Interview: Peter Carey's latest novel, Theft: A Love Story, has been greeted with a litany of allegations from his ex-wife. The Australian writer tells Belinda McKeon in New York that the novel is not 'a therapeutic response to my life.'
'You can't teach people how to read," says Peter Carey, with more than a hint of weariness. "If they haven't learned how to read by now, you can't teach them." Carey is not talking about literacy. He is not talking about teaching, either. He is talking, as obliquely as he can, about the controversy that has swamped the appearance of his new novel, Theft: A Love Story - and which has given the story of self-absorbed painter Butcher Bones and his childlike brother, Hugh, more column inches and more publicity than Carey's publishers could ever have hoped for.
But it's the kind of publicity that Carey himself could have done without, involving an angry ex-wife and a litany of allegations. Alison Summers, who Carey divorced in 2003 after 15 years of marriage, spoke openly and at length to British journalists about her belief that Theft was a thinly-veiled attack on her character.
Summers argued that the protagonist of Carey's novel was so close in character to the novelist himself as to make his use of the phrase "alimony whore" to refer to the protagonist's ex-wife a "deliberate smear" on Summers herself. It had been "done very cruelly", she complained, while a "friend" of Summers told the Telegraph that Carey was clearly trashing his ex-wife "to clear the way for a popular welcome for his new partner".
The fact that the character of the ex-wife in Theft is so peripheral, so scarcely mentioned and so much in the shadows that she barely comprises a character at all went unmentioned in much of the commentary on the scandal; instead, arguably slender ties between the facts of the author's own life and that of his protagonist were presented as evidence of Carey's bad faith. Not only did Summers speak out against Carey, but she offered her perspective, too, on what literature should and should not be. Theft, she said, was how it should not be done; it represented a "misuse of literature", a settling of scores. What Carey had asserted about her in court papers, she said, she had had some chance of refuting, but this version was now "fixed in literary history".
Summers's was an elaborate architecture of accusation. Does Carey have an equally far-reaching response?
"Let me be very specific," he says over lunch in a sushi restaurant close to his apartment in lower Manhattan. "Was I divorced? Yes. Was it fun? No. Have I felt all sorts of passions about the process, about my children . . . well, yes, of course. Is that something I now have at my disposal that I can use or imagine when I'm writing about a divorce? Yes. Is this book about my divorce? No. Not at all. Is there a hierarchy in the points of view in the book? No, there isn't really. Do I have some knowledge because of my life? Yes. Is this novel there to explicate my life? To be a therapeutic response to my life? No."
CAREY, WHO HAS just turned 63, has created a varied and deeply original cast of characters over the course of his nine novels. From the hell-dwelling protagonist of his first novel, Bliss (1981), to the monstrous poetry fraudster of My Life as a Fake (2003), from the church-carrying gamblers and the mythic bush ranger of his Booker winners, Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), Carey's writing has been characterised by an enviable marriage of range and depth; his imagination may never stray far from his native Australia, yet in rooting itself close to that inhospitable terrain, it surges far beyond the limits of realism, of historical fact - and of autobiography.
Carey's characters may be partly made up of people he has known, but they are also, he insists, made up of many other elements; people he has known of, utterances he has heard, utterances he has only imagined. The life of a character, as he tells it, is a kaleidoscopic creation of perspectives and possibilities that must always set out from a narrative task.
"All of these characters are born by the things they have to do," he says. "Perhaps there have been one or two exceptions from a long time ago, of a character that's like anyone I've ever known. But largely, they have to do things. And I spend all my day thinking, who would actually, really want to do such a thing? Not just in a superficial way, but really want to do it. And as I write and rewrite successive drafts, it's not the things that happen that are so different, but that the reasons that they do them are continually interrogated and come back, sort of, to a deeper place. And that's why I get absolutely annoyed about the autobiographical argument."
If he wants to allow autobiography into his writing, Carey argues, he can write memoir, of which he has written a fair amount in the last number of years - including last year's Wrong About Japan, an account of a journey east with his young son. "If I'm going to write about myself, I do know how to do it," he says. "But I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention. They just believe that everything is really code for something else. You actually can't convince people who don't believe it. So there's no point."
THAT SAID, THERE are traces of Carey's childhood Australia in the world inhabited by Butcher and Hugh in Theft. They hail from Bacchus Marsh, the same town near Melbourne where Carey was born, and they now live in a rural house in Bellingen, the area Carey lived in as a young boy. And Butcher, who has gone through a terrible fall from grace in his professional as well as his personal life, was born in the same year as Carey. This tactic was a simple matter of rendering the detail of the brothers' town as convincingly as possible, says Carey; drawing on his own memory of how things looked back then was key to providing a strong base from which the characters, and the intricate plot which sends them hurtling through the art scenes of 1980s Tokyo and New York, could develop.
And for their voices - their boomingly, caustically, profanely Australian voices - Carey had to draw on a language and a vocabulary that he had long since left behind, not just by moving to New York in 1990, but in going to an upper-crust boarding school at the age of 10.
"The music, if there is any, or the art if there is any, certainly comes out of Australian soil," he says. "No matter how many notes and calculations I've made about the whole thing, voices for me are very intuitive."
And he was pleased to realise that he could summon up the sound of rural Australia, its rhythms, its obscenities, so fluidly - but also a little perturbed. "I've been sort of anxious about these sorts of issues," he nods, "you know, that if this is what I'm basically writing about, then what am I doing living here?"
What is he doing in Manhattan? For one thing, teaching writing at Hunter College (where Irish writer Colum McCann is his colleague). He adores his students, talking about them in very tender and proud terms. "Maybe it's the thing of not having children around me any more, but they're more my children," he says. "The thing of looking after them and helping them, it's a pleasure."
His own children, meanwhile, 15-year-old Charley and 19-year-old Sam, live in another part of Manhattan with their mother. Carey is in a new relationship, with the British-born Picador publisher Frances Coady, and is generally living the life of an internationally acclaimed novelist in New York, with all of the privileges and irritants that role implies.
But Australia is still on his mind. He goes back there often and reckons that his sons, though they are young Americans rather than Australians - complete with strong views on the Bush administration - are "sort of invested in Australia in some way, not that they know of, but just in the idea of it, and quite strongly". When children inherit from parents the kind of "split" that results from a major geographical and cultural transplantation, he says, "there's a good chance that they're going to have some considerable curiosity about the life that they've not led."
As to the life that he did not himself lead, Carey has no illusions, no delusions that, for him, the literary life was somehow meant to be. His family were not wealthy; his parents sold Ford cars for a living, and he has no idea how they managed to scrape together the enormous fees for his years in boarding school, which saw him going "from a working-class town to a ruling class school", and, after an undistinguished academic career there, to a job in an advertising agency.
There he was introduced to the work of Joyce and Faulkner by a colleague who was a voracious reader. That was the beginning of a new life for Carey, but he knows that there is a very simple reason for the fact that his path turned away from his old life, or rather his young life; for the fact that he is not still living in Bellingen, close to his brother and sister. The reason? He was the youngest in a family in which there was scant room for heirs.
"The day that my sister said to me, 'You were smart to get away'," he shakes his head, "I said, 'I wasn't smart. I was just told there was no room for me in the family business. Otherwise I would still be doing it.' People sort of feel astounded when I say that, but I'm sure that I would have spent my life selling cars in that little town. And that doesn't seem so strange to me. It just seems what I would have done. Happily or unhappily, I don't know."
The Carey File
- Born in 1943 in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia
- Studies science at Monash University - but fails first year exams
- Advertising copywriter in early days of career
- Resident in New York since 1990
- Wins his first Booker Prize in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda: Beryl Bainbridge says it confirms him as a writer of force and originality
- Second Booker win with True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001
- Influences: Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett