The nauseating sycophancy of the conservative postcolonial

In Australia recently I found a brilliant series of small books, "Writers on Writers," which asks Australian writers to write short books on compatriots of their choice. Others are Alice Pung on John Marsden and Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard.

I couldn't finish this. Nam Le begins by conjuring his high school in Melbourne in 1991-96.

"Strange, that I remember only the mornings. Or maybe it was all a single morning, all those high school years -- dark, chill runny-nosed morning, shock of school uniform starch against the skin."

This instantly conjures any number of 20th c. English writers (not Americans): I thought of Waugh, Greene, Barnes, and especially of Ishiguro. The carefully and yet apparently effortlessly chosen adjectives and images speak to a certain ideal of writing from a colonial past. I didn't think of Patrick White, for example, or any number of mid-century American writers.

Yet in the next few pages Nam Le tells us he and his high school friend argued about Rilke, Rimbaud, Tennyson, Blake, and Hopkins. Aside from a bit of the last nothing of them remains, and more to the point there's no mention of any number of other people who were argued about in the early 1990s, including in high schools -- Acker, Perec, Roubaud, Wallace, so many others. It seems as if Nam Le grew up from an adolescence thinking of romantics into an adulthood thinking of conservative modernists.

He makes a case early on for Malouf's difference, how he doesn't fit the transparently nationalist agenda of the authors who were then set as required texts. But then that shifts to an impassioned defense of the canon, as a way of introducing Malouf.

"Like Malouf, I'm a student of Western philosophy. I honor the Western approaches of intrinsic skepticism, self-critical inquiry, uncertainty. I hew, as hard as I can, to epistemic humility."

Fair enough, I might have thought as I read those first two sentences, because they could mean, or lead to, practically anything. But that third sentence is not humble. It's a literary brag. And who, exactly, hews? Waugh, Greene, Barnes, and Ishiguro, for example.

Then he mentions Shakespeare and Socrates, and remarks "Is it not possible to acknowledge their worth, critique the context that begat them, and then go out of our way -- out of our skin -- to find, encourage, and value works by and about all those people who all this time have been systematically 'othered'?"

The seriousness of his defense of Shakespeare and Socrates (made of straw here, or something even flimsier) may have made him a bit self-conscious, because the word "begat" is weirdly imported from the King James Bible to help make the case -- and then just afterward the sentence veers into the hortatory and formal with "and then go iout of our way..."

The next sentences are:

"All this feels rudimentary. Unremarkable. But in our shared, splintering moment, nothing can be said to go without saying. Basic things beg belaboring."

The one-word sentence is suddenly chummy, vernacular. And the Gertrude Stein echo in "nothing can be said to go without saying," as well as the alliterative last sentence, are bids for modernist syntactical profundity.

I think this is horrible writing. It's sycophantic to the former colonial power, and it vamps, not only for Malouf but for the famous British dead. I would have written "fairly horrible," but then I would have fallen into the same temptation to ascend to literature by carelessly revealing signs of my educated poise, my ability to move effortlessly from the biblical to the chummy.

I'll apologize in advance to the Goodreads and other readers who may have found this. If you are looking for an excellent book introducing some Australian modernists, may I recommend "The Burning Library" by Geordie Williamson, a really excellent newspaper critic (turned publisher)? I realize I'm writing in an exasperated tone, but it's mainly the old familiar feeling of having wasted my time, venting about an author many people love, in an online forum that is scarcely read.