The narrator of Michelle de Kretser’s seventh novel Theory & Practice is younger than I was when she realises something we all do, eventually: sometimes there can be a great chasm between what we say, write, and purport to know and believe, and what we do.
She is 24, studying at a Melbourne university, and struggling to finish her thesis on Virginia Woolf. She is full of feminist conviction, but finds it difficult to sustain in the face of the limitations of the institution, her subject, and herself.
Her teachers and supervisors prescribe a healthy dose of French poststructuralist theory, which is putatively progressive, but tells her little about how to live. Her feminist colleagues, like Woolf herself, have blind spots around race that are the size of continents. And the narrator tries and fails to resist her desire for a mining engineering student named Kit, which pits her, against her will, against fellow arts student Olivia.
