AustLit

'In Luke Carman’s 2013 debut, An Elegant Young Man, the Kerouac-revering narrator from Western Sydney had his wayward literary influences corrected by a university education, and went running back to ‘beat, beat, beat’ on the doors of his old friends to apprise them of the fact ‘that Australia is not the place for ecstatic truth’. As the coy repetition suggests, the evangelistic about-turn was an ironic one: Carman had no interest in preserving the sanctity of an ‘Australian’ voice, dramatising instead the volatile swing of the cringe between reverent imitation and a parochial insistence on the local. That ‘the cringe’ was just the kind of ‘missile’ which a certain kind of ‘Australian Intellectual … delights to toss at the Australian mob’ was something A.A. Phillips foresaw when he coined the term. Charting the travails of his auto-fictive narrator as he ventured from Western Sydney into more cosmopolitan circles – the humiliating missteps and wild over-corrections, the paroxysms of devotion followed by renunciation – and implicating him, belatedly, in the relay of condescension, Carman put the lie to those of us who’d act as though we’d sprung, wise as Athena, from the side of Zeus’ head fully-formed. '  (Introduction)