The Reading Group

by Amanda Lohrey

Sex and politics — in The Reading Group Amanda Lohrey writes with extraordinary flair about how these two inescapable forces are woven into the ordinary lives of all of us.

The Reading Group is set in an indeterminate future at the time of a political crisis in an Australian city. Events are viewed from the perspectives of eight characters who are involved on the fringes of political activity and who have in the past been members of a reading group.

269 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Amanda Lohrey is a novelist and essayist. She was educated at the University of Tasmania and Cambridge. She lectured in Writing and Textual Studies at the Sydney University of Technology (1988-1994), and since 2002 at the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Reviews

[dom · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Pilger has a book called ‘A Secret Country' that you may have seen in a suburban street library. Its largest chapter, ‘Mates’, chronicles the dissipation of Whitlam government and the following transition to the Hawke government’s sleaze, kickbacks, and ties to an emergent class of oligarchs like Peter Abeles, Alan Bond, and crucially, Ruper Murdoch. To Hawke, 'the future lay not in Whitlam's dream but in the world of 'consensus', he writes:

Those who ran the 'big end of town' would build this consensus. They would provide the money and the power. Their values would be the values of the consensus, and of course, their own wealth and power would be reinforced by it.

With the help of such mates, Hawke and Keating would re-introduce university fees, throttle union power and density, and 'eliminate the most equitable spread of personal income on earth'.

The Reading Group, written in 1988, is a dexterous piece of social portraiture that chronicles how these political transformations are woven into the lives of Sydney’s middle class. As with other ‘social’ novels of this type, it’s polyphonic. It rotates perspective between a high-level public servant, a schoolteacher, a lawyer, a social worker, and a Victorian-era furniture enthusiast. Its framing premise is that these characters are connected by membership years ago in the reading group of the book’s title, but this connecting tissue is thin, and they seem more related to each other through a web of relations and marriages that require you to sketch out a family tree to keep track of.

Lohrey abstracts The Reading Group to a vague future time of crisis. Sydney is encircled by wildfire, its streets are beset by urban guerrillas and ‘plague bearers’, and the government seeks mandate for sweeping incursions into civil liberties with a ‘New Emergency Powers’ bill. This speculative padding establishes tone, but isn’t the main focus of the novel. Lohrey is more interested in chronicling a moment of post-politics, where the possibility of genuine participatory politics has been curtailed, and charting how this irrupts - the return of the repressed - into the private lives of its characters.

Lohrey in 2001 noted a new form of governmentality that 'constructs the the self as a constant work-in-progress' and the promotion of what she calls 'privatised utopias; the utopia of one'. This book was published 12 years before that lecture, but its characters demonstrate the same concerns albeit in a more nascent form. Claire fixates on home renovations and decor, while Robert, the most progressive of the group, obsessively rereads passages from Gramsci (unintentionally yassified by being written as ‘Antonia’ Gramsci in the acknowledgements page), either as a form of consolation or flagellation. Michael’s proximity to government details a world of newly modernised boardroom furniture and apparatchiks eternally launching into coups and counter-coups. The most loathsome character, Dyson, who carries a hairbrush in his jacket pocket, voices the modern crisis of masculinity: as a handwritten annotation in my library copy reads, his ‘narcissism is his politics'.

Polyphony, musically speaking, is tricky. The voices need to blend into each other seamlessly, but each has to be distinct enough on its own to still be recognisable among the other 3 or 4 voices playing simultaneously. Lohrey doesn’t quite pull this off. She’s a sharp caricaturist, and an accomplished prose writer, but her characters are too opaque and interchangeable to distinguish much of the time. The names - Robert, Michael, Sam, Claire, Louisa - don’t help here. I had to establish little mnemonics to keep track of who was who. Michael’s the overweight civil servant, Robert’s the one with the endlessly reiterated purple car, Claire’s the one with the cuckoo clock fixation etc.

This effect is compounded by the strange formal composition of the novel. There’s three parts: a bloated middle section bookended by an introduction and a coda. Very little distinguishes the parts, and the book would have worked just as well if the dividers were omitted altogether. In the middle part - 'The Present Crisis' - Lohrey might linger on one person’s point of view for three segments, switch to an italicised monologue, then return to the first character, then to another. Chapters are divided into smaller sub-chapters without any discernable logic. Some are given a subheading like Renata, 9pm, whilst in others these headings are omitted. Overall, it feels chaotic. Some sort of governing structure would’ve benefitted the clarity of the novel greatly.

The book's most striking moments occur when Lohrey's thesis is made most pronounced, and she voices the slow deliquescence of activist hopes into suburban inertia:
Once, in his twenties, he had thought of himself as a suburban guerilla, but in the vain formlessness of that time everyone's expectations had dissolved. And the boldest had disappeared, picked off by invisible snipers, or laid to rest in suburban comfort, the second marriage and the small job done well. Whatever happened to vastness of scale? The broad sweep, the grand gesture?

Or the rise of a new aspirational class of citizens that benefit from their parents' wealth, but find themselves at odds with their political commitments:
She has the tawny, apricot glow of the elect, a burnished and demure confidence, for she has moved into another social formation from her father, one to which she will not so much bring old political loyalties as emotional resonances that will become weaker in her children...'

The Reading Group marks a deft attempt at contouring the affective lives of those caught in the transition from illusionment to disillusionment. There are times reading it that I wished that the political argument of the book was more intentional, but I think its naturalist bias - to represent as is, without mounting any prescription - is one of the novel's strengths, and the reason it works well as a document of its times.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, this has turned out to be a more interesting book than I anticipated. Winner of the Patrick White Award in 2012, Amanda Lohrey is one of my favourite authors, and I've read all of her novels except her first, The Morality of Gentlemen (1984) which is somewhere on the TBR. Pre-dating this blog I read Camille's Bread (1995), and The Philosopher's Doll (2004), and reviewed here on the blog, I've read Vertigo (2008), Reading Madame Bovary (2010), and The Short History of Richard Kline (2015). But I had no idea that Lohrey was sued over this second novel, The Reading Group (1988). According to AustLit:

'Publication of The Reading Group led to a libel action by Senator Terry Aulich in 1989, subsequently settled out of court, and the pulping of 1,000 unsold copies, events which aroused debate and some strong protests from the literary community; the novel was reissued several months afterwards.' Source: The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1994).

This is the blurb:

Sex and politics — in The Reading Group Amanda Lohrey writes with extraordinary flair about how these two inescapable forces are woven into the ordinary lives of all of us.

The Reading Group is set in an indeterminate future at the time of a political crisis in an Australian city. Events are viewed from the perspectives of eight characters who are involved on the fringes of political activity and who have in the past been members of a reading group.

My copy is dated 1990, so it's the reissued version...

(It's a pity they didn't think to fix the potossorum bush that features on page 202. I am open to correction on this but Professor Google suggests that it's probably a pittosporum that's meant, since we have many attractive varieties that would complement the grevillea on the same page. But I digress...)

With some notable exceptions, Senators in Australia tend to come and go without much media presence, so I shall say at the outset that I did not recognise any allusions to Senator Aulich. But I had no trouble recognising The Leader, when the ministerial adviser Michael visits him at home. He's been there before, so he knows to head for the pool in the back garden (paid for, it is said, if I have identified this now deceased political leader correctly, with the proceeds of litigation).

The Leader looks up from where he reclines on a white tubular sun-lounge. His tanned, nuggety body is oiled and glistens. His shorts, green and white and patterned in bamboo leaves, are laced loosely at the fly. He springs up out of the sun-lounge and his lean, slightly bowed legs narrow down from a wide trunk. (p.202)

Michael is offered a beer by this (always capitalised) Leader whose own diet and conversion to fitness are well publicised. And (most women will wince at this, because we know who he is ordering about) he pads to the back door and shouts for drinks in his flat, abrasive twang. Later on we learn that he used to be a union official...

The Reading Group is an intensely political novel, juxtaposing two poets of the Left and the Right jousting over the crisis, and through the character of Michael, offering interesting observations about the ethics of political decision-making.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/04/27/t...

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gosh I love this writing. The structure is complex and I lost track of some of the characters, all of whom once had a reading group, but that doesn’t matter as each scene is so beautifully fully formed. The smoke from bushfires seethes in the background of this book, something that connects the large cast of characters. Politics and sex and renovations and crime and heat and poetry and the beach and Spanish civil war songs - all these mundane and everyday things make the time and place of this novel. published in1988, bicentennial year, and replete with nationalist jingoism and age old special powers of the authorities. What a brilliant idea and innovative structure.

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very clever.

[Ullah Dullah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book, it got me back into reading!!!