“If I should use a metaphor for the action of writing, it has to be that of listening,” the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse once said. “Thus, it almost goes without saying, that writing is reminiscent of music.” To take that idea further again, writing is sometimes the vain yet necessary attempt – ever ambitious, like chasing the speed of light – to say the unsayable.
The Degenerates, the impressive debut novel of the Indian Australian author Raeden Richardson (a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop), inhabits this tension. It considers our ever-turbulent relationship with change and, with assured control, contends with how to truly express a life in language.
The Degenerates begins in 1976 in the financial district of what was then Bombay, India. We meet 17-year-old Somnath Sunder Sonpate, a shoeshiner from the Dalit (or untouchable) caste with aspirations to “make first a fortune and then a family”. The latter dream seems dashed when Sonpate is forcibly sterilised during a neighbourhood police raid (this was a period in India when millions of men – particularly lower caste – were given government-mandated vasectomies). Then, stumbling through the streets afterwards, he finds the abandoned newborn girl of his friend, a beggar; he names the baby Maha (for her “endless gaze”) and together they stow away on a boat headed for Australia.
In Melbourne, on bustling Degraves Street, Maha grows into a young woman as Somnath runs a reputable yet legally murky motorcycle repair shop. Her father grows distant over time, always preoccupied elsewhere; Maha, meanwhile, begins to tune in to the pained histories of people she comes to affectionately refer to and identify with as her “degenerates”. When Somnath abruptly dies (regrettably we hear little more of his story), Maha feels compelled to capture her father’s life by taking to the page, metafictionally penning what we recognise as The Degenerates’ opening line. She redefines herself as “Mother Pulse” and advertises herself as a “Lifelong Listener & Subterranean Storyteller” dedicated to those on the margins who are unheard.
The lives of two such figures intertwine with Maha’s. It’s 2017 when we meet Titch, a scrawny teenager with a suburban drawl – “bound to his ‘yeahs’ and ‘nahs’” – who is grieving the suicide of his school friend Skeater. We also meet Ginny, a young woman who, bearing scars of abuse from her alcoholic turned wellness-guru mother, seeks escape from her suburban purgatory. Both characters are injured and crave renewal: Titch resculpts himself by weightlifting; Ginny glimpses redefinition among a new coterie of friends in New York.
(Dis)connection, loneliness, transformation: these are the novel’s pulsing themes, and Richardson evokes them elegantly and with a striking voice and sense of authenticity. Everywhere – among his characters, in the cacophonous streets – is pervaded by a longing for meaning. Cultish obsessions promising fulfilment abound: the siren call of cryptocurrencies; the tribalism of the AFL grand final. Urban alienation is evoked in clinical terms: suburbia is “dissected” by an expressway “worming south”; construction sites are “stillborn”.
Though Richardson occasionally offers a surfeit of detail, clear imagery resounds (a favourite: “Their Australian twang sounded so unruly, like squawking seagulls trapped in a milkcrate”). Omission is purposeful and moments are left for absence – Skeater, for example, is referred to throughout as “ ” – lacunae that tell the reader there’s meaning to be found both on and off the page. Indeed, our awareness that Mother Pulse is to some extent the author – the “god” – of the stories we’re reading, suggests a truth beyond text. By the novel’s end, language itself fragments and falls away, leaving us to fill in the gaps.
This is cerebral, diasporic storytelling that grapples with the limits of storytelling itself. Archiving the unsayable drives Mother Pulse: “I’m listening. I’ll save your stories. I’ll hold them forever, despite your here-gone lives.” Yet her inadequacy before the task’s sisyphean immensity also grieves her, leading her to leave Melbourne for the Red Plains, an unreal realm on the margins where time unspools and language ends:
“Maybe, in fact, there were ways of being she could never record, infinite moments that escaped articulation. Maybe words had their limits. But to write until the end of language, over and over, broaching the border of nothingness, was the only reason to write at all.”
Here, Richardson movingly illuminates the futility of writing a life but also its enduring necessity. How else, he appears to implore, will we speak of the often uncharted interiors of those on life’s fringes? How many of us at some time will visit the Red Plains, seeking a witness?
If writing is listening, The Degenerates has heard both an orchestra of voices and the silences they inhabit. It’s ambitious in its structure, making simple yet evocative narrative choices that speak to the novel’s concern with departure and meaning. Richardson has spoken about how he is trying to grasp at impermanence, or “anicca” (the Pāli word that underpins Buddhist philosophy). He manages to offer us such ephemeral wisps.
The Degenerates by Raeden Richardson is published by Text Publishing ($34.99)
