When our unnamed narrator spots a dead ringer for Brenda Shales, once one of Australia’s most notorious bestselling novelists who apparently disappeared without trace in the 1970s, he hatches a plan to rescue his own flagging writing career. Tracking her down to a care home, he chooses not to correct a nurse’s assumption that he’s her grandson. He can hardly believe his luck, squashing niggling doubts about the deception which leads him to become Brenda’s confidant, lies piling up until he’s painted himself into a corner, dreams of the prize-winning biography that will solve Australia’s greatest literary puzzle fading fast.
Amerena’s novel is a wonderfully twisty tale about authorship and literary ambition. Our narrator is a thin skinned individual, willing to involve himself in subterfuge and deceit, squirming more at the thought of being found out than the rights and wrongs of what he’s embarked upon, all to see a book with his name on it and without a thought as to why Brenda seems so willing to spill the beans. An entertaining, smartly structured satire; the final sentence is the cherry on the cake.

The set up of the novel is relatively simple. The unnamed (and in some cases autobiographical) narrator has been an award winning short story author although placing too much of an emphasis on style and particularly struggling with writing female characters (he tends to make them too sympathetic). His attempts to try to write “thinly veiled autofiction, a novel about novel-making, like all the other novels being made that year” have not been that successful and his literary star is waning – while that of his partner Ruth (an essayist) is very much on the rise.

When we first meet him is just leaving hospital after one of his frequent admissions (we only find out the reason for that later) when he spots, at a swimming pool, an old lady – on a trip from a care home - whose face looks familiar and together with a call from his mother sparks a Proustian moment which makes him realise that the women is Brenda Shales, a famously reclusive author of two highly successful but also highly controversial feminist novels in the 1970s after which she disappeared.

The two novels – which earned her the nickname “la belle dame sans merci of the Antipodes” and were caught up in the political developments in the country as a deeply conservative, sexually repressive White Australian establishment came up against the reforms of the socially progressive Gough Whitlam government (as an aside this clash also very much forms the backdrop to this novel) - were: Anchoress and The Widowers. The former was a tale about a mysteriously imprisoned woman, the latter set in a country town where many of the (married) women have left and where the narrator recounts a series of interviews with the married man left behind (interview which then lead to a lost lawsuit against a group of men who claimed the stories were stolen from them - and to a discrediting of the author’s relationships).

The narrator of this novel finds his ambitions returned and suddenly seeing in this serendipitous encounter with Shales the opportunity for a short-cut to literary fame – and when a rushed care home employee inadvertently introduces him to Shales as her grandson he finds himself stuck into a lie (one he withholds not just from Shales but also Ruth who he does not tell of the misunderstanding) that he feels obliged to sustain in order to similarly sustain his idea of a sensational literary scoop.

In some long set piece sessions – effectively transcribed recorded interviews – Brenda explains her life story (which centres heavily around her friendship with another girl Maria – paired relationships are key to the novel) - and particularly the actual genesis of both novels – which as well as finding Shales will be the key to the book that the narrator is trying to write (experimenting with different ways to build a frame around the interviews).

And meanwhile we observe the changing relationship between the narrator and Ruth – both dealing with developments in the careers (during the course of the novel Ruth publishes a virally successful but personally very sensitive essay about her difficult relationship with her mother – which in turn leads to further disclosures about her own back story) – as well as their interaction with another literary couple (an agent and an even more failed author).

And in the novel’s last 50 pages or so a series of revelations (like many such novels this is one to read over a short a period as possible rather than trying to pause to guess how things play out) change ours and the narrator’s interpretations of what is going on and also explains (within the fictional world of the novel) what it is that we are reading.

And overall, it’s an enjoyable and multi-faceted novel - if slightly incestuous in its relatively narrow concentration not just on literary fiction but on Australian literary fiction (which probably means it’s a better fit for Australian prizes than International ones).