By Declan Fry
FICTION
I Want Everything
Dominic Amerena
Summit, $34.99
Ern Malley. Helen Demidenko. Norma Khouri. Wanda Koolmatrie. Australia has a rich and storied tradition of fakers, forgers, frauds and fabricators.
Credit: Simon & Schuster
For his debut, Greece-based Dominic Amerena offers us a worthy addition to this gallery of fiasco-mongers: an insecure, craven, sickly and mercifully unnamed narrator. Peddling his blood and body at a hospital while attempting to succeed as a writer, his existence is dreary. He envies his “Melbourne-famous” writer partner, Ruth, who has found acclaim selling a story about her mother. The family betrayal benefits her career and introduces a new term to the world: daughter-boarding – “hit pieces by young women against their mothers”.
Given the precarity of the artistic landscape, only a fool would not take an opportunity for advancement, and the narrator is no fool. Swimming at the Victoria University pools, he encounters Brenda Shales. A Whitlam-era luminary – part Thea Astley, part Helen Garner – she wrote two novels, won a cult following and promptly vanished into the only dignified position available to a self-respecting literary author: obscurity.
The work speaks, as they say, for itself. Only that’s not enough for an unnamed narrator looking to make his name. Who better to provide prestige than a recluse with some flesh to offer the biographical mill? It’s not quite spotting Christ on the boulevard, but it will do. He sets about writing a tell-all account of what happened to the celebrated author. He will be her witness, her confidante. The Boswell to her Johnson. He will bask in the secondhand shadow of her literary light. He will build his fame upon hers.
Author Dominic Amerena.Credit: Anna Tagkalou
Coy, winking, spritzy, this is a scurrilously funny meditation on ambition and economic insecurity. It satirises the commercialised hellscape of contemporary literature, if not life in general: no pleasure, no heart, just product.
Take Shales’ reputation-solidifying second novel, The Widowers. Passed around Carlton share houses “like some graven object”, its publication results in courtroom wranglings and the advent of questionable legal precedent. It is, we are told, controversial in a way that Amerena calls “unimaginable now”.
It’s a telling detail. It suggests not only changing social mores, but a shift in how literature is received. What was once epoch-making is now merely content. Debase yourself for the algorithm or die trying. “The world is a vampire,” the Smashing Pumpkins sang. Even if it were untrue, you would have a hard time convincing Amerena’s narrator.
There is a sense throughout that, smarmy as the narrator is, his desire to be a writer is merely incidental. He is described as having little mercy – a quality that seems to be borne out, given his treatment of Shales. Could it be mercy for himself too, though, that he lacks? Caught in his Tantalus visions of literary fame, he regularly conflates literature with the satisfaction of other desires (legitimacy, likeability, self-worth). He believes or wants to believe himself to be Brenda’s confidante and confessor. He would be better served learning to act as his own.
“Fame is a form of incomprehension,” Borges observed, “perhaps the worst.” Cannily, Borges never bothered specifying whether this incomprehension belonged to the artist, their audience or both. There is an ironic edge to this aspect of the book. Amerena plays with questions of domination and subordination, both sexual and economic. (Regularly highlighting every abject and unseemly stitch of his characters, Amerena plays the dom.)
In I Want Everything, the conniving opportunism and careerism of the present eclipse … well, everything. If Shales could become Australia’s greatest author, it wasn’t while donating her body to science and her soul to the industry. It was because she came of age in a country that offered its people something more than a series of transactional arrangements. Where authors once sought time and space to write, now they seek time and space to better leverage their brand.
Was it always like this? A sense of parasitism, of being redundant and secondhand, has often haunted settler art in Australia. You can accuse Amerena of romanticising the past if you like. He isn’t alone. In any case, a romantic vision does not necessarily equate to an incorrect one. You may want everything, Amerena suggests, but first you’ll need to sell yourself out – along with your friends, enemies, colleagues, fans, associates, pets, peers and family – to get there.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.