Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

Michael and Marjorie Madigan refuse to be interviewed by biographer Sinclair Hughes for his new book Inside the Lion's Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan. This is not surprising as Gilbert is Marjorie's ex- husband and Michael's mostly absent father.

In Roger Averill's brilliantly conceived new novel, Relatively Famous, Gilbert Madigan is Australia's first Booker Prize winner, a feted and much lauded author that the U.K. and U.S. now likes to call their own. Michael cannot escape his father's life and work, and at times his own life seems swallowed by it. His father's success is a source of undeniable pleasure but also of great turmoil. How does one live in the shadow of a famous relative who we never seem to be able to live up to?

In a world increasingly obsessed with fame and celebrity, this engrossing novel subtly explores notions of success , masculinity, betrayal and loss, and ultimately what it might mean to live a good life.

Genres: Novels, 21st Century, Australia

304 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2018

About the author

Roger Averill lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he works as a freelance researcher, editor and writer... In the late 1990s [Averill] wrote a doctoral thesis about sociological readings of biographies and has since published articles in a number of international journals. Stemming from this work, he has an agreement with the eminent Australian author Randolph Stow to one day write his authorised biography.

Dr Roger Averill used Library collections to research a biography of Werner Pelz. The book, later published as Exile: The lives and hopes of Werner Pelz, was shortlisted for the 2013 NSW Literary Awards.

Reviews

[Steve lovell · Rating 4 out of 5]

It takes one to know one, or so goes the old adage. With these two takes, one I loved and one I struggled with, an author has at his/her book’s core a fellow practitioner of wordsmithery. But one is more up close and personal than the other. Lisa Halliday, indeed, had a relationship with a real life famed scriber, but her product, for this reader, was troublesome, perplexing and not the intriguing novel full of potential some of its mixed reviews promised.
‘Asymmetry’ is an unconventional debut containing two storylines with, unless I missed something, only the most tenuous of connections. Lucy is minding her own business on a Manhattan bench when Ezra plonks himself down beside her, ice cream in hand to be devoured. He is a revered ageing writer and they get to chatting. The girl has something in common as she is an editorial assistant at a publishing house. So, as happens, bob’s your uncle and an affair soon develops. Now here’s the rub. Back in her formative years something similar happened between Ms Halliday and Philip Roth. She remained close to the American literary icon until his death in May of this year. Those in the know report that the likeness of her fictional Ezra Blazer to PR is wholly evident, so this could be what perhaps should be termed her quasi-fictional effort. She claims there is no quasi about her tale, the first of three sections. It’s entitled ‘Folly’ and charts the coming together of the duo and their journey together through the challenges their coupling presents – mainly down to the old fella’s state of health.
The middle part is a ‘and now for something completely different’ telling of the situation an economist, with connections to the Middle East, finds himself caught in no man’s land at Heathrow. And finally, in ‘Desert Island Discs’, we have again the elderly author – this time reminiscing about his life on that treasured radio show. If there is a link between author and economist I missed it. The critiques I read didn’t enlighten me either. In reality, by the end stage, I didn’t much care and was probably scanning anyway - just to get the thing off my bedside table. I tried to struggle through to the end, but overall it simply left me bored, bored, bored.
On a not much brighter note, only today was I reading the tribulations forced on young AFL players living in the shadow of fathers who were great players. For every Gary Ablett Jr there are a dozen failures who found out they were dismal in living up to a name. The piece was an Age column by Wayne Carey who is, despite some of his oafish off the field behavior during his playing career, quite a perceptive reporter on our game. He cites such hopefuls as the son of SOS at Carlton, the Macedonian Marvel’s offspring at Collingwood and according to the King, there’s a whole slew of them in this year’s draft.
And so there must be the same unfair expectations in the cultural world. Not all sons/daughters can be Martin Amis. Roger Averill’s creation in ‘Relatively Famous’, Michael Madigan, doesn’t come within cooee of equaling the younger Amis in following his dad Kingsley. Gilbert Madigan, who deserts his son at a very early age, finds fame, as many creatives did back in the day, once he landed in Pommyland. He was touted as our country’s greatest since Patrick White and seemed certain to secure our second Nobel Prize for Literature. Michael, very early on, realises he could never cut it following in those footsteps – he just didn’t possess the talent. But what about as an artist? Now there’s a thought. But, oh dear, he isn’t much chop at that either, so he’s forced to eke out life as, you guessed it, a put upon teacher. His mother, Marjorie, has long been left behind by her philandering hubby and she brings up their lad solo. He eventually marries and has two kiddies of his own. To a degree he does find some contentment in life.
Then Gilbert’s biographer, Sinclair Hughes, turns up, wanting to tease out the father/son relationship. He’s a pompous git and returns the sense of failure to Michael’s life – followed by something far worse for his well-being. The novel also features extracts from Hughes’ hagiography – the great man can do no wrong – and the son is forced to come to terms with a half brother who, as he sees it, does the dirty on him.
Yes, sounds soapy, but I enjoyed it immensely. Averill has authored several previous tomes and if he continues to produce to the high standards set by this offering, well then he deserves to be more than ‘relatively famous’ himself.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I noted in Meet an Aussie Author, Relatively Famous is Roger Averill’s fourth book, and his second novel. Especially interesting to anyone who likes literary biographies (as I do) it explores Averill’s long-held preoccupation with biographical ‘truth’, and it also mines the fraught territory of unsatisfactory father-son relationships.

The book is cunningly constructed with contrasting narratives. Michael Madigan’s introspective anxieties about his desultory life and hapless career is offset by ‘excerpts’ from a (fictional) upbeat biography of Michael’s father Gil, a celebrity expat Australian author and a potential Nobel Prize winner. The biography is a brick of a book, and – trading on Gil Madigan’s celebrity – its author Sinclair Hughes is interviewed on national TV, while the book is lauded in the quality press. Yet despite its exhaustive resources, all neatly catalogued in the excerpted ‘acknowledgements’ by Hughes, the biography fails to reveal the true Gil because both Michael and his mother Marj both refused to have anything to do with it.

Their refusal is partly due to loyalty to Gil Madigan’s long-standing position on literary biographies. In an article in The Paris Review, Gil says that a writer’s limited truths [are created] from smaller, more manageable worlds than the ones they live in. These imagined worlds are free from the uglier truths that injure us and those we love. But those worlds are also remote from the everyday life of the writer:

…literary biographies leach imagination from the creative process as they attempt to return a work of art to the quotidian experience that inspired it. That just seems dumb to me.

But the more general problem is that there’s nothing left to be said about the lives of writers. More than most, we live uneventful existences. […]

We spend our working days sitting in rooms making up stories. What does it matter if the desk we sit at is made of oak or chipboard, if the room has a view, or that the words are written in pen or tapped out like lines of ants marching across a computer screen? Does it make any difference, add a scintilla of artistic value to In Daniel’s Den for the reader to know who I was sleeping with at the time it was written?

The trouble begins when people mistake a writer’s wit and wisdom on the page for how he actually talks and conducts himself in life. (p.235)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/05/26/r...

[Giles Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a seriously good novel. In fact, I’m not sure much I’ve read this year beats it, especially fiction-wise.
On a personal note I feel it was written for me, themes of the city of Melbourne, fame, talent and absent fathers are all topics that have found a home in my brain, for better or worse.
I could go on about the turns of phrase, and the slight but impressive twists in the story but I think I’ll just recommend it highly to anyone who will listen.
A terrific book. 📚📚📚

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Struggled to ground myself in the first couple of pages….but that was just me settling into the format.
This is a truly good book. It’s sophisticated. It’s really well written. I really enjoyed….and I admired it.
Then I found out that Roger Averill is a West Australian author…. I was actually surprised to find this out, as I have not heard of him.
Fabulous writing.

[Ghada · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the way this story was told.
And loved the author's formulated sentences to redifine common words and well-known feelings.