The Hyperrealist Novel

Solidarity is easier to invoke than to achieve. This problem is posed as much in the novel’s title as in the critique its narrator articulates of then fashionable leftist academic discourse. As she reflects, referring to her own writing project:

The smooth little word “and” makes the transition from theory to practice seem effortless, but I’d rarely found that to be the case. . . . The book I needed to write concerned breakdowns between theory and practice, and the material was overwhelming. Particles of it had entered my novel and jammed up its works.

This reference to writing also suggests that Theory and Practice is in part a work of autofiction. Its narrator — like its author — eventually becomes a successful author. And its other characters follow life paths common for their generation and class background. The narrator’s one-time romantic rival, Olivia, ends up working as an environmental lawyer. Kit, on the other hand, makes headlines as the project manager for a mine in Madagascar that faces protests from locals.

In an interview with Michael Williams on the Read This podcast, De Kretser further addresses this aspect of her work, describing Theory and Practice as a “hyperrealist novel, a novel that doesn’t read like a novel.” Given the scathing view the book takes of French post-structuralist theory, which came to dominate university humanities departments in the 1980s, it’s clear that De Kretser’s comment is a tongue-in-cheek allusion to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality.

Baudrillard described a society within which representations have become more “real” than the realities they were initially created to represent. By using Baudrillard’s term to describe a work of fiction, De Kretser reverses his claim, acknowledging the fundamental unreality of literature. Indeed, it’s also a barb aimed at the realist style that continues to dominate the literary landscape, despite challenges from authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, who described science fiction and fantasy writers as “writers of the imagination.” While Le Guin saw speculative fiction as a way of describing reality and exploring more hopeful alternatives, De Kretser attempts to structurally represent the intrusion of reality into literature, blurring the boundaries between memoir, fiction, and essay.

This also helps us understand the presence of Virginia Woolf in the novel. As De Kretser’s narrator states, Theory and Practice takes inspiration from Woolf’s final work, The Years, published in 1937. Although The Years was initially intended as a hybrid text of fiction and social commentary, it ended up reproducing the form of a traditional novel. Theory and Practice aims to achieve Woolf’s abandoned ambition by weaving a genre-defying tapestry of ideas about art, class, gender, and race.

By a similar token, De Kretser appropriates techniques usually associated with postmodern literature in order to level a critique against postmodern theory. For example, Theory and Practice begins with the narrator recounting her work on a different unfinished novel before she interrupts herself, anachronistically citing an extract from a 2021 London Review of Books essay called “Tunnel Vision” by Eyal Weizman. The essay explains how Israeli military commander Aviv Kochavi’s strategy drew on post-structuralist theory to devastating effect during a raid on the West Bank in 2002. “According to Weizman,” De Kretser writes,

Kochavi attributed the success of the raid to his reinterpretation of space. . . . Kochavi’s strategy was inspired by the key Situationist concepts of dérive and détournment. The first refers to unhindered movement through a city without regard for “borders”; the second to the adaptation of buildings for new ends.

The clear implication is that theory that obfuscates reality, à la Baudrillard, can be mobilized to justify or even worsen brutal realities — a motif that recurs throughout the text.

Later in the novel, the point is reinforced when the narrator takes another nonfiction detour, documenting the pedophilia of Donald Friend, an Australian artist and diarist who abused multiple young boys in Bali between the 1960s and 1980s. Despite the far-reaching impact of Friend’s abuse on his victims, she notes the lack of response from the arts community. “The Devil refused to be shamed,” the narrator notes, concluding that “a white man’s wealth can buy a great many things in a developing country, including impunity from the law.”

By weaving together seemingly disparate strands like these, De Kretser builds her argument that art and those who make it are not inherently valuable, despite the stories artists and audiences may tell themselves.

Class Consciousness

In an episode of the Tin House podcast Between the Covers, De Kretser cites Fredric Jameson’s 1981 command to “always historicize!” In Theory and Practice, the historical context of the author and the reader is omnipresent, an element that culminates in De Kretser’s critique of contemporary anti-capitalist fiction.

In Beautiful World, Where Are You, the ills of contemporary capitalism paralyze Rooney’s characters — and this is the point. As one of Rooney’s characters, Eileen, writes to her friend Alice:

If serious political action is still possible, which I think at this point is an open question, maybe it won’t involve people like us — in fact I think it almost certainly won’t. And frankly if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it.

By contrast, although she also struggles with the problem of political action, De Kretser’s narrator is anything but passive or resigned. Instead, her experience of injustice motivates her search for a meaningful form of resistance. Driven by her entanglement in the lives of Melbourne’s upper class, she reflects on an incident from her childhood when her mother identified a particular suburb as “where rich people live.” The narrator explains that, at the time, her mother had “come across as vulgar — vulgar! — and rude and ignorant.” Now, however, she found that she “could think of nothing but other people’s financial status.”

This experience of class inequality, for De Kretser’s narrator, is also deeply inflected with racism. By the 1980s, the White Australia policy — which enshrined racism toward non-white migrants — had been dismantled. But its racist legacy was going strong. As the narrator recounts, this racism “ran hand in hand with Late Capitalism’s commitment to wealth inequality.” It’s a realization that helps her understand that she would never be on equal footing with her fellow students, despite her education — and why they would remain blissfully ignorant of this fact.

None of this suggests the narrator of Theory and Practice is a paragon of political virtue. Her reactions are as messy and complicated as the injustices that give rise to them. In one scene, the narrator fantasizes about breaking into Kit’s girlfriend Olivia’s flat and stealing or damaging her possessions, leaving “a bloody lipstick scrawl on a mirror: ‘You Are Not Me!’” In another, she even gets as far as the back fence before thinking better of it. Instead, when Kit mentions his girlfriend, the narrator “exacts revenge by stealing coins or a low-denomination note from his wallet — nothing he could be sure he hadn’t spent.”

The narrator’s experiences of jealousy toward her romantic rival — as well as her complicated relationship with her mother — reveal that she is subject to the same petty resentments as those around her. And, at the same time, they point toward a budding awareness of the material forces that have shaped her life, denying her the same things her peers take for granted.

This theme in Theory and Practice shouldn’t be read as a dismissal of the discontentment and lethargy experienced by Rooney’s characters. De Kretser’s narrator struggles with a similar sense of disempowerment when, toward the end of the novel, she finds out that Olivia has died in what her cousin suspects was a suicide. In the face of this, words fail her. “[The cousin] needed a story. I didn’t have one to give her.”

By the end of Theory and Practice, De Kretser seems to have taken Rooney’s diagnosis of the ills of modern life as accurate. And it points toward her prescription for its treatment: instead of literature, a politics of action.

Praxis and Poiesis

Given its historic setting, Theory and Practice doesn’t make straightforward claims about what a contemporary politics of action should entail. This is in keeping with the novel’s main claim that a story will not provide the answers to the complex challenges facing the Left in 2025. Rather, Theory and Practice separates art from politics, pointing to the common misconception that the former can be substituted for or equated to the latter. The point isn’t to criticize art as such, let alone to depoliticize it, but rather to criticize art that substitutes for political praxis.

This is also an example of De Kretser’s historicization of the problem. In one scene, she suggests that the substitution of art for praxis is endemic to post-structuralism and its emphasis on the instability of literary meaning. For the novel’s characters, an overreliance on this kind of theory has clouded inherent injustices in higher education and capitalism more broadly. This is highlighted when the narrator confesses to a friend that she is struggling with her assigned reading, and her friend replies with a prescient rant:

Artists used to think about art through art. Now they think about it through Theory. What happened to praxis? The left used to dream of doing. You know what I see all the time in tutorials? Women, working-class kids, kids from migrant backgrounds, the kinds of students who used to feel empowered by feminism and Marxism, struggling to engage with the Theory they’re expected to read now.

De Kretser’s narrator wrestles with the same problem in a later scene, where she recounts her discovery of Virginia Woolf’s racism. In a diary entry, Woolf compares E. W. Perera, a Ceylonese barrister, politician, and freedom fighter, to a “caged monkey,” describing him as “a poor little mahogany-colored wretch” with “no variety of subjects” of conversation. Woolf’s husband, Leonard, had served in the colonial administration in Ceylon and was sympathetic to Perera’s push for an inquiry into the injustices perpetrated by the British. Perera’s preferred “subject” of conversation was presumably the dozens of summary executions and imprisonments suffered by his countrymen, making Woolf’s racism all the more shocking.

In light of this discovery among her beloved writer’s papers, the narrator feels unable to continue with her thesis — until, that is, another friend expands on the idea of the role of theory and practice.

She had Aristotle’s categorization of human activities in mind, she said. “He distinguishes theoria, which increases knowledge, from praxis, which is action-for-itself. In between those two comes poiesis, which is action-for-making.” Poiesis is creative. Make a film, paint, write a poem. Write back to Woolf.

This distinction clarifies both poiesis and praxis. It’s not that aesthetic creation replaces action. Instead, politically charged creation explores the gap between political ideals and the messy human realities, reactions, and feelings that give rise to them and make action necessary. Crucially, the main political value of creation is for the maker, not the consumer. And, insofar as poiesis grapples with the gap between theoria and praxis, it points beyond literary representation.

So, too, does Theory and Practice. In the final pages, we learn that that De Kretser’s narrator has burned her poster of Woolf, cremating her alongside the theoretical certainty she once represented.

Novelists Against the Novel

In contrast with praxis in the Aristotelian sense, the Marxist idea of revolutionary praxis calls for socialist theory to be transformed into practical success. Although, for De Kretser’s narrator, Marxist praxis still lies frustratingly out of reach, both conceptually and practically, her critique of poiesis as politics is bringing her closer.

Many years after her time in Melbourne, she hears an interview with a Canadian journalist-turned-novelist at a literary festival extolling the “moral seriousness” of the novel as a form. The novel, he pronounces, functions as an “ethical device for eliciting the reader’s empathy and compassion by showing that strangers were really just like us.” She links her struggle to empathize with her mother or Kit’s girlfriend with Woolf’s inability to empathize with Perera and the racist view of him Woolf fell back on as a result. “I wanted to ask the Canadian writer,” the narrator explains,

about characters whose inner lives revealed thinking we disagreed with and even found repellent. Did we summon empathy and compassion for them? If novels present us with people who turned out to be “just like us,” was that “moral seriousness” or the comforting reflection of our values and beliefs?

As De Kretser’s narrator reflects on these impenetrable characters, she understands that she must nevertheless find a way to see their humanity. “The Canadian reasoned as if the politics of novels were the politics of politics,” she reflects. “They were not. What politics asked of us was to care about people we couldn’t see into, and the difficulty of that was the difficulty of life.”

Here, there are echoes of the driving question of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign: Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself? Equally, in the context of Donald Trump’s attacks on migrants and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, it calls for a broad political solidarity built upon a common struggle for liberation. The same sentiment is encapsulated in a phrase that originated from a Queensland Aboriginal activist group in the 1970s: “If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

By having her narrator insist on this kind of real-world, political solidarity, De Kretser’s work of creation is one that succeeds aesthetically precisely by pointing to the limits of literature. It’s why her disruption of the novelistic form is capable of pushing beyond Woolf’s aborted attempt to resist the demands of plot. At the same time, it goes beyond Rooney’s long-winded anti-capitalist treatises by questioning the effectiveness of fiction as a tool for generating compassion.

In the final pages of Theory and Practice, the narrator revisits a line from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Cirque D’Hiver,” a poem she had pinned to the wall above her desk in her university days. “Well, we have come this far,” wrote Bishop in 1940, in a meditation on the search for connection in an increasingly artificial modern world. The narrator, too, has come a long way in her understanding of the limits of stories. Ultimately, if you empathize with her defiance, maybe it’s time to start building solidarity off the page — perhaps, by joining your union.