Review of Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser (Catapult, 2025)
From corporate hellscapes to doomed cross-class relationships and climate dystopias, there is no shortage of recent novels that draw attention to the miseries of life under capitalism. It’s this literary movement that Australian author Michelle De Kretser responds to in her seventh novel, Theory and Practice. But unlike many exemplars of the trend (including De Kretser’s previous novels like Scary Monsters and The Life to Come), in her latest work, the author pushes her reader to do more than to empathize — and she does so by mounting a critique of literature that substitutes for political action.
Theory and Practice is told from the perspective of a twenty-four-year-old narrator — who remains unnamed through most of the novel — as she chronicles her experience of Melbourne academia in the 1980s. As a woman and Sri Lankan migrant, she is forced to confront sexism, structural racism, and inequality, as she attempts to write a thesis on Virginia Woolf while traversing a fraught romance with a mining engineering student named Kit, who has a “deconstructed” relationship with his girlfriend, Olivia.
Theory and Practice is framed within an explicitly materialist worldview, recalling Sally Rooney’s best-selling Beautiful World, Where Are You. Similarly, it highlights the gulf between our political ideals and our interactions with those around us. “As a child I often heard, ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil,’” the narrator recalls at the start of the book. “When the truth was told,” she continues, “someone had to be shamed — usually the teller of truth. It was time, I told myself, to stop fearing…
Auteur: Molly McLaughlin
