The vessel of Robert Crofts: autobiographical fiction as a palimpsest

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Passage of Love by Alex Miller Jennifer Popa The vessel of Robert Crofts: autobiographical fiction as a palimpsest Alex Miller. The Passage of Love. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2017. 585 pp. n.p. ISBN 978-1-76029-734-3 The Passage of Love opens with first-person modern-day Robert Crofts, who at the end of his career as a writer is struggling to find the creative impulse for his next book. He visits a women's prison to give a talk and is captivated by a particular inmate who explains his previous work to him, saying, "I thought he was explaining himself to his mother as a way of explaining himself to himself" (12). This is an on-ramp [End Page 174] to what the bulk of the novel will grapple with: Robert Crofts telling himself his own story. The back cover situates this novel in the murkiest of territories with regard to genre: "The Passage of Love is Miller's own story brilliantly cast in the mould of fiction." Autofiction, or autobiographical fiction, resists landing squarely within fiction or nonfiction. It feels like a memoir but is delivered in the style of a novel; it has some degree of truth but is also not beholden to the truth in the way that nonfiction would demand. Just as essays often circle around a question, this book circles around the self-directed reflection of how Robert was molded into a writer. Which moments, however innocuous they might have seemed at the time, accumulated and shaped Robert's path? In this case, a first love, an almost-stranger's suggestion that he attend college, a gifted copy of Doctor Faustus, among others. The novel breathes like the memoir of a thoughtful writer who lets his audience glimpse behind the curtain, though it is hardly a glimpse, as the novel is a tome at almost six hundred pages. Miller is dissecting his life, taking stock, investigating the relationships he had with a few select women that ultimately informed the man he became. Though The Passage of Love is reminiscent of memoir, Miller employs such devices from the novelist's toolbox as switching point of view and compressing time. After two chapters with elder Robert, we jump back in time and are introduced to a young Robert, who at twenty-one has moved to Melbourne after a stint as a cowboy in Australia's north: "He had no money, no friends, no family and no connections in Melbourne. He had stopped drifting because he had run out of money and had also run out of Australia. He was at the bottom. There was no further down to go" (29). He takes up residence at a boarding house and begins the menial routine of his work and isolation. He meets an older, more experienced woman, Wendy, who encourages him to write, specifically the story of his Aboriginal friend and fellow stockman. When a fellow boarder reads Robert's first draft, he tells the latter to attend university. While these moments are significant, the real thrust of narrative momentum occurs when Robert the aspiring writer meets Lena, a middle-class girl who has grown weary of the bondage of her upbringing. There were places where the novel lagged and I wanted a bit more compression. The pacing at the beginning of the novel made it challenging to immerse myself. Fortunately, the bulk of the novel is spent examining the enigmatic relationship of Robert and Lena, one that is ripe for analysis—as they are seemingly unfulfilled yet cling to each other. The elder first-person Robert interjects periodically, disrupting the story of a young Robert Crofts. Miller's decision to jump between the distant third-person narrative and the first-person present-day voice of Robert Crofts feels more cumbersome under the guise of autofiction, which is to say that it draws attention to itself. Autofiction is a tricky form, one with an inherent tension for both writer and reader. The writer is fashioning a truth of course, but he is also somewhat off the hook as there is no required truth ratio or fact checking or accountability when the work is...