From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones and this is seven AM's summer series. All this week we're bringing you conversations with our favorite critics telling us about their favorite arts and culture from twenty twenty four. Today, it's all about books,
and no one knows books like Michael Williams does. The editor of the monthly has read hundreds of novels this year and interviewed dozens of incredible writers for his podcast Read This, and for him, the best books of the year are those that have bent genres, brought a sense of play to old tropes, and reminded him of the ultimate unpredictability of life in a good way. So today Michael Williams from the books that surprised and delighted him
in twenty twenty four. It's Monday, December twenty three. Michael, Hello friend, how are you?
Ruby Jones? I am very well, still conscious.
Congratulations on a huge twenty twenty four. We're almost at the end.
You say that, but honestly, it's the last few pages that you need to That's when a book proves itself, and that is when a year proves itself. I'm not counting it out until we're through.
How many books do you think you read this year?
I'd look at like friends and other people on social media who do their book counts each year, and I envied it seems very ordered and very methodical.
Got on your stories? Did you even read them?
I don't need to read performatively. Definitely I do lose count, but it would be an embarrassing Oh yeah, yeah, comfortably triple figures.
Okay, well, let's try and narrow that feel down to a top four. I thought we could start with one of the books that I know is one of your favorites for the year, Helen Garner's new book This Season. I think that you and I had sort of similar thoughts going into this book, which was I love Helen Ghanner, but am I going to love a book that is about her grandson's amateur footy league. So tell me what your expectations were and how the book delivered.
We are at a really funny point in time with Helen Ghana, where for years there were so many expectations around her and people had a kind of weird relationship with her books that one way or the other they decided she was for them or she Wasn't you know that they knew her, and yet now she's in her eighties and she suddenly hit this point where collectively, culturally, the name Helen Garanner is a name to conjure with,
and the new Helen Garner book is an occasion. We've just had a decade of the only new Helen Garner books being the re release of her diaries or the
release to the public for the first time. And those diaries show things that we always suspected about Helen, but now we know unequivocally she's one of this country's foremost observers, that she's incredibly funny, that she has an eye for detail and human forces, that she is unforgiving in the way that she writes about others, and even more brutally unforgiving when she writes about herself, all of which adds up to say that even a footy book is worth
reading from Helen Ghana. And I am someone who by and large is like, you're going to be turned off by the idea that it's a book about football, But it's Helen Ghana, So it's not about football. It's about her relationship with her grandson, It's about what it is to be getting older, it's about different types of masculinity, it's about all these things at once, and it's beautiful.
And she is known, as you say, for this kind of unflinching attitude that she has towards her subjects, including herself, and I found that particularly confronting in this novel, because she's talking about how she's aging, and she's talking really specifically about how her body and her mind are changing, and it does at times feel like, well, she thinks she's getting towards the end of her life and that this might be her last work.
I couldn't agree more Ruby. It broke me all times in this book. It's this kind of note of melancholy that runs like a vein through proceedings. Here again and again she says she wants to get to know her grandson Ambrose Amby before it's too late, before he becomes a man, and before she is dead, and this is a refrain. Again and again Helen has no illusions her hearing's going, it's a little bit harder to get up and out of bed in the morning and in winter.
All of this stuff is kind of conspiring to suggest that it's not just an evening in Melbourne. While the footy training is going on in the dead of winter, but it's that in life as well, and you do get a sense that you're watching someone kind of reckon with their own mortality.
But it's not. I mean, it is sad in parts, but I don't think the overall tone of this novel is melancholic.
Do you No, No, I think you're absolutely right. Or even if the tone is, it's offset by a phenomenal sense of joy. I think when people think about Helen, they often talk about or remember the spikiness or the moments of conflict or confrontation out I think if you read her work, actually what comes through is this kind of boundless capacity for joy and wonder and love. That's an incredibly generous book. I was lucky enough to interview
her for the first ever episode of Read This. We went to her house and she was in the process of writing the book that would eventually become the season, and in that interview she talked about the fact that off the back of doing the diaries, she was pretty depressed.
She thought she might not write anymore. She wasn't sure where that energy was going to come from, and she just found the spark taking her grandson to his under sixteens football training once a week, and that suddenly, sitting there on the boundary line watching that being part of
that ritual, she found herself come to life again. And she found a through line from that activity to the classics that she loved to read, to the kind of literature, to the various men that shed grappled with throughout her career in thinking about the nature of power, thinking about the nature of the way people relate to one another, and the nature of community, and all of that converged on this big, joyous, beautiful She calls it a hymn at one point, and it feels like that it's a
little song of love to her grandson, and we're very lucky to have it.
Let's move on to your second pick for the year, Michelle Ducretz's novel, Theory in Practice. Before we talk about the book itself, could we talk about Dacretsa a little. I know that she's previously won the Miles Franklin been shortlisted for the Stella. Can you tell me a bit about her, her life, her writing.
She's an amazing and beautiful novelist and she's kind of much lauded on the awards circuit, and she's always been a kind of deeply playful writer. She's very interested in the novel and it's formal, both constraints and the things that it makes possible, the ways in which has an art form. It has a kind of elasticity, if you like, and it means that you can approach big subject matter
in different ways. She writes sometimes in a kind of realist mode, but then with these extraordinary capacity for formal experimentation and play. Michelle D. Kretza is not a writer who takes the job of writing a novel lightly. She takes it very seriously and yet produces this beautiful prose and this character stuff that Yeah, she's one of our best.
Absolutely. I'm currently about halfway through Theory and Practice, and what I think I'm really enjoying about it is that there's this contrast between this very personal, almost kind of gossipy tone at times where she speaks about being a young woman, but that's mixed with this incredibly smart literary criticism and engagement with these very complicated ideas, and she sort of moves between these two modes quite seamlessly.
Yeah, no, no, I think that's a beautiful description I mean she in theory and practice, her narrator is a writer and is grappling with the business of being a writer and at the same time grappling with memory, and as a consequence, the lines between what is essayistic and what is fictional, the lines between what might even be memoir from the cretsa or what is purely a work of imagination, those lines are incredibly blurred, and deliberately so.
Her narrator is a huge fan of the work of Virginia wolf and the book in some ways mirrors one of Wolfe's very late books, called The Years, which was originally designed to be a combination of novel and essays, and then Wolf kind of blended the two into one, and so there are kind of big literary things, but as you say, the enjoyment of the book doesn't rely
on that at all. Here you have a young woman who is grappling with, to put, in very base crest terms, a love triangle and sexual jealousy and a sense of what her identity is at UNI in Melbourne in the eighties, and she's kind of recounting that in ways that I think will be immediately recognizable to readers in whatever stage of their life.
Through After the Break, the book that lit up a million group chats. So, Michael, let's talk about your third pick for the year. James by Persval Everett. So this is the retelling of Mark Twain's classic book from eighteen eighty four, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But it's written from the point of view of Jim, who is the slave who run away and joined Huck on his journey
done the Mississippi River. So my first question about this is how well acquainted do you need to be with Huckleberry Finn the novel to appreciate this book?
Not at all would be my first and most straightforward answer. This book reads like a kind of wonderful, lively, page turning, funny historical novel, and you could have no acquaintance at all with Huck Finn except for a vague, lingering sens as you read it that you were missing out on jokes that you didn't get, or there were resonances that
didn't mean anything to you. Everett described in the process of writing James, he reread The Adventures of huckle where if in something like thirteen times back to back, he would get to the end and then flip straight back to the start and read it again, to the point where it just kind of embedded in his brain in a way like a song or a refrain, that he'd read it so many times in rapid succession that it
almost transcended meaning. And then he put the original book aside and he wrote, James James was a story that he wanted to tell, that he felt the need to tell. He wanted to do justice to the earlier book. But it's not a retread. It's not a retelling, it's not a sequel, it's not a reclamation. It's a kind of companion piece. And so it stands very nicely on its own.
And so it just won the National Book Award and it was shortlisted for the Booker. So the buzz around James, I think, has been pretty phenomenal. I know that you're a fan of Percival's writing. So how does this novel stack up against his other works.
It's interesting in some ways, it's one of his straightest, most conventional books. Yet he is I mean talking about Michelle Decretsa being a writer who likes playing with form. That's also true a personal eva. Some of his books are utterly batchet not to put too fine a point on it, Like he comes up with an idea and then he kind of teases it out in as many
different ways as he can. He wrote a book called The Trees, for example, that functions almost like it's beats as similar to a crime novel, its resonances are like a zombie novel, and ultimately it's about slavery and the legacy of Emmett till Now, if those four elements don't make sense to you in a single work of literature, add the fact that it's at times screamingly funny, and you get a bit of a sense of what personval
ever it's like. So his books are endlessly experimental and endlessly playful in a way that means that a book like James can feel very straight. But I think that would be a misread. Part of what's so great about James by telling the story from the perspective of a character who's a little bit kind of culturally and historically problematic. To revisit the Mark Twain book now and read the voice of an enslaved man who in many ways reads
like a zeotype of the time. Part of whatever it's saying in James is code switching is a crucial part of understanding their historical record. That the way in which James may have spoken around Huker, around the white characters, or indeed around it write like Mark Twain wasn't a true representation of who he was, in his family, in
his community, how he really spoke. And to make text rather than subtext that play around identity, around your safety, being about how you presented and who you were in the world. That seems to me to be rich and funny and weird and very very personal. Ever it it's lots of fun, all right.
Well. That brings us to the final book of the year, which was also one of my favorites, the book that lit up a million group chats, the first great Perry menopause novel, All fours. Miranda July, tell me what you loved about it.
You say that I'm not convinced after reading this book and talking to Miranda July on an episode of Read This, that there haven't been other peri menopause novels before now that just haven't been diagnosed as such. I believe, and
this is my big theory. My big theory is that Anna Karenina is the first great Perimenopause novel, and we understand her and Vronsky and everything that goes on in that book much better if we understand it to be Leo Tolstoy's portrayal of what perimenopause was like for Russian women of its time. That's my theory.
Okay. Well, even being in conversation with that novel would be a great way to have your your book framed. So tell tell me what you liked about all fours.
Look, I think it's a wonderful novel, and I think you're right. It has set the book groups of the English language speaking world a light over the past six
months since it came out. I'll wager that more than a few kind of marriages in inner city Australia are in peril off the back of people reading this book, because it is a book about the kind of ways in which the approved social structures that we all live under might constrain us, but might limit us, might make us feel like we haven't fulfilled our best version of ourselves.
And July rites really beautifully about a woman, an artist of a particular age, who suddenly feels suffocated by those constraints and can't take them anymore and tries actively to make some changes. But this is a book that is incredibly playful with ideas of sexuality, of identity, of the ways in which we move in the world, and particularly the ways in which women of a certain age are expected by our society to conduct themselves, and what might happen if they don't.
Yeah. One thing I loved about all four is was that every time I thought I knew where it was going, it completely upended my expectations. I mean, I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that there is an affair of sorts contained within it, And I think I thought I knew where the story of an affair goes. We all know what happens with an affair, But it turns out I had absolutely no idea where that was going, and that sense of surprise was so delicious.
Yeah, it looks It's a bit of a common thread of all four of these books that I have so loved and relished reading this year, which is that they are books by writers, by artists who understand the conventions and the traditions into which they're working and then want to say, well, then what happens if I don't follow those If I'm surprised as a writer, what does that mean for my readers? And what does that give them? And Miranda July, you know, her artistic practice extends beyond
the written form. This is only her second novel, but she takes a form that can be very conventional, can have the kind of familiarity of beats, as you say, and July is not satisfied with just following that path. Like her protagonist, she is determined to say, but what if we didn't? What if we asked a question instead of made a declarative statement. What if we explored possibility?
And for me as a reader, reading something that truly surprises me still is one of those kind of greatest joys of reading and the thing that you look at for every time you pick up a new book.
We'll be back with some honorable mentions after this, So, Michael, do you have any other recommendations, any other books that you secretly can't wait to spend an afternoon with at the beach.
One book that I am looking forward to reading over the summer is the new Hruki Murakami. It's called The City and it's uncertain walls, and like Murakami, is now enough of a kind of hipster phenomenon that he's much parodied. People are like, oh, yeah, it's going to have a jazz bar and a magical cat and a man who's very bad at talking about his emotions. And I'm sure all those things are true, but there is something about
the way Murakami writes. There's something about the translations from his longtime translator Philip Gabriel, where just the use of language, the relationship between the kind of mundane every day and the kind of magical weirdness of a Morikami book is a good time. So I am definitely going to give that a go over the summer. Also, they're massive bricks, so I don't have to run back and forth from the banana lounge to the bookshelf to get other books.
I can just sit and wallow in that one for a little while.
Sink yourself in, always with a big toll drink.
Yes you know something medicinal.
Obviously, Michael, thank you so much for your time.
Today, Absolute pleasure.
Ruby have a great summer you too.