Jen Craig: Since the Accident; Wall

 

- As an enthusiastic fan of Jen Craig's Panthers and the Museum of Fire which I raved about here, I bought and gobbled up her first novel Since the Accident, now re-released, and her just published Wall. Both novels are published by the small Australian publisher Puncher & Wattmann in beautifully designed editions.  

- Craig writes about childhood, family, creativity, ambition and failure in a very personal and gritty way. She renders the micro-world of her narrators in such detail she forces us to confront personal realities that are often overwhelming. We all live in small worlds demanding exploration, at times obsessive.  

- In Since the Accident Trude, the unnamed narrator's older sister, one of many as it happens, is recovering from a rather serious car accident. She has moved out of her partner Murray’s place and is now recovering in a small room in a local pub. The owners of the pub are treating her very kindly. 

- Trude’s reflections dominate the novel. Our narrator hated Trude when they were growing up together because Trude was totally self-centred, and still is. And they both have a complex relationship with their mother. 

- A large section of the novel has Trude telling us about the art workshop that she has recently attended for three days, and her observations about the small group of other participants, who were all frustrated 'artists'. They each have their stories and most of them are sad and about failure. 

- After the workshop the group go to a pub and an animated discussion about art and creativity forces all of them to fess up. One of them, Monique, bursts forth with a frank, vulgar and utterly refreshing spray about so-called ‘creativity’, which is so grounded it's just wonderful. 

- Since the Accident is an an extremely accomplished novel. 

- Wall, Craig's just published novel, is on the other hand a far more complex beast. It took me a long while to get hooked as our narrator prattled on like there's no tomorrow, but eventually, probably half way through, I warmed to it, sucked in by the incredible writing. 

- Her father has died and his house in Chatswood, full of trash, needs a thorough cleaning. He was a right wing fruitcake of your standard sort, constantly ranting. 

- She has returned to Australia after a decade in London and is talking, in her head, to her friend Tuen. She had a tense relationship with her former Australian art teacher Nathaniel Lord, and memories of him obviously drive her. She is also intending to construct an art installation inspired by the wall created by the revered Chinese artist Song Song. Her initial intention is to splatter it with her father's belongings, but as she sifts through them she gives that idea away. 

- To complicate things further, she also has issues with former art school friends Elaine and Sonya. They share a painful history of anorexia, art being a child of pain. And there is more pain right until the sad and emotional final page. 

- Wall is not an easy book to read but it demands perseverance. This blurb on the back cover by Shaun Prescott, author of Bon and Lesley published last year, sums it up brilliantly: 

Wall is an extraordinarily compacted work of rich complexity, humour and sadness. Its narrator's steadfast desire to explain herself, to clarify the seemingly unclarifiable, is as close to mirroring the roiling momentum of real consciousness that I've read in a modern novel. When I read Jen Craig I find it impossible to imagine a better way to capture the mysterious workings of the mind - its inadvertent epiphanies, its loose but determined associations, its cruelly recurring entrapments - without writing just like her. But no one else could.   

And the ABC Radio Hobart interview with literary academic Emmett Stinson is well worth a listen.