AustLit

'A week ago, this review had a different beginning. The first sentence was ‘Let’s begin with bridges’. And we’ll get to the bridges. But as I’m writing, at the end of a long day with my kids at home, I hear Leigh Sales giving kindness a plug on the 7:30 Report. I’ve already muted a Facebook Group called The Kindness Pandemic. A lot of the stories being told on The Kindness Pandemic were hopeful and heart-warming. But small acts of kindness just aren’t doing it for me.'  (Introduction)

'The death of an author can be an awkward subject for critics. Death calls for empathy, goodwill (however retrospective), and mourning. The genres appropriate to it – elegy, eulogy, obituary – tend to be ones that burnish the subjective. Faults may be mentioned but only as part of a wholistic appraisal of a life whose worth is ultimately affirmed. This sits in tension with criticism’s objective register and the open-ended nature of interpretation and judgement. Affirmation can come across as sentimental, objective appraisal as heartless or ‘too soon’. Perhaps death is a moment when critics ought to keep their thoughts to themselves.' (Introduction)

'I am sitting in a café in North Melbourne adjacent to the hospital. It’s filled with older people anticipating or denying or recovering from the usual bodily attrition, sporty-looking medical staff with lanyards drinking long blacks, and people on break from day-programs in street clothes trying to blend in. These are people with enough money to sit in a café and eat something and to dawdle while doing it, not worried about = being asked to leave. A very limited inner-city melting pot, in other words, of which I, on my laptop typing this essay, am a part.' (Introduction)