by Kate Grenville<\/p>\n
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(Canongate \u00a316.99, 256pp)<\/p>\n
(Canongate \u00a316.99, 256pp)<\/p>\n
As a young girl, Dolly Maunder lives for the gold star she is frequently awarded at school. She\u2019s bright \u2014 far too bright for the daughter of a farmer in Currabubula, New South Wales, in 1881. So when her father forbids her from training to be a teacher, insisting she stay home to work instead, she nurses a resentment that will never abate.<\/p>\n
Dolly forges ahead regardless, rejecting the expected life of a farmer\u2019s wife and, with her philandering husband, establishing a succession of successful pubs and hotels. Yet she can never forget society sees her only as a woman and, try as she might, she can\u2019t bring herself to entirely love her three children \u2014 thrusting them away whenever they seek her out.<\/p>\n
Grenville, who has made a career from filling in the gaps in the lives of forgotten Australian women from history, tells Dolly\u2019s story swiftly, cleanly and compassionately, all the while refusing to let this difficult, furious woman off the hook. Excellent.<\/p>\n
Baumgartner<\/span><\/p>\n by Paul Auster<\/p>\n (Faber \u00a318.99, 208pp)<\/p>\n (Faber \u00a318.99, 208pp)<\/p>\n Auster\u2019s career will always be crowned by the postmodern antics of The New York Trilogy, a book people tend to read \u2014 and fall in love with \u2014 when they are students.<\/p>\n All the same I had high hopes for Baumgartner, which is told from the perspective of a septuagenarian professor in mourning for his wife, Anna, an unpublished poet who died in a freak accident ten years ago.<\/p>\n And for its first third it is indeed a delight \u2014 a tragicomic account of bereavement and the ravages of ageing shot through with an unexpected poignant light. Yet then Auster goes all Auster on himself, incorporating tracts of Anna\u2019s memoir, a quick deep dive into the lives of Baumgartner\u2019s parents that, wink wink, takes in some of Auster\u2019s own ancestry, and a couple of abrupt about-turns that don\u2019t so much widen the scope of his story as erode the reader\u2019s trust.<\/p>\n Some of his observations are zingers, though: \u2018Ten years later Baumgartner marvels at how little has changed for him since those early months of insanity.\u2019 If only Auster had stuck to a boringly conventional novel about grief.<\/p>\n Brooklyn Crime Novel<\/span><\/p>\n by Jonathan Lethem<\/p>\n (Atlantic \u00a320, 384pp)<\/p>\n (Atlantic \u00a320, 384pp)<\/p>\n Lethem\u2019s latest isn\u2019t a crime novel exactly, in fact, it\u2019s not even really a novel. It is, however, set in Brooklyn, the stomping ground of some of his best known works (including the award-winning Motherless Brooklyn), and which both by default and by design becomes the novel\u2019s principal character.<\/p>\n For this curious literary experiment best resembles a scrapbook of reportage \u2014 a long sequence of vividly realised short episodes, zigzagging back and forth across several decades and detailing imagined and real moments in the city\u2019s history, many of which pivot on the tension between black and white, poverty and gentrification.<\/p>\n Lethem writes in a cool, disaffected, electric style and with deep love for the borough he was both born in and which he has given such rich imaginative life. Still, it\u2019s a book to dip in and out of \u2014 perhaps even, a rare work of fiction to savour in the loo.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/i.dailymail.co.uk\/1s\/2023\/11\/09\/21\/77625893-12731497-image-a-37_1699565460618.jpg\")
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