Joyful (Robert Hillman, Text)

At the beginning of Joyful, Tess, wife of the asexual Leon and lover of many men, dies. The reader then learns of their courtship, where Leon dresses Tess in glamorous clothes and falls in love with her (arguably, as an object). After Tess dies, Leon struggles to know his wife, believing she didn’t understand her own redemptive beauty and that she squandered it by living ‘her life through her vulva’. The reader thinks this will be a novel about this complicated character, Tess. Instead, another character is introduced: a Kurdish-Australian academic driven mad by the suicide of his daughter. His wife Daanya remains patient and faithful, despite the fact that he threatens to kill her. The reader also (in one of many irrelevant excesses in the narrative) becomes intimate with Daanya’s father’s view of her, including that she has become ‘plainer’ after having children. Women in this book are subhuman, existing as symbols, or to infuriate men with their desires. They unrealistically return, care and forgive. Along with this frustrating reductiveness, the formal prose and archaic dialogue (‘oh my dear fellow’) distances us from the mad, intellectual, ‘tasteful’ men, turning their potential ferocity into flatness. This is an uncharacteristically unengaging novel from a respected author.

Angela Meyer is a writer, reviewer and editor of The Great Unknown (Spineless Wonders)

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Category: Reviews