In the near decade I’ve been a book critic, I’ve received my share of fanmail, hate mail – even the occasional rape or death threat (greetings, Cormac McCarthy mega-bros). It’s the price of the job, and I pay it. But I’ve noticed a pattern. When I criticise the work of a young woman, I’m feted – often grotesquely so. When I criticise the work of an Aussie man, I’ve made a gross moral error. The writer is a good bloke. Hard-working. Generous. Redoubtable. The implication: all criticism is off-limits, literary or otherwise. Which brings me to Trent Dalton.
Gravity Let Me Go is the first Dalton novel I’ve read. The year his smash hit Boy Swallows Universe was published, I’d just moved to Cairo and had other things on my mind. By the time I returned to Australia, the response to his fiction was so fervently oppositional – adoration v derision – that it felt like being asked to pick a footy team. The allegiances were more interesting to me than the novels: the packed auditoriums; the cultural critiques. What we talk about when we talk about Trent Dalton.
