Lohrey

Julieanne Lamond. Lohrey. Melbourne University Press, 2022. Contemporary Australian Writers. 173 pages. AU$29.99. ISBN: 9780522878936.

It has taken me quite a long time to write this short book. It has been with me through family crises, house moves, bushfire and pandemic, in and out of teaching semesters and family dinners and departmental meetings. Through it all I have been reading and thinking about these novels, bringing them into the same space and opening up conversations between them. This book is an attempt to represent these conversations on the page, so that you can read [Amanda Lohrey's] work and continue them. (Lamond, 137)

Most will be familiar with Amanda Lohrey's Miles Franklin-winning 2020 novel The Labyrinth, but many will not have explored the rich body of work this author has produced over the several decades of her career. Julieanne Lamond's book-length study is both an introduction to Lohrey for readers and academics, as well as a call for scholars of Australian literature to pay due attention to this significant Australian writer.

A quality that Lamond returns to throughout her analysis is Lohrey's dauntlessness. She is unflinching in her creative vision and her ability to represent points of friction in social and personal life with startling precision. Lamond says, "hers is a clear, bold gaze which looks at the reader 'so directly and with a vision so sharp the fog lifts'" (137). Lohrey celebrates this unique writer's approach to representing an Australian life that is at once deeply political and deeply personal.

The book is structured by four key thematic elements and motifs that recur in Lohrey's work: home renovations, gender, fire, and reading. Lamond shows how Lohrey's work, when taken together, represents a sustained engagement with key dilemmas of contemporary human life, like how to live in relation to others and to one's environment. By considering recurring elements in the body of work and tracing how they develop across it, this approach reveals fascinating intellectual nuances and artistic beauty.

The introductory chapter sketches out a biography of Lohrey, with a hefty focus on her proximity to and involvement in Australian politics. Lamond articulates the uneasy place Lohrey's work has occupied in relation to conversations around the value of literature, the form of the novel, and gender...