland, distracted by thoughts of a beautiful music teacher he met in London, recalls how, in his Australian childhood, he was evacuated to live with his grandparents at a sheep station in New South Wales in the second world war.
Her last book, Scary Monsters, for which she won the 2023 Rathbones Folio fiction prize, had two different narratives running in parallel – one literally going from front to back in the printed book, the other from back to front.
The narrator of Theory & Practice is at work on a dissertation titled The Construction of Gender in the Late Fiction of Virginia Woolf, and at the same time involved in an overwhelming affair with a fellow graduate student, Kit, who is engaged to their mutual friend Olivia.
