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.
After graduating from university with a degree in history, Andy (Miller’s stand-in) is in the midst of life in Melbourne. He’s essentially alone – he moved to Australia from the UK in his late teens. Andy’s struggle to get published is, so far, fruitless, despite having written several “pre-novels”. Travelling by bus to Sydney, he meets Jo. They become inseparable, and Andy’s life is transformed. In a short time he goes from single aspiring novelist to family man: Andy and Jo soon welcome a child, Hennie.
Andy feels pressure to provide for his partner and child and starts part-time work as a school teacher, a profession he fears will slowly kill his true calling as novelist. It is at this new workplace that he meets fellow teacher Lang Tzu (also a key character in The Ancestor Game). The two quickly bond over a shared obsession: art, and its role in our lives.
Lang’s existence is dominated by the feeling that he has failed as an artist. His story inspires Andy to write in an uninhibited way he has never known before. At the same time, Lang’s artistic hopelessness contrasts with the ideals passed to Andy by his father, an amateur artist who showed his son the redeeming power of art. Both Andy and the Chinese-born Lang are outsiders in Australia; the latter struggles with the deep-seated racism he encounters here, drowning his disappointment and sense of dislocation in alcohol.
The “deal” at the heart of this book is one that intertwines art (specifically, a piece by the English artist Walter Sickert) and friendship. Lang is obsessed with owning a Sickert, and when one emerges, he hatches a plan that requires Andy’s help. Lang describes seeing the piece as witnessing “the power of fate” – such is his belief that owning it will somehow transform or resolve his own artistic failure. Jo objects to Andy taking part in the scheme – while not technically illegal, it goes against the artistic ideals Andy lives by. Andy’s motives aren’t entirely pure, either: his friendship with Lang also fuels writing that will eventually become a novel. For Miller, the writer can sometimes be a parasite.
Miller’s writing of memory in The Deal – most often memories of Andy’s parents – is particularly beautiful. It makes this short-ish book shine among other similarly themed novels from earlier in his career, like Autumn Lang (2011) or The Sitters (1995). So does Andy’s relationship with his young daughter. “Hennie,” Miller writes, “was not coming into being but was already a whole person with her own world. She was fully here. Her eyes shone with intelligence and curiosity.” Reflecting on his daughter, Andy apprehends his own artistic becoming, a series of transformations and struggles that accompany life. For Andy, the coordinates of this journey are held within us from the beginning.
The Deal shows the reader both the furnace where artists are forged and the ashes of disappointment that can be left behind. For many, the great effort to survive and create can be too much. Miller’s reflection on his friendship with Lang Tzu describes this struggle: both the failure and the fire of inspiration.
The Deal by Alex Miller is published by Allen & Unwin ($32.99)
