What I said then:
I saw her in a session at the Writer's Festival and she was impressive enough that I bought her book ... but not so impressive that I read it.
What I say now:
The Lost Dog is a strange old book, and I must admit I found it a bit of a muddle. It gestured towards being a lot of things: a romance, a mystery, a Garner-esque dissection of Melbourne's contemporary art scene. But it never really committed to being any of these things, leaving important story elements dangling all over the place, and ultimately ending up an underwhelming reading experience (despite de Kretser's obvious skill).
Tom Loxley, half-Indian academic, is staying alone in the mountain shack of a friend while trying to finish his thesis on Henry James. When his dog runs off while they're out on a walk, he assumes it'll be back soon. When it doesn't return, he spends the next ten days searching for it in increasingly frantic fashion. While the search gives the book its through-line, the narrative keeps jumping backwards in time to fill out Tom's family history, and to detail his unrequited love for Nelly Zhang, friend, shack-owner, and artist, as well as Nelly's mysterious (possibly murderous) past.
If that last sentence was confusing, good. The way the novel skips about in time makes it difficult initially to track who everybody is, where they are, who they know, and when this scene I'm reading is actually happening. De Kretser doesn't help us out, leaping from Melbourne in the present, to India in the past, to Melbourne in the slightly-more-recent past without doing anything much to make sure we know where we are at any given moment. Early on in particular, while all the characters were being introduced, I found it pretty difficult to keep track of who was who.
And then there's the mystery element. Nelly Zhang's husband went missing from the mountain cabin in strange circumstances years ago (suicide? murder? secret flight to a new life?) and during Tom's wanderings after his dog, he starts to delve into what exactly happened. Which made me think that, by the end of the book, I'd get to find out what exactly happened. But the investigation goes nowhere. Tom does come up with a theory, and in the penultimate chapter he explains it to Nelly ... and she explains it's not possible. And that's it. There was no revelation, no catharsis, no nothing. Look, I don't mind when writers get playful with genre conventions, but this just seemed perverse the way de Kretser set me up to expect an ending, then refused to give me one. It really stuck in my craw.
Prose-wise, she's a super talented writer (if occasionally a little verbose, using five complicated words when two simple ones would do) but it was the structural looseness that kept getting in the way of my enjoyment. Ultimately it was kind of a missed opportunity: there was lots of interesting stuff in it, but it didn't come together in a satisfying way at all.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Hello America by J.G. Ballard
books to go: 74
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