Scary Monsters

February 7, 2022
De Kretser’s dark, subtle latest (after the critical study On Shirley Hazzard) offers two vastly different perspectives of immigrants’ experiences in Australia and France. Lyle is a mid-level bureaucrat in near future Australia, coping with an erratic family and fears of deportation. Lili, a young woman who emigrated to Australia from South Asia as a teenager, moves to Paris in the mid-1980s with dreams of living as a “Bold, Intelligent Woman” like her idol, Simone de Beauvoir. Their parallel first-person narratives are not interwoven but presented as two separate stories in a reversible book. While teaching in the south of France, Lili falls in with a hedonistic young woman named Minna, who smokes and introduces her to the cinematheque. By contrast, dutiful family man Lyle fears the subtly growing totalitarianism of Australia, showcased by a ban on practicing Islam and a crematoria boom fueled by rising euthanasia (which perpetually dispels noxious smoke over Melbourne), but he is careful to suppress these fears. He has enough to worry about with the extravagances of his wife, Chanel; his elderly mother, Ivy; and two impulsive adult children. Much of the power comes from the matter-of-fact voices of the two protagonists, making for a disturbing and entirely believable depiction of social upheaval and repression, respectively. The sum leaves readers with a stirring look at the eerie links between past and present.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
A reversible novel tells the stories of two Asian immigrants to Australia, one 40 years in the past and one in the future. It's the early 1980s, and 22-year-old Lili's ambitions are grand: She wants to be a cross between Debbie Harry and Simone de Beauvoir. To that end, she leaves Australia--where she had moved with her parents as a teenager--and accepts a post teaching English in southern France. It's the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Lili sees shadows everywhere she goes. But the real monsters are the larger forces that threaten her existence as a brown-skinned woman: racism and sexism. When Lili's story concludes, at the end of her eye-opening time in Europe, de Kretser's inventive book begins again: The novel can be flipped upside down and reversed to tell the story of Lyle, who lives in a future just a bit darker than our present. (To say that the book starts with Lili's story, though, is an arbitrary matter of a reader's personal sense of chronology. Since there are two covers and two sets of frontmatter, a reader could equally begin with Lyle and travel back in time to read Lili's story.) Justifications for this format are clear in both novels: "When my family emigrated," confesses Lili, "it felt as if we'd been stood on our heads." Lyle, who believes that he must jettison his past in order to fit in with the "Australian values" of corporate drudgery and a whopping mortgage, echoes Lili's sentiment: "Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared." Only Lyle's elderly mother, who lives with the family, reminds him that there is another way to live. De Kretser, one of our most deeply intelligent writers, offers a book that is wry and heartbreaking, playful and profound.

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Starred review from March 15, 2022
The monsters here are, of course, people, made terrifying by what de Kretser labels "three scary monsters--racism, misogyny, and ageism." Subtitled "A Novel in Two Parts," the notable Sri Lankan-born Australian de Kretser's (The Life to Come, 2018) latest is indeed a dual narrative presented in a flippable binding: open it one way to read Lili's early-1980s adventures as an Asian Australian twentysomething assistant language teacher in Montpellier, France; flip and open it the other way to witness Lyle's assimilations, adaptations, and compromises to survive as an Asian immigrant in a post-pandemic, on-the-verge-of-another, dystopian Australia of the near future. The two parts aren't overtly ordered; both halves open and close with the exact same front and back matter--including epigraphs, acknowledgements, author bio--with the exception of an introductory note which reverses the order of references to Lili and Lyle. Close reading is required to find the four-word sentence linking the two halves. Time becomes arbitrary in de Kretser's remarkable presentation of past and future--"Which comes first, the future or the past?" As contrasting as the details of their lives are, both Lili and Lyle must relentlessly navigate the challenges of being perpetual outsiders who are judged, overlooked, dismissed, targeted, used, and abused. Wrenchingly poignant, brilliantly biting, de Kretser provides an indelible, ageless examination of the migrant experience.

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August 3, 2021
Montpellier, France, 1981. Twenty-two-year-old Lili is teaching English at a local high school and navigating a new experience of displacement in her adopted European home—after emigrating to Australia with her family seven years ago, she’s once again a stranger in a strange land. As she embarks on a complicated new friendship and tries to avoid her odd downstairs neighbour, Lili begins to make plans for her future. Decades later in a dystopic Australia—a place where Islam is banned and the Permanent Fire Zone has been euphemistically rebranded the Bush-Cleansing Precinct—public servant Lyle is busy erasing his immigrant past so that he and his family can achieve total assimilation. But Lyle’s eccentric mother and an uncomfortable work situation threaten to disrupt his myopic commitment to an anodyne existence of renovations and replica furniture. Scary Monsters is a novel in two distinct parts, and while Lili’s and Lyle’s stories are only tangentially connected, the deeper threads of racism, ageism and misogyny that run through both are stark. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have been a relentlessly dispiriting read—but de Kretser’s cutting wit and dexterous ability to dismantle Australia’s rose-tinted idea of itself make this an inventive, satirical and confronting exploration of the migrant experience. Scary Monsters is sure to hold strong appeal for literary fiction readers, particularly those who enjoy the work of writers such as Helen Garner, Charlotte Wood and Ryan O’Neill. Carody Culver is senior editor at Griffith Review and a freelance writer.