As I noted in Meet an Aussie Author, Relatively Famous is Roger Averill’s fourth book, and his second novel. Especially interesting to anyone who likes literary biographies (as I do) it explores Averill’s long-held preoccupation with biographical ‘truth’, and it also mines the fraught territory of unsatisfactory father-son relationships.

The book is cunningly constructed with contrasting narratives. Michael Madigan’s introspective anxieties about his desultory life and hapless career is offset by ‘excerpts’ from a (fictional) upbeat biography of Michael’s father Gil, a celebrity expat Australian author and a potential Nobel Prize winner. The biography is a brick of a book, and – trading on Gil Madigan’s celebrity – its author Sinclair Hughes is interviewed on national TV, while the book is lauded in the quality press. Yet despite its exhaustive resources, all neatly catalogued in the excerpted ‘acknowledgements’ by Hughes, the biography fails to reveal the true Gil because both Michael and his mother Marj both refused to have anything to do with it.

Their refusal is partly due to loyalty to Gil Madigan’s long-standing position on literary biographies. In an article in The Paris Review, Gil says that a writer’s limited truths [are created] from smaller, more manageable worlds than the ones they live in. These imagined worlds are free from the uglier truths that injure us and those we love. But those worlds are also remote from the everyday life of the writer:

…literary biographies leach imagination from the creative process as they attempt to return a work of art to the quotidian experience that inspired it. That just seems dumb to me.

But the more general problem is that there’s nothing left to be said about the lives of writers. More than most, we live uneventful existences. […]

We spend our working days sitting in rooms making up stories. What does it matter if the desk we sit at is made of oak or chipboard, if the room has a view, or that the words are written in pen or tapped out like lines of ants marching across a computer screen? Does it make any difference, add a scintilla of artistic value to In Daniel’s Den for the reader to know who I was sleeping with at the time it was written?

The trouble begins when people mistake a writer’s wit and wisdom on the page for how he actually talks and conducts himself in life. (p.235)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/05/26/relatively-famous-by-roger-averill-bookrevie... ( )