- This is one of the best Australian novels I’ve read in a long time. It's a thrilling, exhilarating, powerful piece of work. The richness of Baxter's prose is astonishing. We’re immersed in the unsettling process of art creation, and the horror of exhibiting it.
- Sabine is a 38 year old conceptual artist. ‘My personal style is playful, irreverent’ she reflects. She's preparing for an exhibition of her latest work, a series of photographs of herself and a short video. She’s full of the usual performance anxieties. That may be an understatement - she's actually thoroughly upended by it.
- Her partner, Constantine, has just been promoted to head chef at a fancy Melbourne restaurant, so there's plenty of delicious food and drink references dotted throughout. But he works long hours and she hates that. As well there's her obsession with makeup, and their house which is always shambolic and untidy, with bits of food and clothing everywhere.
- Carolee Schneemann, a ‘painter, revolutionary, early pioneer of installation, body politics and feminist art’, is dead but her ghost visits her and all sorts of fantasies are indulged in. Sabine is inspired by her.
- The other ghost-like figure in her life is ‘Rembrandt Man’, a stalker. He appears in her back garden and peers at her through the windows and leaves threatening notes about her 'whore-like' clothes and other personal things. It adds profoundly to her anxiety. She chews and swallows his notes ‘letting her membranes and muscles shove it deep into the wet dungeon of her body’.
- She’s self-centred and highly dramatic. ‘Hell is an artist three days before their exhibition opens...In fact, seeing her exhibition printed, the force of her wild and miraculous work had hit Sabine so fully, so utterly completely, that it had become impossible for her to believe she was anything less than a young god.’ She also constantly live streams herself on TikTok. The comments from her fans, many critical, are often very funny.
- One night she digs a small hole in her backyard. 'She placed a foot either side of the hole, hugged her thighs to her chest in a squat, screamed at the sky and shat...The shit was authentic, it was animalistic. This was a territorial shit. It zinged with transcendence…This genuine art. This materia prima. It was divine. Her shit was holy.’
- Yes the novel is often whacky in the extreme. But that's what gives it so much thrust and power. I’ll read this novel again, and sections of it again and again.
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