Susan Lever’s David Foster: The Satirist of Australia was shortlisted this month for the Walter McRae Russell Award (the best work of literary scholarship on an Australian subject); deserved recognition for this first major critical study of David Foster's fiction.

David Foster: The Satirist of Australia provides an engaging portrait of Foster and an insightful guide to his strangely neglected writing. As Lever notes:

Despite the originality and importance of his fiction, Foster’s
writing is relatively unknown beyond Australia, and in Australia
not much beyond a group of loyal readers (2).

Foster’s publications include twelve novels, three collections of novellas and short stories, two books of poetry, and a collection of essays, with several produced radio plays. His first novel, The Pure Land (1974), shared the first Age Book of the Year award (with volume three of Manning Clark’s A History of Australia) in 1975. Moonlite (1981) was the National Book Council Book of the Year for 1981. The Glade Within the Grove (1996) won the Miles Franklin award in 1997 and In the New Country (1999) was the inaugural Brisbane Courier-Mail Book of the Year in 1999.

Born in 1944, Foster is often grouped with writers such as Thea Astley, Peter Carey, Helen Garner, David Ireland, Elizabeth Jolley and David Malouf. Foster, however, has not achieved the local or international popularity of any of these authors. Lever concedes that ‘a degree of critical neglect’ may have contributed to Foster’s lack of fame, but suggests difficulties in reading his work are more likely:

he is a satirist; his writing sets itself deliberately against the favourite beliefs of the educated readers who are most likely to read it. His work is opinionated, misanthropic, obsessive and sometimes tedious (2)

Foster is also a modernist, pursuing linguistic experimentand ‘convinced that writing remains, at least partly, an improvisatory performance’ (2), and his tendency to be ‘a novelist of ideas rather than character’(2) is likely to discourage many contemporary readers. As Lever observes, however, ‘the qualities that make Foster difficult are, of course, also those that make his books rewarding to read’ (3).

Foster has also been prickly in his dealings with the public and press, and critical of the reading public and awards processes. He notoriously commented that it was “about time” when presented with the Miles Franklin in 1997. More recently, he has been vocal on ‘the decline in cultural literacy among the reading public and the mindless pursuit of easy profits by publishers’ (xi) (although he is not alone in that opinion). Foster’s deliberate attempts to “offend and discomfort” (xi) – in his writing and his public interactions – have not helped his popularity, nor have they gained him the notoriety of some of his satirist counterparts.

David Foster: The Satirist of Australia is a critical work rather than a literary biography. Lever provides a brief biography of Foster's early life and a discussion of his approach to satire to set the scene, before chronologically examining each of his works in detail.

This provides a narrative structure for the book and allows readers to understand some of the relationships between and among Foster’s novels. In proceeding in this way, I do not mean to suggest a simple progressive movement of Foster’s art alongside his life, nor do I wish to present the novels as merely a function of his personality. But the idea of satire as a performance in which the author’s satirical persona ‘inhabits’ the text suggests that the living place of the satirist needs to be acknowledged in discussion of his work (33).

The book also draws on Foster's letters to Geoffrey Dutton early in his career, as well as his interviews and articles. Lever charts the development of Foster's philosophical ideas and technique as a novelist over the 35 years of his writing life and is particularly successful in establishing the significance of Foster’s work within an Australian context. Foster read Lever’s manuscript, and his comments appear, italicised, within the text.

As Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and editor of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL), Lever has made significant contributions to Australian literary criticism and literary biography, and maintained a long-term critical interest in Foster. Her previous publications include: Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction; Henry Handel Richardson: The Getting of Wisdom, stories, selected prose and correspondence; A Question of Commitment: Australian literature in the Twenty Years after the War; ‘Fiction: Innovation and Ideology’ in The Oxford Literary History of Australia; and entries on Thea Astley, Martin Boyd, David Foster, Helen Garner, Henry Handel Richardson and Mary Theresa Vidal for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Selina Samuels.

I was fortunate enough to be taught by Lever, at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) campus of the UNSW in the late 1990s, where I first encountered Foster on the syllabus. Lever was, I’m sure, profoundly disappointed with our class’s response to The Glade Within the Grove. As Lever notes, ‘Foster’s novels present significant challenges, even to tertiary students’ (203). I loved the descriptions of the forests, the references to ancient history, and the idea of the commune turned cult, but was frustrated by the lack of narrative drive. While open to Foster’s contradictions and irritations – as she is throughout this book – I felt Lever’s need for us to see the quality of his work, and its strengths.

More interesting to me at the time were Foster’s papers: notebooks and jottings we were able to examine in white-gloved reverence in the ADFA library; my first insight into the private workings behind a published novel. It was perversely satisfying, too, and perhaps in keeping with Foster’s many contradictions, that the materials of this anti-military, anti-establishment author had been acquired, albeit indirectly, via the Defence budget. Lever has had the benefit of accessing these papers in the process of researching this book, a valuable resource for biographers and researchers, particularly in this increasingly digital age. Notebooks, drawings and handwritten drafts may be less likely to be used, kept and acquired from contemporary authors.

David Foster: The Satirist of Australia is a guide to understanding and enjoying Foster’s works. The section on The Glade Within the Grove (1996) is one of the book’s finest. Rereading The Glade ten years later, as part of a research project on ‘wild writing’, and in conjunction with Lever’s book, I was struck by Foster’s environmental concerns; his vision of us a citizens of ‘a dying world’ (140), having lost our spiritual connection with nature. These concerns are not new, of course, but with current anxieties about climate change, and renewed interest in sustainability and alternate lifestyles, it is humbling to see similar concerns expressed by the previous generation. Foster’s is a complicated viewpoint, influenced by his scientific background, philosophy on spirituality and religion, and his experiences living a self-sufficient lifestyle on a property near Bundanoon, in the Southern Highlands, since 1975. As Lever notes, ‘Foster has lived out some of the hippie ideals of this generation and knows first hand the paradoxes of back-to-nature theories’ (146).

Foster’s fiction explores what it means to be Australian; offering ‘grand and sweeping visions of the state of Australia and its place in the world’ (1). As Lever argues, Foster’s novels ‘deserve to be read alongside the finest work of Patrick White, Xavier Herbert, and Joseph Furphy’ (1). Her book successfully demonstrates the significance of Foster’s contribution to Australian literature, and, as Andrew Riemer’s foreword anticipates, it may ‘rekindle interest in this most individual and challenging of our contemporaries, Patrick White’s worthy successor’ (xiii). This book goes a long way toward redressing the critical neglect of Foster’s fiction, and should spark further discussion and research.

Hopefully, the award nomination will result in the book becoming more widely available in Australia. David Foster: The Satirist of Australia was published by Cambria Press, an American independent academic publisher, and doesn’t yet have an Australian distributor. You can ask your local bookstore to order it in for you or check your national/state/university library collection. Sample chapters are available on Cambria’s website: http://www.cambriapress.com

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