Alex Miller’s career now spans almost four decades. Resplendently beautiful and gracefully poised, his writing on love, artistic becoming, and belonging has won him most of our top awards. Miller’s new novel, The Deal, expands on one of his most complex works, 1992’s The Ancestor Game (one of his two Miles Franklin winners). And while it is fascinating to see how he excavates ideas from three decades ago, The Deal also works as a stand-alone book.
In the time between the two novels it feels like Miller has slowly but surely intensified his focus on the critical moments of his life. In 2020 he wrote Max, a biographical work about an influential mentorship that propelled him onto the path of the writer. The Deal is again concerned with a pivotal friendship early in Miller’s life of letters – and the characters we encounter mirror those from Miller’s autobiographical novel from 2017, The Passage of Love.
