Book review: Theory and Practice by Michelle de Krester

I’m in a bit of a reading slump so I wasn’t in the right place to read Michelle de Krester’s book of ideas, Theory and Practice.

As I wrote recently, I’ve had a run of reading books that are stronger on ideas than on plot and story, and they’re leaving me a bit cold.

So it is with Theory and Practice, a book that throws around notions of loyalty, love, literature and motherhood. It feels highly experimental and I’m sure it has been praised for that.

Partly autobiographical, the novel is set in Melbourne while the narrator is at university, writing about Virginia Woolf. She finds a certain ‘mother figure’ in Woolf’s life lessons and compares the author with her own flawed mother.

Woven into these musings was a relationship that was complex and ambiguous, with the narrator seemingly more interested in the betrayed girlfriend than the man she was with. Her fixation with the girl, her friend, seemed born out of jealousy, but nevertheless seemed too mean-spirited.

This book never seemed whole to me – there were so many ideas thrown in, and tossed around – but perhaps that is the point of it.

I found it to be a bit too ‘clever’, as these experimental novels tend to be. Finishing it, I struggled to find a sense of what it was all about, and it made me realise that I’m pining for a book with a plot that I can engage strongly with, and characters that I remember long into the future. This novel, while clever and new and innovative, definitely wasn’t that.