Edgy Prosperity: Loving and Hating Offspring

I’ve been a regular watcher of the television show Offspring since its first season last year. This wildly popular comedy drama, which currently airs on Channel 10 in Melbourne on Monday and Wednesday nights, centres on the character of Nina, an anxiety-ridden thirty-something obstetrician. Nina’s life is buffeted by the never-ending dramas of her chaotic family, the Proudmans, who look to her for support each time a new crisis looms.

The show is into its second series and a couple of weeks ago Channel 10 announced that a third series was planned for next year.

The writing is by turns wry, witty, engaging and astonishly lazy. Dressed in immaculate, upmarket boho fashion, the uniformly good-looking Proudmans career across the screen against edgy inner-city backdrops that combine urban grittiness with airy gentrification.  Voiceovers and fantasy sequences add to the comedy.

Nina works in an inner-city hospital where she seems to have way too much time to pursue doomed romances with handsome doctor colleagues and to gossip with the three nurses forever anchored to the nurses’ station. Nina’s highly strung sister, Billie, lives with her boyfriend Mick, while her love-rat younger brother, Jimmy, flits from one romantic entanglement to another.

The family is headed by convivially divorced parents Geraldine and Darcy; conveniently for the Proudman’s housing needs, Darcy is a real estate agent, and Billie works as an apprentice in her father’s real estate office. Most of them live in the long-gentrified inner-city suburb of Fitzroy, with much of the action centring around the family seat, a picturesque brick Victorian villa in North Fitzroy.

The show is a homage to the mythical version of Melbourne extolled in the lifestyle pages of the Age newspaper: Melbourne as family-friendly foodie mecca, a barista-studded paradise of urbane tolerance in which benighted, overcrowded outer suburbs without public transport, hospitals or schools simply don’t exist.

Nor do the real-life disadvantaged who contribute to the vibrancy that Fitzroy manages to retain: the former refugees living in the high rises, the Indigenous peoples with strong historical ties to the area, the homeless and mentally ill who to this day flock to the services provided by the likes of the Brotherhood of St Laurence in Brunswick Street.

The characters rarely move far beyond their Fitzroy playground. One of their gathering places is a local pub, the quaint Union Club hotel in Gore Street Fitzroy, where the musical Mick and his band play regular gigs, and Jimmy works as a casual bartender. Darcy’s office is diagonally across the road. The scenes set in Nina’s hospital workplace have been shot at the Mercy Private hospital in nearby East Melbourne.

Much of the show's success must be attributed to Asher Keddie (pictured), who plays the central character of Nina. The current ‘it girl’ of Australian television, Keddie is much smarter and more skilled than this mantle suggests, investing all her characters with nuance, complexity and believability.

Yet Nina’s character trajectory has been disappointing. She started off as a complex character who was consistently competent in her working life yet self-doubting and prone to fantasy, an anxiety sufferer with a rich interior world who somehow always managed to pull it together when required. By the end of the last series and into this one she had descended into Ally-McBeal-style ditziness, revealing a lack of the most basic workplace communication skills that would be unforgivable, even potentially dangerous to patients, in a real-life person in her position.

Some of the lazier aspects of the writing pertain to this lack of professionalism; Nina also has a habit of snogging on the job that doesn’t at all fit with the frantic busyness of a modern hospital or her supposedly retiring nature.

The politics of real estate

Offspring has been applauded for its contemporary relevance.  It deserves some credit for not sugarcoating the complexities of family life, and for providing short-term narrative pleasure and moments of brilliant humour. The actors are also exemplary. ‘Edgy’ performers like Kat Stewart, fresh from her overcooked performance as Roberta Williams in Underbelly, and darkly comic satirist Eddie Perfect as Billie’s boyfriend (pictured), along with the familiar village-like vista offered by Fitzroy streetscapes, can soothe progressives like me into thinking we are watching something cutting-edge and relevant.

But any perceived edginess is skin deep. Stories that are gripping and socially relevant – such as a wretchedly poor single mother stealing a guitar from  Mick –  come and go with rapidity, and are sometimes asked to bear too much symbolic value when there has been little time to invest in the characters. The moment in the last episode when Nina tells herself in voiceover, ‘I emanate an aura of indie rock and progressive politics’, is as near to overtly political as the show ever gets.

In fact the show is deeply political, but inadvertently so. As well as erasing the genuine diversity of Fitzroy, it participates in another great lie, a lie that is surely one reason for its popularity: that the houses the characters inhabit do not represent anything other than homes, and that a middle class family living in Melbourne, even an upper middle class family like the Proudmans, could  these days afford to  live as close to each other as they do. In reality the stratospheric prices of Melbourne real estate, partially fuelled by a regressive tax break for property investors  known as negative gearing, tears extended families and communities apart: this applies to renters as much as home owners.

By making Darcy a real estate agent the show ‘cheats’, creating a credible reason why the family could afford to live in close proximity to each other; at the same time, giving Darcy this role both reveals and works on the obsession with real estate that an overpriced market fosters.

The Proudmans are a family one might seek to emulate, in a way that is neither completely traditional nor completely modern. By setting the show in Fitzroy, its makers rely on a street credibility that in one sense is two decades out of date – although the suburb retains much of its appealing scruffiness and creative vibe, few of the cool and arty can afford to live there these days, and many mightn’t want to. Yet this in itself creates another kind of credibility that is completely current – Fitzroy represents a particular kind of real estate mecca that everyone, not just the cool and arty, can yearn for.

So while the backdrops are inspired – scenes with the picturesque old Fitzroy town hall in the background; shots of Jimmy riding through quiet, narrow streets past wrought iron fencing, lush hedges or carefully bordered front gardens; the brutalism-meets-traditional-Italian-bar coolness of cafes in Brunswick and Gertrude streets – this show perhaps merely confirms what was already evident: that the one-time artistic haven of Fitzroy was taken over by the very prosperous long ago.

Of course the family’s unexpected closeness, geographically and otherwise, contributes to the show's attractiveness. While in previous years it was the young who dominated the northern suburbs, now both generations can participate in inner-city living; Jimmy can flirt with the idea of artistic freedom that the inner city represents despite the fact that, having been born in North Fitzroy, he hasn’t  ‘earned’ his place there; Geraldine and Darcy represent the middle class baby boomers who are so firmly established that it’s easy to forget they stole Fitzroy from the working classes.

It's not surprising, then, that other social problems related to government shortcomings are neatly elided. Offspring evokes a version of Melbourne in which both family and community are tightly knitted, and where appropriate services, in particular maternity services, are available when they are needed. (It’s never clear whether the hospital that is Nina’s workplace is private or public, and I think this is deliberate, erasing the kinds of social divisions that these categories themselves indicate.)

But perhaps the show’s self-deludedness is what makes it so entertaining, so watchable. Real estate and fashion porn, good-looking and engaging actors, lots of silly humour, constant family conflict and regular injections of pathos and ‘values’: ultimately Offspring is very good escapism, and therein lies its charm. Still, with the calibre of the actors and the sharp humour of some of the writing, I think it could have retained this charm while encompassing a more complex, gritty and accurate vision of modern Melbourne.

A Summer to Savour: Review of Siri Hustvedt’s The Summer without Men

Acclaimed writer Siri Hustvedt’s most recent novel, The Summer without Men, fits an amazing degree of plot, character arc and intellectual bite into a small amount of text.

Hustvedt has long since mastered the art of verisimilitude, so much so that she could easily crank out quietly naturalistic masterpieces like Joan London’s The Good Parents (a novel I loved and would recommend) if she chose. Another writer who has achieved the ability to construct a world we can believe in is Susan Johnson, whose Life in Seven Mistakes convinced this reader that the Barton family’s claustrophobic high-rise Gold Coast apartment and the dynamics that occur within it actually existed.

But Hustvedt wants to do more with the novel than produce a constructed version of reality that provides commentary on life only indirectly. She wants to play with its conventions, to stretch the form to its limits, in order to fully let loose her (or her narrator’s) intellectual and social concerns.

Hustvedt is married to the acclaimed US author Paul Auster. This is relevant because it indirectly feeds into the sexual politics of the book, but also because there is a similarity in what both these writers do in their novels despite their very different styles.

Auster long ago mastered a bald but riveting narrative style highly influenced by Raymond Chandler, Hollywood film, and the male tradition of stripping away affect and extraneous details, to produce novels powered by an intriguing, ever-advancing plot line. He was never content to employ this style in the service of narrative drive alone; his works have a postmodern flavour and are often surreal and absurdist. One of his  ploys is to insert into the narrative a character who shares his name, suggesting that fiction and ‘real life’ are not diametrically opposed but rather different states on the same continuum, and that the boundary between the two is at best blurred rather than fixed.

The Summer without Men also blurs this boundary and inhabits ‘that threshold world of Almost’, but it does so for reasons that are more overtly political than Auster’s.

The Summer without Men is political at every turn, but, Hustvedt seems to be telling us, it has to be. According to the novel’s narrator, women continue to be misrepresented, ignored and belittled by masculinist ‘experts’ whether scientific or literary. Hustvedt’s response is a politicised version of what someone like Auster, firmly established in the male canon, would do. Thus, she anticipates being boxed in as a ‘female writer’ and then uses this space of assigned femininity to protest the subject position. Indeed, in a world where the likes of VS Naipaul are still making outrageous remarks about women’s writing being second rate because of its ‘sentimentality’, how can a novel by a female writer not be overtly political?

Hustvedt can never write like Paul Auster, because she does not enjoy his privileged position, the fact that he has been able to assume the mantle of great male writer. Yet she can emulate him in another way, similarly blurring the boundaries between the fictional world inside the novel and the ‘reality’ of the outside. (Of course, in the real life interaction between the pair, it’s not clear at all that Hustvedt is emulating anybody – for all we know, Auster’s literary style could always have been powered by Hustvedt’s preoccupations; in a  marriage, and especially an intellectual/literary marriage, boundaries between self and other become blurred. The novel itself points this out, and also enacts it; at one point, Mia mentions the title of one of Auster’s novels, referring to him as  a ‘prominent American novelist’.)

Hustvedt achieves this boundary-crossing in two ways. First, by deliberately blurring the distinction between herself and the narrator, giving (possibly) some of her own intellectual preoccupations to Mia; and second by making the narrator a highly self-conscious memoirist who constantly and deliberately imports all manner of extraneous intellectual matter into the narrative to support her emotional and intellectual prooccupations.

Hustvedt has a very different style from Auster. The glue of this book is a strongly imagined and dramatic scenario conveyed in naturalistic terms with Romantic overtones in the tradition of Jane Eyre. The heroine and first-person narrator, Mia, a poet and intellectual, goes temporarily insane when Boris, a neuroscientist and her beloved spouse of 30 years, announces that he needs a break from their previously happy marriage in order to pursue an affair with a young colleague that Mia derisively refers to as ‘The Pause’.

After recovering her sanity, Mia returns to the backwater Minnesotan town of her childhood for a summer without men, spending time with her elderly mother and her retirement home buddies, teaching a summer poetry course for female teenagers, and befriending a young family living next door to her rented house.

Naturalism and a conventional plot drive this story forward but it is full of asides, digressions and switches in time sequence. The intellectual Mia quotes the works and ideas of various poets and philosophers, including her own, and muses on human behaviour, the stupidity of stubbornly sexist neuroscientists who continue to seek evidence of women’s innate difference from and inferiority to men and the corresponding epistemological violence that assigns inferiority to the subject matter of female writers. Personal history blends with vivid, concise storytelling and social commentary. The narrator addresses the reader directly as if she were an old friend; the digressions are Mia’s so that she is always relating the story, however she chooses to tell it.

Most importantly Mia refuses to use these intellectual divagations as buffers against the world or intellectual ballast; they are as much a part of her mental and emotional machinery as are her more direct experiences and perceptions, whether banal or profound.

The critic who reviewed this book in The Age newspaper recently was annoyed at its digressions; in fact, they are integral to both the main character and the larger aims of the book. ‘Look’, Hustvedt seems to be saying, ‘my husband playfully inserts himself into his writing and is treated like a genius. If I do it, I’ll be accused of harping, making the personal political, but I’m going to do it anyway (sort of: am I really doing it?).’

Having a first-person narrator who is an intellectual enables Hustvedt to both enact and meditate on the boundaries between novel and the world, the inside and the outside, truth and fiction, reader and writer, the real and the imagined. In making Mia an intellectual and poet, Hustvedt deliberately positions her narrator close in similarity to herself and her own situation. Like Mia, Hustvedt lives with her husband in a New York apartment, one of a pair of ageing members of the intelligentsia in a long, happy marriage; has one child, a daughter who is artistic; is highly educated; and teaches creative writing. Earlier in this piece I’ve assumed that Hustvedt’s choice of intellectual heroine may well mean that Mia is a mouthpiece for her own views; but is this really the case? Simply creating the grounds for such speculation enables the author to bring the humanity and messiness as well as evil and nobility of human life into the novel, itself a feminist move.

At the same time it enables her to question why, in the twenty-first century, such views still need to be advanced in order to expose the extent of literary misogyny, promote female literary genius such as Jane Austen’s, and privilege the role of feeling in everyday life, whose denigration is one tactic of that very misogyny.

Mia’s views are not (perhaps) Hustvedt’s only line of attack against misogynistic lit crit. In her role as author, Hustvedt also frames this book as an indirect attack on the chick lit genre, and the way in which such categories marginalise and denigrate women’s writing. The plot has enough in common with a conventional chick lit plot to be mistaken for it on first picking the book up in a bookstore or library; and the book itself is a trenchant assertion of the primacy of both feeling and creativity if one is to live the good life, or indeed any kind of meaningful life at all (this applies to men too, as Boris discovers). The book further asserts that feeling and intellect are indissoluble, again attacking a cherished misogynistic distinction. Interestingly, the cover on the Australian edition has distinct echoes of chick lit covers.

But in the slippage between Mia and Hustvedt the book also mimics the sister genre of chick lit, the female misery memoir. This is perhaps a wry comment on the spate of confessional memoirs that now crowd bookstores. But it is also a very specific way for Hustvedt to privilege the role of feeling in the world, and the kind of inner life that was so important to the characters of master novelists such as Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen. Mia’s flight to insanity is framed as a temporary, necessary response to an impossible situation: ‘after thirty years of marriage pause was enough to turn me into a lunatic whose thoughts burst, ricocheted and careened into one another’.

In referencing chick lit, however subtly and indirectly, Hustvedt attacks the notion of a separate genre that in itself denigrates women, seeming to anticipate Naipaul’s recent masculinist attack on so-called sentimentality in novels (when he is, in fact, talking about feeling).

But I don’t want to represent this book as mainly concerned with semantic gender wars. In its economical prose The Summer without Men manages to be a trenchant examination of the inner lives of elderly women, a group who are stereotyped in modern culture if they appear at all, and when they do appear are depicted as if they have no inner lives; a sophisticated exploration of the problems of human evil as expressed in the herd behaviour of teenage girls; and a sympathetic portrayal of the ways in which gender politics and the economy affect the welfare of one young family (Mia’s neighbours) in contemporary America. It’s also a celebration of female being and becoming and the simple joys of everyday human life in a way that has echoes of radical feminist writings but goes beyond them to embrace both males and females as imperfect human beings who are, in fact, not so different.

Mia is not a particularly stern judge of human frailty. An important aspect of the book’s examination of sexual politics, literary and otherwise, is the love story between herself and Boris. The 30-year marriage the narrator looks back on is imbued with the imperfections of the quotidian. While Mia wants her husband to be faithful, she values his ability to love her over whether he will do his fair share of chores. In her attitude towards Boris, Mia is ultimately able to demonstrate what Hustvedt believes is too often missing from both modern life in general and masculinist commentary in particular: empathy.

By highlighting this book’s sexual politics and unconventional style I don’t want to give the impression that it’s anything but highly readable – The Summer without Men is engrossing, witty and sometimes caustically funny. Mia’s outraged, lively and embodied storytelling and her intellectual excursions produce wonderful opportunities for mordant humour. This is a book to savour.

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Polluters' Voices Dominate ETS Report

I tuned into 7.30 the other night. This current affairs show, which screens on the main ABC channel four nights a week, is a new incarnation of a popular and long-running current affairs program, The 7.30 Report. A recent change of anchor, from the widely respected but middle-of-the-road Kerry O'Brien to two younger ABC journalists, prompted a sweeping change in the show's branding and emphasis, and not for the better.

In recent years the news and current affairs section of the government-funded ABC, affectionately known as Aunty, has lost its way and devolved into little more than an offshoot of the Murdoch press, which controls 70 per cent of the Australian capital city press. This development came about because the previous conservative prime minister, John Howard, stacked the ABC board with right-wing culture warriors, and his communication ministers carried out a sustained campaign of attacks on its journalists for being left-wing (and supposedly biased against the Coalition government).

ABC news and current affairs now operates all too often as a mouthpiece for big business interests. A source with much valuable information on this development is The Failed Estate, an excellent blog on the dire state of the Australian media.

The departed anchor of The 7.30 Report, Kerry O'Brien, was regularly attacked by the conservative side of politics, but in fact his interviewing style had long fallen victim to the narrow mindset that the ABC had adopted. Yet in relation to the two new anchors, Leigh Sales and Chris Uhlmann, he was a raving leftie. These two are what I term 'functionaries' - journalists who appear to have no values besides those of 'gotcha' journalism but in fact work to further the values and interests of a corporate agenda in general and the Murdoch press in particular (such is the dominance of Murdoch in the Australian media that some commentators now refer to Australia as a 'Murdochracy', a term that has disturbing connotations of murdering democracy).

When I tuned into 7.30 last night, veteran Heather Ewart was reporting the main national political news of the day: that at a time when the federal Labor government is developing and selling to the public a carbon tax that will lead to an emissions trading scheme (ETS), a tax that the opposition is attacking at every turn, the Productivity Commission had just released a report finding that an ETS would be a cost-effective way to reduce carbon emissions, and noting that a number of jurisdictions had introduced such a scheme or were planning to. The report also found that direct subsidies of renewables, which is the Coalition's policy to reduce Australia's emissions, was expensive compared with an ETS.

Predictably, with the ABC obsessed with 'balance', we got footage of both Wayne Swan, the Treasurer, trumpeting the report, and opposition leader Tony Abbott (strategically visiting a coal mine) trashing it.  In terms of the minority parties and independents we heard nothing from the Greens, who have five members in the Senate and one in the lower house; instead, we had an approving voice from the independent MP Tony Windsor, stating his support for an ETS in light of the Productivity Commission's findings.

But what was most disturbing was that the sole non-government players given a voice were representatives of the big polluters, either directly or indirectly: Ralph Hillman from the Australian Coal Association and Alan Moran from the Institute of Public Affairs. This right-wing thinktank is funded by large corporations keen to see their interests pushed in the mainstream media, and pursues an extreme neoconservative free market agenda. As a research institution it has zero credibility, yet it was the sole non-government, non-industry voice in this report. Not surprisingly it canned the significance of the report's findings. Ralph Hillman from the Coal Association was similarly, predictably, negative.

In a  news report on a scheme that will see the beginnings of Australian action on the worst catastrophe the world has faced, on the nation's pre-eminent current affairs program, there were no comments from climate scientists, environment groups, or concerned citizens groups. Just parliamentary figures and the big polluters. It's no exaggeration to say that our democracy is under threat; but perhaps it's more accurate to say that it's already down the plughole.