I'm always interested in the relationship writers have with their previous work, particularly once they've built up a significant backlist. How do they feel about that novel from twenty years ago? Is their comfort in rediscovering an earlier literary voice or is there something a little bit mortifying about retreading old ground.
I've spoken with writers in both camps. Some have expressed surprise, even delight, at finding in earlier works turns of phrase or clarity of expression that they have no memory of being responsible for. Others avoid it like the plague. When a book is finished, it's no longer theirs. It belongs to the reader at that point, time for them to
move on. But that seems wild to me. The intensity of the way so many writers talk about their characters, about the months and years of world building that consumes them when they're writing, takes on this life of its own, not to mention those writers who draw from life from personal stories and ideas or people who matter to them. It seems like a big thing to let go of. Alex Miller has written seventeen books, fourteen of them novels.
His first was published thirty seven years ago. He's now eighty eight, and there have been various moments in his glittering literary career where he might have been inclined to dip back into his own writerly past. He's won the Miles Franklin Award twice and countless other accolades. Maybe awards make you look back and see the book with fresh eyes. Just last year, with his wife Stephanie Miller, he unearthed old notepads, diaries, and letters for a collection called A
Kind of Confession. It's deeply personal, but amongst its pleasures, perhaps the most acute is the insights it offers to his writing process and the conversations and thoughts that inspired so many books. But it's his latest novel that perhaps represents the deepest engagement yet with his own creative past. Back in nineteen ninety two, Iilla released the modern Australian classic The Ancestor Game. It's arguably his most celebrated book,
and at the heart of it is a character. Lang Sue is an exiled Chinese artist turned dealer and is based on Alex's real life friend Alan o'hoy. The pair, who met in the mid seventies, shared a deep friendship, and much of The Ancestor Game reads like Miller and his characters Stephen, August and Gertrude trying to make sense of this puzzle of a man. In their work of fiction. Lang su survives, but in real life, Alan o'hoy died by suicide. His grieving friend was paying tribute on the page,
immortalizing him in the Australian literary firmament. Now more than thirty years later, Alex Miller is returning to that fiction and returning to his friend. His new novel, The Deal is about how writers engage with the world around them. It's about artists, about Australian racism and marriage, and parents and their children. But ultimately it's about giving length Sue or alanor'hoy, or even Alex Miller himself another go at
laying out the truth. I'm Michael Williams and this is read This show about the books we love and the stories behind them. Alex Miller, Are you a rereader of your own work?
No, I've never read one of my books from beginning to end. I've read chunks, bits and pieces of them and then sort of remember so much of what's going to happen, where it's going to go, and even sentences that I made up. Yeah, I've never read one to the end.
I ask about rereading your work because it seems to me the book that came out with your name on the front of it before the deal was a kind of confession, and it was a collaboration with your wife, Stephanie.
It was Stephanie who did it.
It was her project of unearthing your papers, your letters and compiling them in a way that tells a story of a writerly life and a body of work. How did you feel about that process? How was it to be confronted with your words of forty years ago and think about what they meant, what they said about you, and how you've changed.
Had I done it, I wouldn't have done it the way she did. She and Annett Barlow, my publisher, were in it together, and it took a long time for them to put it all together. I'm an unbelievable amount of material. For years since I can remember, I've kept letters, and then of course when email came in, I kept what I thought it was significant responses from me, so that the letters have a place, and I love writing letters. I wouldn't have put in the stuff that steph put in.
She went through to the earliest, went through all my diaries, every diary for bloody years, and all the notebooks, piles of notebooks. I mean a lot of those notebooks just had things like dentists three PM, you know, stuff like that in them, about them.
That's a good name for a future book about.
The dentists three PM root canal.
Yeah.
So, I mean no, I was very busy while she was doing it, writing another book. I can't remember what the book was. It may have even been this one, the deal, but I didn't read it. I'd had no input to it. I attempted to have an input to it at one point by saying, looking at what had been done at a fairly late stage, and I said, well, all my essays on art have been left out. There's nothing in there to indicate really my lifetime interest in art.
And Steph said, that's for another collection. We've kept them out on purpose. I said, okay, who Yeah, it was absolutely Steff's job.
Smart woman.
Yeah, she's my first editor, and she'll save a book from being discarded altogether and see something else in it that it needs rearranging, or the perspective's a bit wrong. That's what's the trouble is that's why you're talking about giving it up and doing something else. And it again shines a light for me on the work that's a long way from finished.
It seems directly relevant to me to the deal, because the deal is partly an act of reckoning with one of your most celebrated works, a book of many years ago, and that there is a letter that you send your Chinese translator in a kind of confession, where you offer a forward for the Chinese edition of The Ancestor.
Again, I really I can't remember that.
And it begins. I began to work on the answer game in order to try to understand the tragic death of a dear friend. The man on whom the hero of this book is based, Langzu, was a real person. He was my friend. He was an Australian Chinese artist who had lived his entire life outside China. He failed to achieve recognition as an artist in Australia, and his life came to seem to him to be more and more pointless as time went on. Eventually, at the age of fifty, he shot himself.
So really been revealed. I've forgotten that was in there, all that I'd written.
There only for the Chinese forward of the book, but you laid it out there very clearly, that engine for the Ancestor game, but also for this book.
Yeah, and for this book because.
In the ancest Game he doesn't die.
So I want to begin with the Ancestor game before we get to the Deal.
And by.
What motivated you as a writer to tell his story and what motivated the decision to let him live?
Yeah, really good questions that I've asked myself many times, and there are many different answers to them, depending at what stage of life you're at. For the first two or three years after he shot himself, I was very upset about it and quite depressed often, and if I had a few drinks in the evening, I'd start lamenting his death, which made me angry and disappointed and a number of confused emotions for quite a long time. And Steph finally said, well, why don't you write a book
about him? And I knew immediately that she was right, I should do it. So, yeah, I mean to clear your mind in a sense, to get it over, to deal with it. And that book. What didn't become the Deal, It didn't become the real life. It became a real and an imaginary life, and it took me back into Chinese history in Australia, and it brought me to the realization that if you're Chinese you're never going to be
an ussy bloke. If you're Irish or English or a German migrant, you can be a Nussi bloke, not if you're Chinese. It began to sink into me that that was the case. And of course I also read in great depth the History in Australia, the published history in Australia of anti Chinese feeling and racism, which ran deep.
There was even a I.
Mean, it hasn't gone away. If you're Chinese, you must come across it from time to time. And I was talking to Alice Pung the other day and she and I are friends. She came for lunch and we were talking about it and she just said, yeah, you know, it's normal for it to be in her life and
in the lives of her friends who are Asians. And one of the reviews, a very good review of the deal actually know it was lovely to get it in the Australian Book Review, and in that the reviewer, who has nothing negative to say, about the book, said, it's a stretch for me to believe that this or he didn't quite say to believe, but it's a stretch for me that this Chinese drunk is valued so highly by
dealers and auctioneers in the art world in Melbourne. Anybody who was involved in the art world in Melbourne in the seventies and eighties knew Lang Zu, They knew Alan o'hoy, the man on whom he was based. I mean that was unconscious racism in the sense that if it had been a drunken German dealer or a drunken Ossie dealer, now I would have blinked an I it was Chinese dealer.
He was a secret dealer and a collector, and he was relied on by a lot of agents and also people in the business of auctioning paintings.
That anger and grief in the wake of his death, Yeah, I understand that as an impulse to write. But I love what you're reckoning with the man you look.
I loved him, and as you know, if somebody who loved dies, they're with you forever. They don't go away. People like Alan Barry Reid really critically important people to me.
Yeah.
I mean a lot of people have gone into my books who are now did friends, people I loved and cared deeply about the truth of what they had lived, the truth of what they claimed those things are I mean yeah to me. I mean Ray Gator always says I'm a searcher after truth, and I hadn't kind of realized that there was anything special until he said that, and I thought, oh, I am too, because that's what interests me, to get to the truth of the story.
I mean that the story in a sense. If you're a writer, you don't have this beginning of the story. You don't have the middle of the story. It's only when the end of the story appears to you that you realize, oh my god, there's a story there.
I know.
When that began, you think, and then you've got the compass of the story.
If you like it.
If you like it.
When we return, Alex shares why he had to return to the story of his friend and set the truth straight, and why he's no longer scared of death, We'll.
Be right back.
If seeing the shape of the story isn't clear until you get the end of the story, how different is telling a story when that end is death by suicide. When that end is at the hand of the person that you're writing about.
Well, writing The Deal wasn't the same as writing The Ancestry Game. It was a desire to tell the truth. Because when I wrote The Ancestry Game, people who'd known Allen wrote to me or rang me up and in those days left a message saying you brought him back and thanking me.
Well, yeah, but he's dead. He shot himself. That was the reality.
And as you just pointed out in that book of Steffs that I actually wrote about that to Professor Leo, who translates my stuff into Chinese. I think that writing this book The Deal, it came simply, in a sense, from a desire to the two things. I suppose one is that I'm continuing with a kind of autobiography because it's all come It all comes from friends and loved ones.
As I'm concerned. I did try and write about a person I disliked intensely once, and through trying to write about him, I began to like him and understand his motivation and have some sympathy with it. The real life bloke I still didn't like, but I find it very difficult to write about people I don't.
Like you'd written written him into someone you understood.
Yeah.
Anyway, the reason I wrote the Deal was to bring a couple of things into perspective. One was the fact of my father as the good man before the war, and his gift to me of the simplicity of art in that innocence of art as it can be, and the corruption of art which happens in the book, with the substitution of paintings and recognition of things and all that.
The end the signature, I mean, neither he nor I put the signature on that picture, but it was there, and it was sold in London for some enormous.
And the heart of the deal is your surrogate, if you like Andy, And I'm curious at times it's a picture of the writer as someone who is extractive of the people in their life. And it seems to me that if we understand this book partly through the lens of autobiography, you seem critical of your chosen profession.
It's the same in the Ancestor Game. I actually call the writer a parasite in the Ancestor game, because he is feeding off the material of his engaging main protagonist of a book that maybe he will write one day. So, yes, he's kind of feeding off a relationship.
But both of us were.
We were both using each other, And you do have to ask, is there any friendship in which the two people don't use each other to some extent? I mean, I know they say, oh, he's a user or she's a user, and.
That's a derogatory term.
But nevertheless, we do use or make use of friends in all sorts of ways, and they do of us too. We find we have been used and in not unpleasant way.
If the deal is partly about telling the truth of that relationship and of that time and that story, is it a stretch then to say that you feel that you weren't telling the truth in the ancest Again.
Yeah, it's not a stretch. I suppose it's just the truth to say that I wasn't. I mean, the ancestor game is a lot of it is history making the point. I suppose that the Chinese arrived twelve years after Melbourne was declared a settlement, and that they came before the gold, whereas, of course the story is normally that they came for the gold and then went home again, which is simply
not true. Maybe true of some people. It's certainly true of English people who came out with money, significant amounts of money, and exploited land and sheep and cattle for a few years.
And then went back again to England.
Lots of lots of them, and that was but that's not said about them.
Part of what works so beautifully in The Deal and makes the way it recast the story so moving is the perspective of time and age. You know that Andy's voice and his story comes from from the other end of a lifetimes, so much so that the book actually ends in the first person with Andy's voice and in old age kind of looking back at this stuff. How important is that perspective of distance. I mean, I imagine the Alex Miller who wrote The Answer Game not only
didn't write The Deal then, but couldn't have that. It's something that you can only come to several decades on in your writing career.
Yeah, I mean, I've simplified things in as much as I'm able to in the last few books. I mean, I'm not capable of writing a great, big book anymore. I'm too old to take on a subject that requires a lot of research and he's going to finish up being a sort of six hundred page book. So it's kind of in my interests anyway, to be much tighter and more disciplined about the way I deliver a story. So yeah, a kind of not a kind of confession.
What was it called A Brief Affair and The Deal I were both relatively short books compared to ancestor Game, which is not huge, but still it's big in terms of its subject and its grasp of things and its historical reference and all that.
But The.
Deal runs from when I was a kid to now I'm what eighty seven, I'll be eighty eight next month, December.
It's distressing to me, Alex, you're in better nick than I am.
And then you know, well, I work at it.
Yeah, I work at a two that's not having any and me of the same success you're having.
It's just luck.
But yeah, So the perspective that I now have on it, I think needs to be stated in this book because the guts of the book, The Deal is a story that happened a long time ago. It's also the story of Stephanie and I meeting and having our first child and what that did to me and for a lot of people, that's the most important part of the book. But none of the reviewers so far has mentioned Australian racism as having any part to play in it. Except
Chinese people. It's the most important part of the book for them.
I'm so curious about whether the writer in their eighties is more comfortable letting their friend die on the page than the writer in their forties. You know, whether that or their fifties. You know, whether whether that distance allowed you to be truer this time around.
Yeah, I think that's probably an insight, of valuable insight. But you're not afraid of death when you're old. I mean, why be afraid of death when you're in your eighties? For Christ's sake, you should be dead and it will be soon. I used to call it, and I probably still do. People don't like it, of course. Is the death zone. Someone turns eighty and they let me know or have a party, and I say, you're in the death zone now, and they say, oh, fuck felks for christ aint cheer up, mate.
You might want to work on the messages you're writing cards, if that's what you're.
Doing, But that's when we die. We die in our eighties. Ninety percent of us die in our eighties. A few slip through to their nineties. Not too many are still being productive in any sort of serious way into their nineties. So that's another challenge yet to be faced. I mean, when you're forty five, you're scared of death. When you're fifty year scared of death, you think, oh fuck, I've got bloody cancer.
Now never think that.
At my age, I've never give it a thought. I just look at Steph and I think, I hope you're okay when I'm gone, you know.
Before I let you go, I just want to ask, just cut and ride for the record, if there's something that you want readers of the Deal to understand, to take away and remember about your friend Allen, what would it be?
No, people read their own book, and my books hopefully are open to readers to read their own book, so that a young person in Bowrel will pick the book up and read it, and they'll read their own book. They won't notice the racism, or they will notice it, or they won't notice the innocence of art and the corruption of art as a possible dichotomy a subject, if you like. They might notice the falling in love on the bus. Yeah, maybe that will be the main story for them.
Well, the way a man talks to his daughter.
Yeah, that having children was the greatest e end of my life, and I think probably of many parents' lives. The event of having a child changed everything.
It humanized me.
Well, I concur with your other readers who think The Deal might be the finest thing you've done. It's a masterpiece and thrill to discover that you're still delivering masterpieces. And I'm excited for the next one.
Thanks for a chat mate, It's.
An absolute pleasure. Great as Everdencey YouTube Mike Alex Miller's latest book is The Deal. It's available at all good bookstores.
Now.
Before we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been reading this week, And like I'm sure many of you, I read Picnic at Hanging Rock when I was quite young and it kind of haunted me ever since. But I realized I didn't know a great deal about his author, Joan Lindsay. Brenda Nile is arguably one of the best literary biographers in Australia today, and she's just completed a new biography of Joan Lindsay with the subtitle The Hidden Life of the woman who wrote Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Lindsay was deeply embedded in the world of the visual arts. She was wife of National Gallery of Victoria director Daryl Lindsay, and a lot of her life she'd sacrificed her own talent because of that context that she was in. But on the page she came to life and demonstrated this gothic, incredible vision, and Nile does a great job bringing that to life. Brenda Niles Joe Lindsay is available in all
good bookstores. Now that's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and reviewers. It helps a lot. Next week, I'm read this. I'm sitting down with Sean Wilson to discuss his heartbreaking new book about dementia. You must remember this. Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the generous support of the AAR Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original
compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Thanks for listening. See you next week.