- This book is deeply flawed by the author's male obsession with cheap sex. It's really two different novels shoved together - one focussing on the marriage and careers of two highly respected writers; the other a vulgar, pornographic tale of a young woman's sexual exploits.
- Amy Winston is a young book editor. She’s bright, irreverent, talented and ‘exceptionally beautiful’ according to virtually everyone. As the novel progresses however it becomes quite clear she’s just a cheap male fantasy. A sex object.
- The $2 million advance to the ageing literary novelist Helen Owen is absurdly unrealistic. It’s comic. But it highlights the theme of the book - artistic integrity under commercial pressure.
- The constant descent to outright pornography becomes extremely annoying. It is so cheap. Presumably Purcell is caricaturing popular taste in contrast to quality literature. Or satirising modern commercial publishing. Whatever, it fails dismally.
- Amy is a literary ignoramus. She’s aware of popular fiction and thriller writers and that’s it. She’s also a borderline alcoholic, continually drunk, hanging around bars for sex.
- Thankfully, however, Purcell can write. There are wonderful lines: ‘No one bothers to talk about the second time Lazarus died’; ‘He thought of the book now as some sort of disease, like syphilis - a disease you catch while doing something pleasurable’. Both Helen and Malcolm are insightful and wise. And as they age they question their fading relationship. It’s heartwarming as it progresses to a tragic ending.
- Halfway through I was convinced that this book was simply trash. Easily the worst novel I'd read all year. It cloaked itself in literary righteousness but was really just a low rent pornographic indulgence. It was name dropping countless books and authors, literary and popular, as this was a novel about novels and their authors, but it continually subverted its main narrative by the sexual vulgarity. The real and substantial story never got off the ground.
- That story, the Helen and Malcolm one, is beautifully told and comes into its own in the final 70 or so pages. The potentially good novel, on the brink of ruin, re-emerges.
- Under Helen and Malcolm’s influence, Amy, estranged from her own parents, finally begins to mature as an adult. When the sex stops the real and satisfying story is immensely enjoyable.
- Malcolm’s reflections on commercial and literary fiction at the Sydney Writers Festival are just brilliant.
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