Yesterday afternoon, the small crowd that showed up for a reading by Australian novelist Peter Carey in Salomon 101 was treated to a look inside two of the writer's books with intersecting themes, published fourteen years apart.
Carey, one of only two writers to win the Booker Prize twice, read first from 1994's "The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith" and from his most recent novel, 2008's "His Illegal Self." Even in brief passages from the two works, some of Carey's prevailing concerns - performance and fakery, mother-son relationships and his native Australia - proved their continuing importance to his work.
Before launching into a well-paced and strikingly rhythmic reading of the opening pages of "Tristan Smith," Carey offered the hope that the combination of the two novels wouldn't be "too chaotic."
The books dovetailed well.
"Tristan Smith" begins with a powerfully realized description of the title character's birth and his mother's confrontation with his physical deformities. Set in Efica, an imagined country dominated by the hegemonic nation of Voorstand, the novel, Carey said, allegorizes the relationship the United States has with many other countries, including Australia.
"Illegal Self," on the other hand, is firmly grounded in recent American history. The protagonist, young Che Selkirk, is the child of '60s hippies but is raised by his Park Avenue grandmother. In the opening passages Carey read, the boy's prodigal mother returns for him, leading to a tension-filled scene in an Upper East Side Bloomingdale's.
"Here we go in with boys and mothers again," Carey observed.
He then read from a later passage that finds Che and mom hitchhiking in rural Australia.
After the reading, Carey fielded questions about his interest in reworking Victorian novels - Dickens' "Great Expectations" inspired his 1997 novel "Jack Magg" - and about the ethics of representing Australian Aboriginal characters in literature.
"I think if you're Australian, you live daily, almost no matter what your politics, with the recognition that the place you're living in is not yours, that it was taken," said Carey, who is of European descent.
"The indigenous people would prefer that I did not represent them," he said, describing a conversation he had with an Aboriginal activist who once told him, "Enough damage has been done already by misimaginings of who we are. Why don't you leave that alone, for now?"
As an author, though, Carey added, "I really do think it's our responsibility to imagine everybody and everything, so I'm inconsistent."
As for Dickens, Carey's response was more jocular.
"Until driven by expediency, I'd had a lot of trouble reading Dickens," he said. But after reading Edward Said's analysis of "Great Expectations" in "Culture and Imperialism," Carey said, he was excited to read the novel and ended up incorporating it into his own writing in "Jack Magg."
Faced with a dearth of questions after the sparsely attended reading, Carey then ended the talk, but the event continued at a reception at 68 ½ Brown Street - home of the Literary Arts department, which sponsored the reading.
Carey's work involves a "more complicated sense of realism," Assistant Director of Literary Arts Gale Nelson said at the reception. He described the prescience of "Tristan Smith," which envisioned technologies nonexistent in the mid-90s that are now prevalent.
Carey named a few of his favorite authors - including Henry James, Joseph Conrad and W.G. Sebald - and talked about his current attempt to read Proust's "In Search of Lost Time."
"Proust is wildly boring, and then he's wildly exhilarating," Carey said, paraphrasing James. "It's everything that makes you want to lift your game and write better."
Carey said he recently turned in a new manuscript to his publisher, which may appear in 2010.
