Springtime
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“This is a gorgeous, delicately surprising piece of writing. . . . It's like spirit photography, all fuzzy outlines and unaccountable light: a snapshot of something that may or may not exist.” —Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review When Frances met Charlie at a party in Melbourne, he was married with a young son. Now that the couple has moved to subtropical Sydney, a lusher and more chaotic city, Frances has an unshakable sense that the world has tipped on its axis. Everything seems alien, and exotic—and Frances is haunted by the unknowability of Charlie's previous life. A young art historian studying the objects in paintings–the material world–Frances takes mind-clearing walks around her neighborhood with her dog. Behind the fence of one garden, she thinks she sees a woman in an old-fashioned gown, but something is not right. It's as if the garden exists in a vacuum suspended in time, «at an angle to life.» Springtime is a ghost story that doesn't conform to the genre's traditions of dark and stormy nights, graveyards and ruins. It breaks new ground by unfolding in sunny, suburban Australia, and the realism of the characters and events make the story's ambiguities and eeriness all the more disquieting. The richness of observation here is immediately recognizable as Michelle de Kretser's, a writer who has been praised by Hilary Mantel as a master of «the sharp, almost hallucinatory detail.»
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Also by Michelle de Kretser
The Rose GrowerThe Hamilton CaseThe Lost DogQuestions of Travel
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His apartment block, sixties brown brick with a sand-colored trim, signaled the start of Frances’s favorite section of the walk. It was shaded by she oaks, and she could look into the gardens that ran down to the path. She was still getting used to the explosive Sydney spring. It produced hip-high azaleas with blooms as big as fists. Like the shifty sun, these distortions of scale disturbed. Frances stared into a green-centered white flower, thinking, I’m not young anymore. How had that happened? She was twenty-eight.
For as long as she could remember, the weekend supplements of newspapers had informed her that her generation was narcissistic, spoiled, hyperconscious of brands. It was like reading about a different species. She was a solitary, studious girl, whose life had taken place in books; at least four years of it had passed in the eighteenth century. Her young parents had always treated her, their only child, as if she were more or less grown up. Her mother was French. Frances was taken to restaurants at an early age, expected to sit quietly and eat her food in a mannerly way while adults talked over her head. As a teenager, she devised a game in which she identified the sentence this or that person was least likely to utter. Her mother’s was: I’m not interested in what you think, tell me what you feel.
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