Publishers Weekly
02/07/2022
De Kretser’s dark, subtle latest (after the critical study On Shirley Hazzard) offers two vastly different perspectives of immigrants’ experiences in Australia and France. Lyle is a mid-level bureaucrat in near future Australia, coping with an erratic family and fears of deportation. Lili, a young woman who emigrated to Australia from South Asia as a teenager, moves to Paris in the mid-1980s with dreams of living as a “Bold, Intelligent Woman” like her idol, Simone de Beauvoir. Their parallel first-person narratives are not interwoven but presented as two separate stories in a reversible book. While teaching in the south of France, Lili falls in with a hedonistic young woman named Minna, who smokes and introduces her to the cinematheque. By contrast, dutiful family man Lyle fears the subtly growing totalitarianism of Australia, showcased by a ban on practicing Islam and a crematoria boom fueled by rising euthanasia (which perpetually dispels noxious smoke over Melbourne), but he is careful to suppress these fears. He has enough to worry about with the extravagances of his wife, Chanel; his elderly mother, Ivy; and two impulsive adult children. Much of the power comes from the matter-of-fact voices of the two protagonists, making for a disturbing and entirely believable depiction of social upheaval and repression, respectively. The sum leaves readers with a stirring look at the eerie links between past and present. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize
Longlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize (UK)
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Year
A NYLON Most Anticipated Book of the Year
"What seem on the face to be two very different stories, but whose power lies in the imaginative work the reader has to do to link them, to find clues to the future in the past. It's a brilliant use of negative space, and contributes to the lasting power of this fine and stereoscopic contemplation of the migrant experience." —Alex Preston, The New York Times Book Review
"I read Scary Monsters months ago and can't stop thinking about it. This is a bold, unsettling and beautifully written work." —Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven
"Michelle de Kretser's brilliant split-form past-and-present dual narrative, Scary Monsters . . . about perilous times and societal and institutional forms of exclusion, what it does to the human spirit, and how that pressure reforms us." —Ali Smith, The Guardian
"Dual narrative looks at the racism and terrifying experiences into which the 'outsider' is thrown . . . What lingers in the mind . . . are the connections she makes between past prejudices and a future society devoid of values or compassion." —Lucy Popescu, The Financial Times (UK)
"Magnificent . . . A carefully constructed pattern of thematic echoes . . . . [both] stories are filled with unexpected details, apt quick literary brushstrokes and the gleam of humor . . . Terrific." —Sam Leith, The Daily Telegraph
"The tales are engrossing . . . It’s a powerful portrait of feeling adrift in a hostile environment, suffused with stabs of beautiful description." —Siobhan Murphy, The Times
"Language is not benign in Scary Monsters. It is the sanitization of language that enables this society to enact violence on its most vulnerable. The sweep of de Kretser's critique here includes us all." —Gretchen Shrim, The Australian
"In yet another masterful work, de Kretser has pulled out her recipe book and remixed her ingredients into a strong, hallucinatory brew that might make us taste fear and anger before it’s too late.” —Susan Wyndham, Sydney Morning Herald
"De Kretser [is] one of our most acute chroniclers of migrant experience, and a savage critic of white Australian complacency." —Geordie Williamson, The Saturday Paper
"Ruminative and sly rather than preachy, this novel about complacency and compromise packs a stealthy bite." —Slate, 1 of the 10 Best Books of the Year
"The range and verbal pleasures of de Kretser’s considerable gifts are compelling . . . What unfolds, rife with dark irony worthy of George Saunders, is as banal as it is horrific. De Kretser is a wonderful writer, and woefully underrated in this country. Though her skewering satire is pointed and painful, her gallows humor keeps the reader smiling." —Claire Messud, Harper's
"Scary Monsters is a provocative and exhilarating game of snakes and ladders." —Fiona Gruber, The Times Literary Supplement
"Scary Monsters will resonate most with humans who enjoy a well-told-tale, especially post-modern feminists with a penchant for literary intertextuality." —Nanci Nott, ArtsHub
"To read Michelle de Kretser's fiction is to sense important details swimming under the surface of our awareness . . . For readers of this novel, the implicit task is to make a seemingly fractured story whole, to locate or construct points of connection between parallel worlds, to warm the pages with our close and imaginative engagement. There is an implied moral dimension to this challenge, but the ultimate result is our readerly delight." —Shannon Burns, Australian Book Review
"De Kretser's cutting wit and dexterous ability to dismantle Australia's rose-tinted idea of itself makes this an inventive, satirical and confronting exploration of the migrant experience. Scary Monsters is sure to hold strong appeal for literary fiction readers." —Carody Culver, Books + Publishing
"Wrenchingly poignant, brilliantly biting, de Kretser provides an indelible, ageless examination of the migrant experience." —Booklist (starred review)
"De Kretser, one of our most deeply intelligent writers, offers a book that is wry and heartbreaking, playful and profound." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A disturbing and entirely believable depiction of social upheaval and repression . . . A stirring look at the eerie links between past and present." —Publishers Weekly
"In Scary Monsters de Kretser addresses the weightiest of subjects with the lightest and deftest of touches, and the result is funny, playful, painful, angry, and, above all, ferociously smart. It's a dazzling novel, by a hugely talented author." —Sarah Waters
"Scary Monsters is a novel of luminous intelligence and profound depth, written with verve, humor, and exceptional elegance." —Monica Ali
"Scary Monsters is a marvel. Each of the two very different parts of the novel had me totally riveted, intensely absorbed, wowed by de Kretser's scathing accuracy––whether she's chronicling youth's delights and distortions or a future where prosperity is the new 'unethics.' It's a wildly remarkable book that unfolds like no other." —Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness and Improvement
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-03-02
A reversible novel tells the stories of two Asian immigrants to Australia, one 40 years in the past and one in the future.
It’s the early 1980s, and 22-year-old Lili’s ambitions are grand: She wants to be a cross between Debbie Harry and Simone de Beauvoir. To that end, she leaves Australia—where she had moved with her parents as a teenager—and accepts a post teaching English in southern France. It’s the era of the Yorkshire Ripper, and Lili sees shadows everywhere she goes. But the real monsters are the larger forces that threaten her existence as a brown-skinned woman: racism and sexism. When Lili’s story concludes, at the end of her eye-opening time in Europe, de Kretser’s inventive book begins again: The novel can be flipped upside down and reversed to tell the story of Lyle, who lives in a future just a bit darker than our present. (To say that the book starts with Lili’s story, though, is an arbitrary matter of a reader’s personal sense of chronology. Since there are two covers and two sets of frontmatter, a reader could equally begin with Lyle and travel back in time to read Lili’s story.) Justifications for this format are clear in both novels: “When my family emigrated,” confesses Lili, “it felt as if we’d been stood on our heads.” Lyle, who believes that he must jettison his past in order to fit in with the “Australian values” of corporate drudgery and a whopping mortgage, echoes Lili’s sentiment: “Immigration breaks people. We try to reconstitute ourselves in our new countries, but pieces of us have disappeared.” Only Lyle’s elderly mother, who lives with the family, reminds him that there is another way to live.
De Kretser, one of our most deeply intelligent writers, offers a book that is wry and heartbreaking, playful and profound.
