Transnationalism and the Literary Reception of Australian Women Writers’ Fiction in the US, 2010–2020: Three Case Studies

ABSTRACT

The following article examines how Australian literary fiction by women is received in the United States. In particular, it considers how books are positioned by publishers, reviewers and authors as relevant to an American audience as well as to what extent Australian literary fiction’s appeal is borne out in reviews and in an online forum, Goodreads. To address these questions, I examine the US reception of three diverse literary novels by Australian women: Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Atria Books, 2016), Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (Riverhead, 2020), and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (Little, Brown, 2013). I argue that recent Australian literary fiction by women makes an appeal to US readers through a combination of “transnational orientation”—or ideas, characters and settings that a novel evokes to address a global readership—which are leveraged by publishers in book design and endorsements, and “authorial disambiguation”, in the form of essays and websites written by authors and addressed to local and global readers. Efforts to draw attention to a novel’s currency for a US audience are unevenly evident in reviews in broadsheets and trade publications, as well as on Goodreads.

KEYWORDS:

• US reception of Australian novels
• transnational fiction
• Goodreads
• literary fiction
• women’s fiction

For decades, Australian writing has been published, reviewed and read by American publishers, critics, scholars and bibliophiles. Australian literature, according to David Carter and Roger Osborne in Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, was international “long before it was national, and long after as well”.¹ The international orientation of much Australian writing therefore makes it difficult to categorise as “Australian”. The reception of Australian Indigenous fiction in the US has been a productive area of research, including the extent to which Indigenous writing constitutes a recognisable category, a “generative framing discourse” in the public sphere, facilitating the marketing of First Nations writing to American readers.² A recent report addressing the sale of titles overseas notes the peaks and troughs in US publishers’ championing of Australian books, claiming that “between each period of Australian success in the US, awareness of Australian books and writing lapsed and the next Australian authors pursuing publication were in effect starting out with no base or support structure to build upon”.³ The following article acknowledges that Australian literary fiction, while enduringly international in its outlook and reach, is so diverse in form and subject matter that it is hard to see how it could be construed as constituting a recognisable field or “marketing category” in the US.

Keeping this lack of coherent “markers” in mind—including setting, subject matter, style and form—I examine the US publishing journeys and reception of three recent Australian literary novels by women: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book, published in the US by Simon & Schuster in 2016; Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend, published by Riverhead in 2020; and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel, published by Little, Brown in 2013. These books are distinct in how they have been received as transnational (or as Australian); whether they achieved recognition in the form of prominent broadsheet reviews; and, in their vernacular reception, in terms of reviews on Goodreads of US editions. The degree to which the three texts have been received as “literary” also varies. I have selected them as case studies because of the different ways they have been apprehended by US readers and reviewers. In its study of Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel as one of three case studies, the following article is also interested in the extent to which Australian transnational fiction written by authors of diverse backgrounds is registered by international readerships. While work by writers from non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds has been afforded sustained scholarly attention,⁴ how their work circulates and is received among international readerships has not been allotted as much space.⁵ This article therefore extends David Carter’s work on the reception of fiction by Indigenous authors in the US by comparing the global ambitions of novels by Wright, Wood and de Kretser and how they have been recognised by US reviewers and audiences.

The publication of these authors’ work in the US represents only a fraction of the output by Australian novelists published in North America. Between 2010 and 2020 (inclusive), the AustLit database recorded the publication of a total of 16,879 novels in Australia: this figure includes republished and self-published novels by authors who are listed on the AustLit database.⁶ During the same period, a total of 3,017 novels were listed on AustLit as having been published in the US, with an average of 274 per year.⁷ But fiction published in the US by authors on AustLit has not necessarily been published in Australia first. Most fiction on the AustLit database published in the US—as is the case with fiction published in Australia—is commercial, with romance, fantasy and young adult fiction making up the largest percentages. It is not possible to filter results in the AustLit database for “literary fiction”; however, the database denotes some work simply as fiction, and some novels in the “historical fiction” category could be considered “literary”. The following article focuses on work that is construed as literary in the public sphere in Australia—that is, it has been shortlisted or has won national or international literary awards, it has received sustained critical attention in Australian broadsheet newspapers, and its authors have been recognised with Australia Council grants, as well as residencies or paid positions in national institutions. Writers, according to Alexis Wright, are “the inheritors and generators of the country’s psyche”.⁸ The appellation of the term “literary” therefore lends fiction in this category cultural significance.

Apprehensions of “literature” in scholarship have acknowledged how the literary is positioned in opposition to popular fiction, as well as its function as part of a period of “bourgeois social formation”, associated with postwar institutions.⁹ Ken Gelder’s Popular Fiction registers the 20th- and early 21st-century literary novel as apparently indifferent to the market and—in its emphasis on the writer as singular Romantic figure—as a work of creativity and authenticity.¹⁰ While acknowledging literature’s “unique evidence of fundamental human dignity and particularity” as well as its “association with values of care and attention”, Sarah Brouillette argues that literature is increasingly viewed by institutions that historically supported it, such as UNESCO, as “a commercially self-sustaining leisure product for wealthy, aging publics” and as “the habit of an elite niche”.¹¹

The literary is also entangled with the transnational, Carter and Osborne argue: “as an ethical or aesthetic category” and as “merely the latest in a long line of such euphemisms for literariness”.¹² In The New Middlebrow, Beth Driscoll uses the term “middlebrow” as a way of investigating and articulating the commercial and artistic entanglements of novels: that the economic as well as the intellectual and creative ambitions of literary fiction are deeply “enmeshed”.¹³ According to Driscoll, the “new literary middlebrow” is “middle class and feminised”, “referential to elite culture and also entrepreneurial”, and engaged in “practices that are recreational, emotional and earnest”.¹⁴ This article acknowledges literary fiction’s communication of interiority, its continued association with transnational forces and ways of thinking, and also its dependencies on the commercial: that the sale and marketing of literary fiction, as much as genre fiction, is shaped by financial exigencies. The cosmopolitan middlebrow is therefore adjacent to ideas of the transnational literary. The study of middlebrow culture has nonetheless noted “how values such as accessibility and utility were pitched in opposition” to the difficulties inherent in approaching modernist texts, for example.¹⁵ Together, the “transnational literary” and the “cosmopolitan middlebrow” provide approaches to reading the reception of texts that cross borders, while it is important to acknowledge that the two terms do not represent fixed categories.

Because publication in the US continues to confer international recognition on literary authors, while also bolstering an author’s reputation in Australia,¹⁶ I ask in the following: If Australian literary authors aim to position their work as globally significant, what textual and paratextual strategies do they use, and how apparently effective are these strategies? To what extent are transnational textual strategies leveraged by US publishers in their production of US editions of novels first published in Australia? Unlike authors of genre fiction,¹⁷ literary novelists generally choose to be published by an Australian publisher so that their books are marketed through Australian literary events and festivals. Therefore, literary authors may intend to produce fiction that is sufficiently “Australian” so as to be eligible for Australian literary awards (the Miles Franklin Literary Award, for example, is awarded to a novel “of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”¹⁸), and sufficiently universal in their themes to attract the attention of an overseas publisher. I have concentrated on novels by women writers because they have been especially successful in publishing work overseas (literary and popular) and because Wright’s, Wood’s and de Kretser’s novels illustrate the diverse ways in which Australian literary novels are received, as well as the differing strategies that authors and publishers use to augment a novel’s chances of recognition.

The question of the extent to which Australian literary fiction travels is one of significance to writers and publishers. Authors wish for their art to be acknowledged as relevant across borders; the slender margins for publishers who offer contracts for literary fiction in Australia are improved by successful international rights sales.¹⁹ Practical considerations aside, this article contributes to a discussion about how and to what extent fiction crosses borders, and what ideas and forms of representation gain traction with international audiences. I argue that the appeal to US readers on the part of recent Australian literary fiction by women is inflected by a combination of what I term “transnational orientation”—or ideas, characters and settings that a novel evokes to address a global readership—and “authorial disambiguation”, in the form of essays and websites written by authors and addressed to local and global readers. US publishers leverage a work’s “transnational orientation” to a greater or lesser extent in book design, and in the endorsements they seek, in order to position Australian works for a US market.

By “transnational”, I draw on a narrow definition given by Paul Jay and Paula Rabinowitz: transnational fiction exhibits “geographical and cultural diversity” in terms of settings and characterisation, and engages “with the experience of the transnational as a disruptive force related to displacement, migration [and] the occupation of border zones”.²⁰ A complication is that books that cannot be defined as narrowly transnational—such as Wood’s The Weekend, whose characters are white and middle class, and travel only as far as a coastal area north of Sydney—also appear to have been successful in terms of critical attention in the US. Driscoll’s conception of the “cosmopolitan middlebrow” is therefore potentially more useful in understanding the success of Wood’s fiction. But while Wright’s, Wood’s and de Kretser’s novels are oriented towards a cosmopolitan readership, and publishers in the case of Wright’s and de Kretser’s novels in particular leveraged the novels’ transnational content in book cover design, they differed in the degree to which published reviews in broadsheet and trade publications examined questions related to the novels’ global positioning. Vernacular reviews of American editions of these books on Goodreads largely overlook their Australian origin and transnationalism; they do not necessarily show evidence of engaging with authorial attempts at disambiguation.

Reading Reception and Vernacular Reviews

Recent scholarship on reading and reception has acknowledged its relevance largely for a women’s readership in terms of reflection and “enchantment”, but it has also emphasised the social nature of what is apparently a solitary experience. M. A. T. Olave’s work acknowledges the “affective attachments, reflections and valuations that occur when people engage with imaginative stories”.²¹ But social structures “bring a book into the hands of a reader”, including “family and friendship circles”, bookstores, publishers, and online forums and booksellers.²² Books are also “heavily invested with symbolic value” while also entangled in social systems.²³ As Anouk Lang argues, a book’s value—as a cultural object—while always in a state of flux, is determined by a nexus of institutional and other structures.²⁴ The following discussion therefore acknowledges an individual’s response to a text, and interventions that authors make to attempt to improve a novel’s circulation and uptake among networks of readers, with an understanding that even an individual’s apparent response—on a site such as Goodreads or Amazon—bears traces of social and cultural structures and interactions.

To study reception in the US, this article considers Goodreads reviews filtered for the US edition of the novel, to try to ascertain readers’ responses to a particular text and the apparent efficacy—as far as can be determined—of marketing efforts and authorial disambiguation. Goodreads is one among many social structures that shape the circulation, uptake and reception of fiction, a “literary network” and “a fan community”,²⁵ with design and user conventions that gesture towards the site’s dual purpose. As Lisa Nakamura notes, Goodreads mobilises the free labour of readers and reviewers, advancing the commercial interests of publishers, while also collecting information about its users, also for financial gain.²⁶ Following Stinson and Driscoll, this article acknowledges that reviews on forums such as Goodreads are frequently “critical” in the mode of reviews in online and print publications, in that they demonstrate informed and careful reading that moves beyond personal experience.²⁷ But some reviews on Goodreads could be identified as “post-critical” in their eschewing of “traditional aesthetic judgement”. Instead, these reviews discuss works “within a highly contingent, personalised context that never produces a traditional assessment”.²⁸ While appearing to record an individual’s response to a title, Goodreads responses may entail a series of individuals in dialogue with one another about a book. They may record the reviewer’s inability to finish a book, and also build on other reviews of the same title or different titles. A proportion of reviews on Goodreads are solicited by publishers, who send influencers copies of the novel; such reviews are often syndicated across Goodreads and Amazon, for example, and also appear on a reviewer’s blog or other website. Goodreads is therefore at the nexus of commercial publishing, and personal and social reading practices.

The Swan Book

Alexis Wright’s third novel, The Swan Book, published by Giramondo in 2013, first appeared in the US in 2016, where it was published in hardback by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. Besides having published three novels, Wright, an Indigenous writer of the Waanyi nation (the Gulf Country around the Gulf of Carpentaria in Eastern Australia), is the author of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction.²⁹ The Swan Book has been described as “world-making”.³⁰ Wright’s fiction is acknowledged as prioritising Indigenous transnational connections.³¹ The novel’s focalisation, narrative, structure and language work towards decolonising the reader and reconstituting Western subjectivity. The novel eschews engaging readers in a singular narrative, and prioritises new forms of knowledge and distinct non-Western approaches to history and time.³² Aspects of the novel’s narrative reprise current and recent political debates about settler-colonial biopolitical interventions into the lives of Australian Indigenous people, as well as the need for sovereignty by Indigenous people over their land and futures,³³ but the novel’s allegiances are determinedly global. It incorporates a range of languages, from Indigenous to Latin. Susan Sheridan speculates that Wright uses stories from a range of traditions “because of their source and origin in place, in country, that traditional stories have this ability to speak to the mysterious and cosmological as well as to the everyday”.³⁴ Maria Takolander, in contrast, views these stories as evidence of how the protagonist, Oblivia, is mentally colonised by European narratives told to her by Bella Donna, a European refugee from the “climate wars” who takes care of Oblivia.³⁵ While Takolander emphasises the colonising power of these narratives, not all of the stories—as Sheridan notes—are European. The stories also suggest the novel’s global relations.

Giramondo, publisher of The Swan Book, maintains allegiances with other small literary presses across the world. The publishing company was conceived by its chief publisher, Ivor Indyk, as international, with a “cosmopolitan outlook”.³⁶ In the case studies associated with the Success Story report, Indyk is quoted as saying: “It was always in my mind that I have an international orientation. I was determined to see Australian writing in the context of overseas writing.”³⁷ Giramondo has built a network of overseas contacts, and has been instrumental in bringing the work of writers from the Global South, including Argentina, to Australian readers in translation. Indyk notes that Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin award–winning second novel, Carpentaria, was the turning point in selling the international rights of her books. Indyk attributed the success of Carpentaria’s sale in the UK, US, China, and European countries to a Uruguayan publisher at a UK publishing house, who understood the book’s transnational connections to the work of South American magical realist writers, such as Eduardo Galeano.³⁸ An Australian editor named Judith Curr acquired Carpentaria for Atria books. Curr was mentioned by other publishers and agents in Success Story as a champion for Australian literature in the US.³⁹

The hardback and paperback editions of The Swan Book (Washington Square Press, another division of Simon & Schuster, published the novel in paperback in 2018) feature a cover with the title in large white type over a design that appears to be an abstract image composed of feathers in red, yellow and white against a black background. The image seems to reference Native American colours associated with the “medicine wheel” or “sacred hoop”.⁴⁰ Some similarity can be observed between the colours in the novel’s cover design and those of the Australian Aboriginal flag, which includes a bar of red at the bottom, representing the earth, under a bar of black, representing Indigenous people, with a superimposed yellow sun. The image therefore connects First Nations people in North America with Wright’s book: it gestures towards transnational Indigenous bonds. The back cover, like that of the other novels I consider in this article, includes Australian prizes and shortlists in which The Swan Book appeared. The back dust jacket also notes the recognition that Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria received in the US, in the form of reviews from the New York Times Book Review as well as Publisher’s Weekly.⁴¹ The book—in its listing of Australian awards and a review from the Sydney Review of Books—is marketed as a novel by an Australian Indigenous author; the cover image, however, connotes the connections between Wright’s work and that of First Nations North American writers.

Despite the novel’s global orientation and the US edition’s design, The Swan Book was not widely reviewed in the US. Nor was its transnational appeal widely noted. There was no sustained examination of the novel in venues with large circulation such as the New York Times, which has an extensive book review section on Sundays. Instead, the critical response was limited to brief reviews in trade publications for booksellers and librarians such as Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist. These focused on the text being about Australian Aboriginal people. For example, Publisher’s Weekly states that The Swan Book “is a challenging and heartbreaking story that illuminates the culture and struggles of an often overlooked people”.⁴² In Oprah Magazine, a magazine founded by Oprah Winfrey, who is also famous for her selection of books for her book club, the entirety of the review reads: “Set in a surreal Australia that melds myths and fairy tales with political and environmental tumult, Wright’s astonishingly inventive novel creates its own language and illuminates the embattled history of the Aborigines.”⁴³

A starred review in Booklist by Cortney Ophoff differs from other reviews in trade publications in that it summarises one of the novel’s narratives and contends that The Swan Book poses a question: “Is there room in the modern world for traditional culture?”⁴⁴ While other reviews in US publications concentrate on The Swan Book’s relevance for readers interested in “Aborigines”, Ophoff compares Wright’s work to African-American novelist Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), a novel that also contains multiple narrative voices. The brevity and sparseness of the reviews leads to questions about the extent to which Wright’s American publisher worked to ensure the book’s circulation in public forums. The Swan Book’s critical reception in the US was therefore initially underwhelming.⁴⁵

Alexis Wright’s profile and excerpts of reviews of her work appear on publishers’ and universities’ websites across Australia and internationally, although she does not maintain her own website. In Australia, she has written essays that offer an understanding of her fiction’s interventions and also advocate for Indigenous sovereignty and First Nations world views. Between the publication dates of Carpentaria and The Swan Book, Wright published at least 10 non-fiction columns and essays in publications ranging from Meanjin to the Australian.⁴⁶ The content of some of her non-fiction, such as “The Politics of Writing”, explains First Nations understandings of the relationship between story, place and time, thus heightening the comprehension of any readers of her non-fiction who also read her novels.⁴⁷ Although Wright has since published an opinion piece in the New York Times, “Want to Stop Australia’s Fires? Listen to Aboriginal People”,⁴⁸ she has not published as much non-fiction in American print and online publications.

On Goodreads, reviews of US editions (hardback and paperback) of The Swan Book were small in number: ten reviews of the hardback at the time of writing, and two of the paperback edition. The book’s transnational connections were overlooked by reviewers of the American editions—some of whom may have been expatriate Australians—and of other editions. Three of the nine reviews of the US edition mentioned that the novel was Australian, the same three that mentioned the novel was about Australian Indigenous people. Goodreads reviews of the US edition mostly mention the book’s difficulty: “A mess of rambling descriptions, symbolism and mythology that didn’t go anywhere and was well above my comprehension levels.”⁴⁹ US reviews, as with other reviews online, appear polarised between readers who found the novel hard to comprehend and engage with, and those who felt the book had marked epistemological value: “If ever a book was to make you question what is real and what is imaginary, what is actual or what is notional, to question if we live or dream our lives, this is the one.”⁵⁰ These reviews do not significantly differ in tone or in polarisation from reviews of the Australian edition. There is no distinct “American” response to the book; a proportion of all readers found The Swan Book “difficult”.⁵¹ There is also no mention of Wright’s non-fiction in Goodreads reviews of US editions of The Swan Book, although there are some mentions of Wright’s identity as an Indigenous writer. Because the genre of the Goodreads review is very focused on the reader’s response to the novel, especially in “post-critical” reviews, it is unsurprising that there are few traces of Wright’s attempts at disambiguation.

The global reach of Wright’s work has been mediated by her Australian and American publishers. In her essays and pieces of journalism for general readers in Australia, she has made a sustained attempt to describe some of the underpinnings of the world of her fiction, and also her political orientation, in terms of issues of cultural appropriation and the importance of Indigenous sovereignty.⁵² While analysing short published and vernacular reviews on Goodreads gives only a partial view of the reception of the novel, it is difficult to argue that the novel’s transnational ambitions, its publisher’s attempts to leverage its global orientation, or Wright’s efforts at authorial disambiguation had a significant impact on how the novel was received in the immediate period following its publication in the US.

The Weekend

The Weekend’s narrative focuses on four women in their seventies, who gather in a fictional town north of Sydney to clean out the house of a friend who has passed away. The novel shifts focalisation between the four women characters, all of whom are coming to terms with their friend’s death and, while healthy, are also facing old age. The novel was selected by Sarah McGrath, publisher at Riverhead (part of Penguin Random House), as a “Summer Read” for 2020.⁵³ It was acquired prior to its Australian publication on the strength of its narrative and its appeal as “women’s fiction/literary fiction”.⁵⁴ Because Riverhead is part of a multinational, it would be expected to have a larger budget for distribution and marketing than Europa Editions, which was the publisher of Wood’s previous novel in the US. Riverhead Books’ website states that it “is a leading publisher of literary fiction and quality nonfiction … devoted to publishing authors who change the conversation—urgent, unheard voices from a wide variety of backgrounds who have new perspectives and new stories to tell”.⁵⁵ Wood’s novel was therefore published by a US entity that places a value on “the literary”.

The Weekend also emerged from Wood’s year-long residency at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre, which describes itself as a “multidisciplinary centre committed to improving global health”.⁵⁶ During the residency, Wood sought to “pose confronting questions around aging, in response to the static way the elderly are represented in literature and in mainstream culture”, choosing to depict her septuagenarian characters as the “main characters, fully alive and thinking about the future and the present, not passively sitting around reflecting sadly on the glory days of their youth”.⁵⁷ Wood’s intention, therefore, was to write a book that resonated with a pressing contemporary issue: the representation of elderly women and societal prejudices against aged people, while portraying her characters as possessing undeniable individuated subjectivities.

The Weekend’s reception in the US was aided by the American publication of The Natural Way of Things in 2016. The Natural Way of Things was Wood’s fifth novel, but it was the first of her books to sell internationally. Europa editions, a small New York-based house (which also publishes Elena Ferrante), acquired The Natural Way of Things after concerted efforts by a New York-based agent who worked with Wood’s Australian agent.⁵⁸ According to Wood’s account in Zwar and Lawson’s Case Studies, The Natural Way of Things sold well due to positive reviews, one of which was part of NPR’s “Fresh Air” podcast.⁵⁹ The novel no doubt also resonated for cultural reasons: it is about the incarceration of young women in an outback facility, where they are kept against their will for a supposed “crime” against a powerful masculine figure, be this an affair or calling someone out for harassment. The novel’s evocation of a culture that blames victim-survivors of sexual violence for the crimes committed against them coincided with Donald Trump’s election campaign, while also predating the explosion in reports of sexual assault and harassment as part of the 2017 #MeToo campaign.

The white type on the US cover of The Weekend is superimposed over a blue sea and blue beach. A woman in a white bathing cap is walking into the water, while another woman is already swimming. The background includes a darkened landform and a blue sky. The cover references summers at the beach, but the darkened landform lends it a slightly menacing quality. Unlike The Swan Book, the hardback edition’s cover of Wood’s novel included endorsements from American authors, including Paula Hawkins, author of the American bestseller The Girl on the Train, and Sigrid Nunez, National Book award–winning author of The Friend, who called the book “an insightful, poignant, and fiercely honest novel about female friendship and female aging”.⁶⁰

The novel was not marketed as an Australian book. While beaches are associated with Australia, there is no mention of the novel’s setting in the blurb.⁶¹ Although the novel’s shortlists for Australian literary prizes are mentioned on the publisher’s website about the paperback, the novel is primarily marketed as a “#1 International Bestseller”. Comparisons are also made with both Big Little Lies by bestselling Australian author Liane Moriarty and The Big Chill in the website’s quotation of a review from the Guardian (London): “The Big Chill with a dash of Big Little Lies.”⁶² That is, while the novel is not transnational in its settings or narrative, it is marketed as a novel whose subject matter crosses borders, drawing on common experiences of ageing in the West: isolation; the fear of institutionalisation and death; the loss of friends; the experience of ageism. One way of explaining the novel’s drawing power across borders is to read it, and its appeal to readers, via the term “cosmopolitan middlebrow”: the novel is making an appeal to informed, educated—and given its subject matter, which focuses on ageing women—female readers.

Wood’s website—and material about The Weekend—is constructed with a global audience in mind. The website includes information about where to buy the novel in the US, UK and Australia, as well as quotations and endorsements from writers and reviewers in all three countries.⁶³ The reference points for The Weekend in prominent US reviews are bestselling American high-end fiction, such as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again.⁶⁴ Marian Winik’s review in the Star Tribune similarly acknowledges the novel’s currency: “For a reader in or facing the demographic of Wood’s three friends, ‘The Weekend’ is both fascinating and chilling. Not just the question of superannuated friendships, but also past-prime careers, ageing bodies, senior finances and calcifying personality traits are all fairly coldly examined here.”⁶⁵ While this review mentions the novel’s setting, it more clearly emphasises the experience of ageing as a relatively privileged person. The Weekend was also compared to Mary McCarthy’s The Group in a discussion of summer reads in the New York Times.⁶⁶ Wood therefore succeeded in writing a novel that was comparable to bestselling American fiction. While in both broadsheet discussions of the novel the Australian setting is mentioned, neither reviewer considers the book an especially “Australian” one.

Goodreads reviews of the US edition—paperback and hardback—total 617: a far higher number than the number of reviews of The Swan Book. As with Wright’s novel, readers’ opinions demonstrate a marked polarisation. A few reviewers mention the fact that the novel is set in Australia: “(Note that the story takes place in Australia, so Christmastime is beach season)”; and “It’s being compared to ‘The Big Chill’ … but for me, that’s a little bit of a stretch. The only similar theme was that old friends were reuniting over a long weekend (a Christmas weekend in Bittoes, Australia)”.⁶⁷ Of the 507 reviews of the hardback edition, only 21 mention that the novel is Australian. One reviewer states: “(though I must note that it was unclear at the beginning that this is set in Australia, and while context clues led me to that, originally I thought it was elsewhere!)”.⁶⁸ Many mentions of the novel’s setting are parenthetical, implying that the setting was not front of mind for American reviewers, although one reviewer, “CB”, says the novel “felt very distinctively Australian”.⁶⁹ There is nothing to suggest in the available Goodreads reviews that reviewers read Wood’s non-fiction or website.

The writing and positioning of the novel by Wood and her publishers has culminated in an audience for The Weekend in the Global North. While Wood and her publishers were hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic—Wood would not have been able to travel to promote the book in North America in 2020—The Weekend evidently reached large numbers of readers, as indicated by the total number of Goodreads reviews and the publisher’s claim that the novel was an international bestseller. This reach could be attributed to Wood’s growing reputation overseas subsequent to the publication of The Natural Way of Things. The accessibility of her material on her writing—and on the writing process generally—via her website may have helped to build an audience for her fiction, although there is no indication of whether vernacular readers have engaged with this material. The setting of the novel largely did not register, or was of limited importance, to vernacular reviewers.

Questions of Travel

Michelle de Kretser’s fourth novel, Questions of Travel, engages with the idea of transnational exchange and whether Westerners (and to an extent immigrants) are able to genuinely participate in and engage with other cultures. The novel was published in the US in 2013, a year after its Australian release. It was sold prior to being awarded the Miles Franklin and Christina Stead prizes in 2013.⁷⁰ The book’s title references Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel”, first published in The New Yorker in 1956, and her collection of the same title (1965), thereby orienting the novel towards a US readership. Sections of de Kretser’s novel are from the perspective of Laura Fraser, a woman who grows up in Sydney and travels to Bali, India, England and Italy, among other countries. Other chapters are focalised by a Sri Lankan man, Ravi Mendis, who travels by necessity to Australia after his wife and child are killed for political reasons in Sri Lanka in the early 1990s. These two perspectives are interspersed, but in fact there is very little genuine dialogue between the two characters, even if they do eventually meet as employees of a company that publishes travel guidebooks.

De Kretser’s novel, while representing canonical transnational ideas—migration, and the effects of globalisation—suggests the limits of intercultural communication. The novel dramatises lives inflected by technological, social and political changes brought about by globalisation, which are “shaped by movement, migration and global and intercultural encounters”, according to Annee Lawrence.⁷¹ Lawrence views the novel as emblematic of what she called in 2016 “the contemporary” (by way of Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the contemporary): “in, of and with the world, as well as in, of and present time”.⁷² But Questions of Travel also continually reinforces the limitations of travel as a means to access the cultures of others. Laura Fraser realises that she follows the same well-trodden paths as other tourists who have travelled before her, and she is disaffected by her conversations with locals, which focus at times on an exchange of the names of Australian and Indian cricketers.⁷³ She views her travel as inauthentic, while also asking herself about the true purpose and value of her journeys.⁷⁴ Ravi Mendis, in contrast, is never able to communicate the extent of the trauma that led him to leave his home country, and he becomes disillusioned with his Australian employer.

In the US, Questions of Travel received more high-profile reviews than other novels included in this article. Most notably, it received a full-length review in the New York Times Book Review, by Soharn Randy Boyagoda, the Canadian author and academic of Sri Lankan immigrant parents.⁷⁵ Boyagoda compares Questions of Travel to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in its scope. He sums up the novel as “full of promise … [it] offers many passing wonders and intensities amid a lot of busy-making and slack time” and likens it to the experience of travel itself.⁷⁶ Questions of Travel also received brief and laudatory write-ups in Booklist and Kirkus Reviews, publications for librarians and booksellers: “De Kretser negotiates the fragmentation of her major characters with aplomb as well as with an aggressive but rhapsodic prose style.”⁷⁷ In a more recent review of de Kretser’s Scary Monsters (2021), Nawal Arjini, writing in The Nation, argues that de Kretser “has spent the last decades writing novels about globalization from two perspectives: that of the person who can afford to travel and that of the person who is forced to move”,⁷⁸ a clear reference to Questions of Travel.

Questions of Travel was published in the US in hardback by Little, Brown and Company in 2013. The front cover bears the photograph of a porthole in a ship, through which the viewer can see a landscape of water with a forested landform in the background. Text on the front cover includes “By the author of The Hamilton Case” and a quotation from Booker Prize–winning British author Hilary Mantel.⁷⁹ The US paperback edition, published in 2014, lists the Australian prizes the book has won since the publication of US hardback edition. The cover features a small pale leather suitcase, and a quotation from A. S. Byatt’s review of the novel in the Guardian.⁸⁰ The emphasis in both covers is on travel, as denoted by the book’s title. The front cover endorsements by Mantel and Byatt underline de Kretser’s status as an author with a substantial international reputation. Unlike Charlotte Wood, Michelle de Kretser does not maintain a website. She has not published a large volume of material that could be termed “readerly disambiguation” in the press, but several interviews with her exist, both in Australian newspapers and in scholarly journals.⁸¹

At the time of writing, the US hardback edition of Questions of Travel had received 349 reviews. A fraction of these reviews mentioned the novel’s Australian content (31 reviews), while four mentioned “globalisation”. One reader called the book “very Australian”. Another noted that the novel provided “remarkable insights to life and modern living, of identity, of travel, a multifaceted book”, a reference to the novel’s global orientation. Interestingly, one reviewer mentioned de Kretser’s interviews, stating: “De Kretser is undoubtedly clever but after reading her interviews it’s obvious she considers herself an ‘artist’. *groan*.”⁸² Reviewers on Goodreads also noted the difficulty of the novel: “What I found was a dense read with way too much going on and far too little to like about the characters.”⁸³ As with The Swan Book, some reviewers seemed to characterise the novel as challenging, and their efforts to finish the novel as heroic. On the other hand, there was a clear sense of what readers thought Questions of Travel was communicating.

Questions of Travel’s subject—the difficulties inherent in transnational travel and genuine communication—was relevant to a global readership. De Kretser’s fiction has received a sustained and high-profile broadsheet critical response in the US, attesting to the currency of her works’ subject matter. The novel’s success as winner of the Miles Franklin and Prime Minister’s Literary Awards also had implications beyond Australia and was written about in the Sri Lankan press.⁸⁴ I did not, however, find any reviews of the novel in Sri Lankan community publications in North America, although I surveyed only English-language publications that could be searched online. Further research into how books by Australian authors with diasporic links to immigrants in other territories circulate would usefully extend this area of research.

Conclusion

The Swan Book’s Indigenous transnational connections, while leveraged in cover design, were lost on US reviewers, who predominantly focused on the novel as being about Australian Aboriginal people; vernacular reviews predominantly concentrated on challenges posed by the novel’s form. Questions of Travel’s transnational subject matter—even while the novel dramatised the limits of intercultural communication—was straightforwardly emphasised in designs of the hardback and paperback. The novel also received the most high-profile US review of the three case studies. The Weekend was the most reviewed book of the three case studies on Goodreads, and reviewers recognised the book’s appeal to a broad cross-section of readers. Attempts to appeal to readers by a combination of transnational orientation, in the case of The Swan Book and Questions of Travel, and by the commonality of Western experiences of ageing, in the case of The Weekend, do not necessarily register in Goodreads reviews, which tend to archive an immediate and at times emotional response on the part of a reader to a book, even while these responses may be performed, or part of the Goodreads review genre. In vernacular reviews, readers also tend not to acknowledge whether they encountered writers’ non-fiction, which, in the case of Alexis Wright, makes aspects of her fiction more accessible.

The Swan Book, The Weekend and Questions of Travel present different models of “the literary” in their US marketing and reception. As three literary texts—in the sense that they are recognised as such in Australia—they do not constitute a definable or recognisable category. The Swan Book is aligned with the literary in its so-called difficulty, and in its ambitions in terms of decolonising the reader. The Weekend is more straightforwardly conceived of as a cosmopolitan middlebrow novel than a transnational one, whose author has made concerted efforts to make her writing legible to a broad reading public. Questions of Travel exemplifies the entanglements of the literary with the transnational, in that the literary aspects of Questions of Travel—its critique of superficial intercultural connections—are inextricably bound to its evocations of travel, migration and globalisation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 David Carter and Roger Osborne, Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2018), 11.

2 David Carter, “The Dynamics of Material Transnationalism: Australian Indigenous Authors in the US Marketplace,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 20, no. 2 (2020): 3, https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/issue/view/From%20Colony%20to%20Transnation.

3 Paul Crosby et al., Success Story—International Rights Sales of Australian-Authored Books: Main Report (North Ryde, NSW: Macquarie University, October 2021), 11, https://research-management.mq.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/177288594/177088842_Main_report.pdf.

4 For example, see the special issue edited by Jessica Gildersleeve of Journal of Australian Studies. Jessica Gildersleeve, “Introduction: Christos Tsiolkas and Contemporary Australia—The Outsider Artist,” Journal of Australian Studies 46, no. 1 (2022): 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2022.2028368; Lachlan Brown, “Worlds Apart: Nam Le’s The Boat and Ali Alizadeh’s Transactions,” Transnational Literature 7, no. 2 (2015): 1–12, https://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/vol7_issue2.html.

5 Michael Richard Jacklin, “The Transnational Turn in Australian Literary Studies,” Journal of the Society for Australian Literature, special issue: Australian Literature in a Global World (2009): 4.

6 The inclusion of works in the AustLit database does not mean that the writer lives or has lived in Australia, but that they at one point had an Australian connection or have been published by an Australian publisher.

7 “Australian Novels,” AustLit, accessed 20 May 2023, https://www-austlit-edu-au.virtual.anu.edu.au/search.

8 Alexis Wright, “What Happens When You Tell Someone Else’s Story?,” Meanjin (Summer 2016), https://meanjin.com.au/essays/what-happens-when-you-tell-somebody-elses-story/.

9 Sarah Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019), 7.

10 See Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (London: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 13. Gelder is drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu here.

11 Brouillette, UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary, 1–2.

12 Carter and Osborne, Australian Books and Authors, 12.

13 Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the 21st Century (London: Palgrave, 2014), 1.

14 Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow, 194.

15 Emmett Stinson and Beth Driscoll, “Difficult Literature on Goodreads: Reading Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book,” Textual Practice 36, no. 1 (2020): 6.

16 Carter and Osborne, Australian Books and Authors, 341.

17 Kim Wilkins, Beth Driscoll, and Lisa Fletcher, Genre Worlds: Popular Fiction and Twenty-First-Century Book Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022), 64.

18 “2023 Miles Franklin Literary Award,” Perpetual, accessed 25 July 2023, https://www.perpetual.com.au/milesfranklin#:~:text=The%20Miles%20Franklin%20Literary%20Award,in%20any%20of%20its%20phases.

19 Crosby et al., Success Story, 33.

20 Paul Jay and Paula Rabinowitz, “Transnational,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://doi-org.virtual.anu.edu.au/10 .1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1134.

21 M. A. T. Olave, “Reading Matters: Towards a Cultural Sociology of Reading,” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 6 (2018): 418.

22 DeNel Rehberg Sedo, “Reading Reception in the Digital Era,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 28 June 2017, https://doi-org.virtual.anu.edu.au/10 .1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.285.

23 Anouk Lang, “Introduction: Transforming Reading,” in From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the 21st Century (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 2.

24 Lang, “Transforming Reading,” 2

25 Lisa Nakamura, “Words with Friends: Socially Networked Reading on Goodreads,” PMLA 128, no. 1 (2013): 240.

26 Nakamura, “Words with Friends,” 241.

27 Stinson and Driscoll, “Difficult Literature on Goodreads,” 11.

28 Stinson and Driscoll, “Difficult Literature on Goodreads,” 11.

29 Per Henningsgaard, “Alexis Wright’s Publication History in three Contexts: Australian Aboriginal, National, and International,” Antipodes 33, no. 1 (2019): 108, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/alexis-wright-s-publishing-history-three-contexts/docview/2475829527/se-2.

30 Linda Daley, “Alexis Wright’s Fiction as World-Making,” Contemporary Women’s Writing 16, no. 1 (March 2016): 8–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpv028.

31 Lynda Ng, “Introduction,” in Indigenous Transnationalism: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (Artamon, NSW: Giramondo, 2018), 1–11.

32 Lucy Neave, “Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) as Crisis Fiction,” Textual Practice 36, no. 9 (2022): 1563, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2021.1977379.

33 Phillip Mead, “Unresolved Sovereignty and the Anthropocene Novel: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book,” Journal of Australian Studies 42, no. 4 (2018): 524–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2018.1539759.

34 Susan Sheridan, “Feminist Fables and Alexis Wright’s Art of the Fabulous in The Swan Book,” Hecate 43, no. 1/2 (2017): 203.

35 Maria Kaaren Takolander, “Theorizing Irony and Trauma in Magical Realism: Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 47, no. 3 (July 2016): 95–122, https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2016.0026.

36 Jan Zwar and Airlie Lawson, Success Story—International Rights Sales of Australian-Authored Books: Case Studies (North Ryde, NSW: Macquarie University, October 2021), 48.

37 Zwar and Lawson, Case Studies, 48.

38 Zwar and Lawson, Case Studies, 48–50.

39 Zwar and Lawson, Case Studies, 51.

40 Robina Thomas and Jacquie Green, “A Way of Life: Indigenous Perspectives on Anti-Oppressive Living,” First Peoples Child and Family Review 3, no. 1 (2007): 92.

41 Alexis Wright, The Swan Book (New York, NY: Atria, 2016).

42 “The Swan Book,” Publishers Weekly, 20 June 2016, https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-5011-2478-5.

43 The Reading Room, “The Swan Book by Alexis Wright,” Oprah Magazine, 13 June 2016, https://www.oprah.com/book/the-swan-book?editors_pick_id=63887.

44 Courtney Ophoff, “The Swan Book,” Booklist, 15 May 2016, https://www.booklistonline.com/The-Swan-Book-Alexis-Wright/pid=8050584.

45 In a New York Times Book Review interview in 2020, Robert MacFarlane, author of Underland (2019), named Alexis Wright as one of the writers he admired most, mentioning both her fiction and non-fiction: “I’m awed by the range, experiment and political intelligence of her work.” Robert MacFarlane, “The Classic Novel That Robert MacFarlane Couldn’t Finish,” New York Times, 22 November 2020, sec. Book Review, 7, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/books/review/robert-macfarlane-by-the-book-interview.html?searchResultPosition=3.

46 See: “Alexis Wright: Works By,” AustLit, https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A6167?mainTabTemplate=agentWorksBy&restrictToAgent=A6167. It is common practice for Australian publishers to ask authors to write opinion pieces for publication around the date of a novel’s release, in an effort to build an audience.

47 Alexis Wright, “The Politics of Writing,” Southerly 62, no. 2 (2002): 10–20.

48 Alexis Wright, “Want to Stop Australia’s Fires? Listen to Aboriginal People,” New York Times, 15 January 2020, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/opinion/australia-fires-aboriginal-people.html?searchResultPosition=2.

49 “The Swan Book by Alexis Wright,” Goodreads, accessed 25 July 2023, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18247932-the-swan-book.

50 “The Swan Book by Alexis Wright”.

51 See Stinson and Driscoll, “Difficult Literature on Goodreads”. Although this article surveys reviews of the US editions, this is not to say that some American reviewers did not write reviews of the Australian edition or that some reviewers of the American edition may not have been expatriates. It is impossible to delineate a purely American response.

52 Wright, “The Politics of Writing”; Wright, “What Happens When You Tell Someone Else’s Story?”.

53 Zwar and Lawson, Case Studies, 134.

54 Zwar and Lawson, Case Studies, 134.

55 Riverhead Books, “Overview,” accessed 13 May 2023, https://www.penguin.com/riverhead-overview/.

56 “Charles Perkins Centre,” University of Sydney, accessed 29 November 2022, https://www.sydney.edu.au/charles-perkins-centre/about.html.

57 Emily Cook, “Author Charlotte Wood New Charles Perkins Centre Writer in Residence,” University of Sydney, 9 May 2016, https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2016/05/09/author-charlotte-wood-announced-as-charles-perkins-centres-write.html.

58 Zwar and Lawson, Case Studies, 132.

59 Zwar and Lawson, Case Studies, 133.

60 “The Weekend: A Novel,” Amazon, accessed 25 July 2023, https://www.amazon.com/Weekend-Novel-Charlotte-Wood/dp/0593086449/ref=monarch_sidesheet.

61 “The Weekend: A Novel,” Penguin Random House, accessed 25 July 2023, https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612452/the-weekend-by-charlotte-wood/#.

62 Penguin Random House, “The Weekend: A Novel”.

63 “The Weekend,” Charlotte Wood, accessed 29 November 2022, https://www.charlottewood.com.au/the-weekend.html.

64 Marian Winik, “Review: The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood,” Star Tribune, 31 July 2020, sec. Books, https://www.startribune.com/review-the-weekend-by-charlotte-wood/571967122/.

65 Winik, “Review: The Weekend”.

66 Elisabeth Egan, “Are They Still Beach Books if You’re Not Reading Them on the Beach?,” New York Times, 13 August 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/books/review/beach-reads-kevin-kwan.html?searchResultPosition=1.

67 “The Weekend by Charlotte Wood,” Goodreads, accessed 18 January 2023, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48848247-the-weekend.

68 Goodreads, “The Weekend by Charlotte Wood”.

69 Goodreads, “The Weekend by Charlotte Wood”.

70 “Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser,” Goodreads, accessed 25 July 2023, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15790884-questions-of-travel#:~:text=A%20mesmerising%20literary%20novel%2C%20Questions,Sri%20Lanka%20by%20devastating%20events.

71 Annee Lawrence, “Australian Writing and the Contemporary: Are We There Yet?,” Cultural Studies Review 22, no. 1 (March 2016): 250. Lawrence is referencing Terry Smith’s ideas of contemporary art here.

72 Lawrence, “Australian Writing and the Contemporary,” 244.

73 Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012), 53.

74 de Kretser, Questions of Travel, 56.

75 “Randy Boyagoda,” Asian Heritage Toronto Metropolitan University, accessed 24 January 2023, https://library.torontomu.ca/asianheritage/authors/boyagoda/.

76 Randy Boyagoda, “When Two Paths Meet,” New York Times Book Review, 21 June 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/books/review/questions-of-travel-by-michelle-de-kretser.html.

77 “Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser,” Kirkus Reviews, 14 May 2013, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michelle-de-kretser/questions-of-travel/.

78 Nawal Arjini, “Departures: Michelle de Kretser’s Fiction of Migration and Globalization,” The Nation, 16 November 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/michelle-de-krester-scary-monsters/.

79 “Questions of Travel,” Amazon US, accessed 25 July 2023, https://www.amazon.com/Questions-Travel-Novel-Michelle-Kretser/dp/0316219223/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1683941050&sr=1-2.

80 de Kretser, Questions of Travel.

81 For example, see Michelle de Kretser, “I Don’t Want to Be a Tourist in my own Country: An Interview with Michelle de Kretser,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 58, no. 4 (2022): 568–79.

82 Goodreads, “Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser”.

83 Goodreads, “Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser”.

84 Bernama, “Sri Lankan-Born Novelist Wins Aussie PM Literary Award,” Ada Derana, 17 August 2013, https://www.adaderana.lk/news.php?nid=23770.