“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.
