Springtime

February 15, 2016
All the traditional pleasures of a ghost story are revived, and cleverly transformed, in de Kretser’s taut, nimble, atmospheric short novel. It isn’t spirits but personal habits and histories that intrude on the verdant and “explosive Sydney spring,” the first Frances and Charlie are spending as a couple. Frances, 28, is an art historian “whose life had taken place in books”; she met older IT guy Charlie in Melbourne a year prior, and the two bonded over their French mothers and complicated childhoods. Charlie left his family to be with Frances, but the past shadows their new life together. Frances, who doesn’t want children, finds Charlie’s visiting young son Luke to be an inscrutable intruder; she resents Luke’s harassment of her dog, Rod; studying Luke’s mother’s photos online, she thinks “her face had the empty yet powerful look of a primitive mask.” To make matters worse, an eerie prank caller targets the couple, and at a dinner party, Charlie’s attention seems to wander to a coworker. When Frances notices, on her daily walks with Rod, a mysterious figure in the “shadowy depths” of a garden, she wonders whether she’s seeing something otherworldly. Readers will retain the precise, startling images powering de Kretser’s prose—azaleas growing “as big as fists”—rendering even loved ones as unknowable as the world beyond.

February 1, 2016
A young scholar is haunted by literal and metaphorical ghosts. Frances, an Australian woman who must uproot from Melbourne to Sydney for a research fellowship, was raised a "solitary, studious girl, whose life had taken place in books." Now a 28-year-old scholar of 18th-century art, Frances is adjusting to her new life not only as a Sydney resident, but as the lover of Charlie, who's left his marriage and his young son, Luke, to live with her. To mitigate against her disorientation--particularly when Luke comes to visit--Frances walks her dog through her new neighborhood. When she keeps glimpsing a woman no one else can see, wearing "an old-fashioned dress" and standing in a lushly landscaped backyard, she feels unsettled, a feeling compounded by a rash of mysterious phone calls. De Kretser (Questions of Travel, 2013, etc.) has crafted a story that is somewhere shy of novella, but the brevity suits not only the abruptness of the intrusions in Frances' life, but also de Kretser's knack for focusing on just a few charged details. Indeed, this is a story about perception as much as it is a kind of ghost story. Frances is never able to pin down the woman at the edges of her vision, and scenes of Frances' interactions at dinner parties or with Luke (whom de Kretser renders masterfully) underscore the mundane ways all of us fail to truly articulate the way we see even to those closest to us. As the story comes to a close, Frances' unearthly visions begin to cast light on her real life, resulting in a strange and resonant ending. As Frances says of her own research: "What people don't pay attention to changes the story." A subtle and intellectual take on the supernatural.

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April 15, 2016

In Miles Franklin Award-winning de Krester's atmospheric fable, Frances and Charlie have moved from Melbourne to lush, cerulean-skied Sydney so that she can take up a research scholarship on 18th-century French portraits at the university. One morning, as Frances walks their dog along the river, she spies a woman in an old-fashioned pink dress tending to a garden, and she has a sensation that time has somehow tilted; the woman isn't really there. Spooky moments follow, the relationship between Charlie and Frances grows tenser, but does Frances really believe in ghosts? VERDICT This brief, absorbing read has just enough portraiture, moodiness, and fine language to stay with the reader long after the cover is quietly closed.

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