Nadine Browne’s debut novel carries a dedication to a man called Danny Kronenfeld, who died in 2019. A few chapters in, we meet an elderly retired social worker named Danny Kronfeld. We’re in the hands of Noni, a “jaded thirty-eight-year-old” from Western Australia who has relocated to New York to undertake a master of fine arts at New York University. This happens to be a path also trodden by Browne.
Gone Guru is a novel that makes merry in the shadowy area between memoir and fiction. Both Browne and Noni are preoccupied with the relationship between identity and storytelling, with the ethics of telling stories about other people and maybe ourselves. And yet this book resembles not at all those po-faced tomes that are generally classified as autofiction. Instead, Browne twists together a set of familiar tropes to contrive a clever, funny metafictional caper.
