Frank Moorhouse (1938–2022)

I don't often write about books I haven't finished, but it's warranted when it comes to books by the late Frank Moorhouse...

Like many, I 'discovered' Frank Moorhouse through his Edith Trilogy, and though only Cold Light (2011) is reviewed here, obviously I liked its predecessors Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2001) more than enough to buy and read my way through those very long books. (Both of those are 678 pages long; Cold Light is 719 pages. And you can read more about them at Brona's Edith Readalong pages.) So when Moorhouse died, I had a spending spree to buy up as many of his earlier books as I could find, and when there was news of two (!) forthcoming biographies, I set my Moorhouse books aside to read my way through them.

I read and enjoyed The Electrical Experience (1974), but had some misgivings about Forty-Seventeen (1988). By then I had a copy of Frank Moorhouse, A Life (2023) by Catharine Lumby and had learned from that that his work and life were, in some of his stories, clearly entangled, and that the novella Forty-Seventeen was one of those where his life and work were juxtaposed. As I wrote in my review, it felt transgressive to read a narrative about a man turning forty who is having a sexual relationship with a girl of seventeen.

That is, a semi-autobiographical narrative about an older man and a teenager...

Well, The Everlasting Secret Family made me feel more uneasy, so much so that I have read only the first of its four short stories: 'Pacific City'; 'The Dutch Letters', 'Imogene Continued', and 'The Everlasting Secret Family'. 'Pacific City' is about a cinema proprietor in a country town whose secret is that he is attracted to children, and acts on it. It's not explicit but it is more than distasteful. It mocks the parents who come to complain about teenagers necking in the cinema darkness while the proprietor wonders which of their children he has 'pleasured'.

I now also have a copy of Matthew Lamb's Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths (2023), so I got that out only to discover that it doesn't have an index! (Bizarre! What kind of LitBio doesn't have an index so that we can come back to it any time to find references to the books??) I only scanned through its 460 pages for content about TESF so I can't be sure, but I didn't find anything because it's only Vol 1 of two volumes and it stops at 1975...

So, back to Catharine Lumby's bio, where I read about an academic's enthusiasm for TESF despite it being 'deeply unsettling' which she usually associates with 'the really extraordinary female writers'...

TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/29/the-everlasting-secret-family-1980-by-frank-...

I don't rate books I haven't finished.… (mehr)

This is a really wonderful book. There's a clarity and precision to the prose which I haven't seen in any other Australian novel. Too often Australian writers aim for the vernacular and use a style that tries to imitate speech. Moorhouse, on the other hand, seems to acknowledge that written fiction has its own discourse and trusts that an Australian style will emerge without having to reach for it. Consequently we get a lucid description of events and a wonderful insight into the mind of the protagonist, Edith Campbell Berry.

Edith starts a job with the League of Nations and the story follows her adventures from there. This setting provides a great opportunity for reflection on big questions such as idealism vs. pragmatism, war vs. peace and other less grandiose questions which it's hard to discuss without spoiling the story. The greatest spoiler of all, of course, is that history tells us that the League of Nations was a failure and that World War II broke out not long after the events in the novel. A quick read of the wikipedia entry on the League of Nations will provide helpful background if you didn't study modern history at high school, as many of the events and characters in the story are based on real life. This history also lends a tragic poignancy to the attempts of Edith and her colleagues to put an end to war.

I really enjoyed this novel and would recommend it to anyone, especially book groups, who will find a multitude of material to discuss.… (mehr)

I had a little buying spree after the death of Frank Moorhouse earlier this year, and found copies of Forty-seventeen (1988) and this one, The Electrical Experience: a Discontinuous Narrative from 1974. It's wrongly entered at Wikipedia as a short story, but at 188 pages it's not. It's a modernist novella. and I reckon that makes it his first novel and a remarkable debut...

The book is prefaced by two Tables of Contents, one listing the more-or-less chronological and coherent narratives about T. George McDowell (TGM) and the mystery of a man who thinks that business is all that matters, and the other listing fragments which purport to be authoritative miscellanea that support George's preoccupations, plus some B&W photos from the early 20th century. It's a clever structure which he termed a discontinuous narrative which was innovative for its time.

Born just after Federation, TGM is a businessman who makes soft drinks on the NSW south coast. He's a man of strong opinions, though he keeps many of them to himself. He is anti-government and anti-union, and he broke a local strike by hassling the weakest individuals until they gave in under pressure. He thinks that reason, progress and stability are defence against a changing world that he doesn't like, represented by his wayward third daughter Terri. (He was, of course, hoping for a son.) He has a pragmatic marriage and a stalwart wife, and he's obsessed by electrification, refrigeration and the wireless. He likes the positive American approach in the Readers' Digest.

While on the one hand the narratives reveal TGM's enthusiasm for Rotary, hard work, and Getting Things Done, they also reveal the hollowness of his philosophy.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/11/20/the-electrical-experience-by-frank-moorhouse...… (mehr)