This article discusses the challenges and risks of changing genres mid-career, focusing on Lee's new novel that combines eroticism with issue-heavy plotting.
. There’s a great deal of sex, for starters, and the line between the erotic and the ridiculous is thin. I’ve spent a week trying to shake Lee ’s image of a pair of middle-aged breasts dangling “like panna cottas”.
And then there is the issue-heavy plotting. Lee has spent her non-fiction career exploring our craggiest socio-cultural fault lines: who we believe . Is keeping him on the gallery walls unethical, or just savvy pragmatism? “Sure, everyone wanted the rich dickheads to lose,” Lally explains, “but you needed power for that.”
Meanwhile, in inner-city Sydney, Pat is eking out a living as a junior appraiser at a venerable auction house . The pay is rubbish, but the prestige is intoxicating: the lure of old money. For a scholarship kid from regional Queensland – the son of bankrupted farmers – a permanent role at Osborne seems like the ticket to middle-class respectability: mortgage and a dog. “Rarely was the Osborne world view upset by anything at all.
When Lally and Pat meet at an art show, sparks fly et cetera, et cetera. As their ties to each other tighten, so do the ethical knots. Together and apart our lovers are hurtling toward a reckoning.isn’t all that interesting. Pat is a gormless mansplainer who’s “never been in a relationship with a full-on feminist before”. Lally is ambitious in that aloof and reductive girl-boss way: sharp elbows; soft, secret dreams of love.
There comes a point where the moral elasticity of Lally’s dilemma snaps, and it becomes clear that Farr is reprehensible. But where that snap occurs will be different for every reader, as will be their take on mercurial Lally.
Novel Genre Change Challenges Risks Lee Eroticism Issue-Heavy Plotting
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