Morbid Symptoms Par Excellence

Irene Katz Connelly reviews Michelle de Kretser’s new novel “Theory & Practice.”

By Irene Katz ConnellyMarch 15, 2025

• Fiction

A SIX-YEAR-OLD BOY visits his grandmother in rural Australia. He loves the farm animals and the open horizon—not to mention the attention from his grandmother and her many Indigenous servants. When his mother summons him home, the boy lashes out, stealing his grandmother’s emerald ring and lobbing it into the forest. He doesn’t confess, and his grandmother blames a teenage maid, accusing her of conspiring with other “natives.” As the boy departs for home, he sees a priest coming for the maid, probably to take her to one of the religious boarding schools that abused generations of Indigenous children. Well into adulthood, the boy experiences nightmares in which his grandmother’s house appears at an ominous crossroads.

This vignette, which begins Michelle de Kretser’s excellent new novel Theory & Practice, is part of the book that the protagonist Cindy is attempting to write. Cindy’s novel within a novel is a superficially accomplished piece of fiction. It features symbols—like the literal crossroads representing the choice to lie—that illustrate how the boy’s comfortable childhood depends on colonial violence and testify to the psychological consequences of this environment. Subconscious preoccupations that would seem unrealistic if stated in waking life (the boy’s lingering guilt, for instance) are helpfully revealed by dreams. Like many such slightly-too-legible narratives, it’s also the tiniest bit boring.

Cindy, a successful contemporary writer when the novel opens in the present day, is unsatisfied with this latest project, which she calls a novel of “theory and practice”—a text that uses literary and political theory to interpret a protagonist’s life. Like de Kretser herself, Cindy immigrated from Sri Lanka to Australia as a child. There, pursuing graduate research on Virginia Woolf at the University of Melbourne in the late 1980s, she learned to admire such novels for their efforts to bridge the academic and everyday.

Arriving at the university where most of the book takes place, Cindy finds a thoroughly “Theorised” campus. Heady discussions of Marxist, post-structuralist, postcolonial, and—most important for Cindy’s research goals—feminist thought dominate the English department. Students share a prevailing faith that Theory, which de Kretser renders with a sardonic capital T, can decode not only the texts they’re reading but also their lives. The novel’s variations on this titular phrase derive from Aristotle’s distinction between theory, or “theoria,” and its twin, “praxis”—referred to here as practice. Sometimes, practice signifies recognizing legacies of past oppression, like the colonial history that propelled Cindy’s family from one former British colony to another; it can also refer to the process of alchemizing one’s studies and beliefs into a freer and more ethical way of being. In Cindy’s case, practice involves a reliance on Woolf’s assertions of women’s rights to navigate a campus in and around which she often feels like an outsider.

But Cindy’s research and academic aspirations founder when she realizes how rarely Theory can account for the real behavior of even the most seemingly committed feminists. Woolf’s diaries yield a racist caricature of a Sri Lankan politician that undermines her place in Cindy’s feminist pantheon, Cindy’s adviser uses her position to exact public revenge against her ex-husband’s lover, and Cindy herself embarks on an affair with a fellow student and becomes obsessed with his girlfriend. As Cindy navigates academic and romantic troubles, her determination to “read” her life through Theory leads not to freedom but to a cycle of dishonest and self-destructive behavior.

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As Cindy acclimates to the Melbourne of 1986, a new friend describes his autobiographical short stories, which depict a gay teenager breaking free of a homophobic family and developing his “sense of self through Theory.” Cindy’s relationship with the Theory articulated by Woolf, whose photo decorates her otherwise austere apartment, is likewise more personal than academic—and sometimes perplexing. She can chat fluently about trends in Woolf scholarship and details of the author’s lesser-known novels, but the figure she (literally) looks up to at home often seems like a simplistic distillation of the most universally applicable passages from A Room of One’s Own (1929) and the core tenets of consciousness-raising feminism—namely, that women deserve to pursue their ambitions unhindered and that they ought to stand in solidarity with each other. Cindy’s crisp, economic narration—instead of expressing dislike for an acquaintance, she remarks that “she found [her] toenail polish ‘cheap,’”—recalls literary descendants of Woolf like Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford, demonstrating how deeply the 20th-century British tradition has shaped the protagonist’s perspective on and off the page. She even sees Woolf as a substitute for her own mother, who “called magazines books” and doesn’t appreciate her studies.

Cindy is shattered when she encounters Woolf’s racist depiction of E. W. Perera, a leader in Sri Lanka’s movement for independence from Britain. Describing Perera as a “mahogany coloured wretch” and a “caged monkey,” Woolf dismisses his complaints about British empire as “always the same stories, the same point of view”—rejecting, in this colonized individual’s case, the paradigm-shifting subjectivity she demands for herself and other women.

Initially, Cindy’s astonishment at this discovery struck me as naive; today, it’s hard to imagine someone so astute reaching the point of graduate research on Woolf without being able to rattle off a selection of her most objectionable attitudes. But Cindy isn’t living today. She’s living at a time when second-wave feminism, without having accomplished all its goals, was beginning to give way to third-wave questions about the intersection of misogyny with other forms of oppression and the marginalization of certain women from mainstream movements. In a scene that testifies to the halting shift from second- to third-wave thinking, Cindy brings the diary to her adviser Paula—a feminist pioneer in the male-dominated English department—and finds her unimpressed.

Naive or not, Cindy is shaken by Woolf’s abandonment of her own explicitly stated feminist principles. Borrowing from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, Cindy describes such “breakdowns between theory and practice” as “morbid symptoms.” Cindy most clearly manifests her own morbid symptoms when she meets fellow student Kit and his wealthy girlfriend Olivia. Kit is somewhat fuzzily evoked: his main traits, even as described longingly by Cindy, are being hot and having the chutzpah to describe his philandering as evidence of a “deconstructed relationship.” Still, he enthralls Cindy, who soon finds herself awaiting his clandestine visits to her apartment. Instead of blaming Kit or herself for this unhappy situation, Cindy becomes obsessed with Olivia, mocking her looks, arranging masochistic coffee dates, and fantasizing about destroying her possessions.

Cindy describes her research as wrestling ideas into “the corset of Theory.” She does something similar in her love life, casting her dislike as warranted resentment of the class and racial privilege to which Olivia indeed seems annoyingly oblivious: the plush apartment, the family-approved boyfriend, the Eurocentric beauty standards to which her body complies. This interpretive technique will feel familiar to the reader from their early glimpse at Cindy’s failed novel; just as the young boy is simply acting out the legacy of colonialism, Olivia’s status in an unjust society inevitably results in Cindy’s irrepressible animosity.

That similarity matters: we already know that Cindy’s novel has failed, in large part through its rush to synthesize, through Theory, the unwieldy elements of its protagonist’s life. Cindy’s self-justifications for her real-life behavior are likewise unconvincing, especially because de Kretser seeds the novel with other acts of hostility toward women that don’t fit into the protagonist’s theoretical schema. Cindy makes fun of Paula for having lipstick on her teeth. She punishes her insufficiently sophisticated mother by not returning her calls. She loathes the woman who broke up her own college relationship—enough to uneasily compare her feelings to Woolf’s disdain for Perera—even as she assumes a similar role in Olivia’s life.

While de Kretser wisely abstains from judging whether the act of sleeping with someone else’s boyfriend is inherently nonfeminist, Cindy herself appears genuinely distressed by her own capacity to disparage other women, particularly since her mockery often targets their experiences as women: she takes aim at the makeup Paula wears to appeal to her male colleagues, or the low earning power and marital responsibilities that have foreclosed her immigrant mother’s horizons. Repeatedly noting these transgressions, the novel asks us to take them seriously as betrayals of feminist values. It also challenges Cindy’s impulse to theorize her situationship (among other things), arguing that in doing so, she can neither justify her actions nor make herself feel better.

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As Cindy loses faith in Theory, de Kretser uses her heroine’s meticulous recording of her life to explore what a novel of practice might look like. When Cindy reflects on Woolf’s plan for her novel The Years (1937)—in which Woolf initially planned to combine essays and fiction, eventually producing the culmination of her experiments in free association—she might as well be discussing Theory & Practice, which swings between dispatches from her life and essayistic digressions into the texts and art that fascinate her. De Kretser writes in short, diaristic bursts that leap confidently between different experiences: in one five-page stretch, Cindy summarizes the state of 1980s criticism, transcribes a plaintive voicemail from her mother, recites a few facts about Kit’s childhood, and gossips with friends about English department politics. She delivers epiphanies through precise, understated observation; Cindy learns that Kit is sleeping with yet another friend after she spots his baking dish in the other woman’s kitchen.

Most ambitious are the novel’s digressions into alternate texts, namely essays. Some come with exegesis (Cindy exits a showing of Gillian Leahy’s film My Life Without Steve raving about its representation of the protagonist’s morbid symptoms). In other cases, not so much: One of the novel’s first passages is a detached précis of a London Review of Books article about an Israeli general who may have used situationist texts in developing a deadly strategy for invading Palestinian homes. This choice is bold not just because of the passage’s placement—directly after a starkly different vignette, and well before the novel reveals a single personal detail about Cindy—but also because de Kretser provides little commentary and never returns to the piece again, leaving the reader to connect the general’s employment of situationism in “colonising practice” and Cindy’s growing skepticism about Theory as an unqualified good.

Cindy’s attempted present-day novel, as mentioned, contains obvious symbols. By contrast, in chronicling her life at the university, she cultivates a magpie-like habit of collecting and repeating snippets of speech, which link her dissonant experiences while themselves mutating in meaning. This tactic of prioritizing association and repetition over interpretation bears a strong resemblance to Cindy’s practice of filling index cards with notes on material potentially relevant to her thesis. Library sessions with these notes, during which she can absorb contradictory ideas without wrangling them into a cogent Theoretical order, provide rare moments of earnest intellectual excitement. Nevertheless, Cindy is embarrassed by her own enthusiasm for note-taking, which she sees as the menial prelude to the real work of using Theory to reveal “humanist teleologies, squalid repressions, influential aporias and many more textual fragilities.”

De Kretser slyly contests that belief. Using an index card–like format as its scaffolding, Theory & Practice suggests that reporting on the fullness of individual experience is more important than Theory in the search for meaning—that, in fact, meaning can only be made through work akin to the note-taking Cindy self-consciously derides. Cindy can’t resolve her infatuation with Kit or enmity for Olivia by browbeating herself or forcing those feelings into a metaphorical corset. Gradually, she comes to adopt the attitude that the novel demonstrates stylistically. Only once she stops rushing to rationalize the clash between principles and desires can she dig herself out of crisis and use that clash as creative fuel.

To what end? By the time Cindy produces the “authorised discursive music” of her thesis, her disenchantment with Theory has propelled her away from the academy and toward fiction. As she stops self-analyzing, the last third of the novel speeds up, breezing through subsequent decades without revealing much about her path to success. The reader is left to infer that artistic development doesn’t come easily. Sometime near the present-day, Cindy abandons the failed novel to write an entirely different book about the “messy gap” between theory and practice. By then, she has already published books and achieved recognition. Her efforts and errors in the service of authentic self-representation, then, aren’t the temporary initiation of a new writer but the never-ending work of decades.

The implication of lifelong creative struggle valorizes Cindy’s work—and, by extension, de Kretser’s. Through Cindy’s path, de Kretser makes a case for the power of a skilled and empathetic novelist: one engaged in what the critic James Wood calls “serious noticing.” A precisely observed novel, de Kretser suggests, is the rare textual container that can reconcile transformative theories and deeply held values with the messy realities of individual experience.

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In another kind of book, unflinching recognition of one’s own morbid symptoms might eradicate them fully. In Theory & Practice, that’s not the case. Long after graduate school, Cindy learns that something terrible has befallen Olivia. Despite the narrator’s distance from the emotional crucible of Melbourne and her desire to feel some compassion for her former rival, the old antipathy rushes back. “I’d been careful not to see into Olivia, preferring to create an effigy whose capacity for love and suffering and joy fell far short of mine,” Cindy admits. “What was shaming was the certainty that if she’d sought me out in Sydney, I’d have exhumed that effigy.”

It’s a piercing observation, a morbid symptom par excellence, and a different author would give it pride of place where the reader couldn’t miss it: in the novel’s final pages or during a climactic scene. Instead, de Kretser almost buries this moment of self-knowledge in the middle of a quiet, reflective passage—she ends Cindy’s story on a chance encounter, shuffling one last index card into the pack. It’s a call for serious noticing, in reading and in writing. The only way to catch a nugget of meaning in this novel—and, de Kretser argues, in our lives—is to pay very careful attention.