I don't know how to review this book, because nothing about it should work and yet everything does. This reads more like memoir than a novel, but the strong insistence that it is a novel also forces the question of what narrative is, what writers try to achieve, and how life and work intersect. It reminded me incessantly of Monkey Grip - possibly because it is set in a in the same city in similar eras (well a decade or so) - but likely because both inhabit this similar uncertain netherworld in which art is made out of truth, or maybe truth is made out of life, in a way that examines the intersection between social constraint and self.  De Kretser's work has always felt carefully constructed to me, but Theory and Practice did not (although it clearly was). Rather it feels unleashed, like this was just waiting to be written, even as it resonates, puns and circles back on itself in clever ways. And even as it explicitly toys with how our theories and our practice shape each other. Our protagonist grapples with her love for Woolf and her growing exposure to Woolf's racism and antisemitism, just as she hits the Melbourne theory-intensive English literature scene, and just as she jealously fixates on her lover's girlfriend while writing feminism. We see how theory can be a refuge, but also a deception, an avoidance and a hypocrisy.  A way of not-seeing or refusing to look. The work also chronicles the way that things which feel eternal in your 20s change, like everything else, like you, in fact.
It has been almost two weeks since I read this that I am reviewing, and my thoughts about this book still feel more whirled than settled. I did love reading it though, and tore through it, which feels worth recording. I also want very much to say that I thought she was very kind to St Kilda, a suburb with great pubs but a lousy beach, but this is not at all relevant to anyone else's enjoyment of the work.