Peter Carey

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Review of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

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SOURCE: Coad, David. Review of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, by Peter Carey. World Literature Today 70, no. 3 (summer 1996): 757-58.

[In the following review, Coad notes the postmodern style of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and comments on Carey's decision to live in the United States as an expatriate writer.]

Peter Carey's fifth novel, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, won the 1994 Age Book of the Year Award in Australia. This is Carey's first novel to be totally written outside his native country, since he has been a resident of New York for over five years now. The title makes us think of the picaresque and the hero's eighteenth-century namesake, Tristram Shandy. Carey's Tristan, however, has been democratized to an anonymous Smith.

Billed as a postmodern tragicomedy, Tristan Smith certainly falls into the post-modern allegorical genre. There is a ludic, ironic dialogue with the past. The diegesis is at once strange and familiar. Carey invents a mythic time and setting in order to avoid a simplistic allegorical interpretation. The first half of the novel takes place in the Republic of Efica, an archipelago of islands, beginning in the year 426 EC—that is, “by the Efican Calendar.” The second section is situated in a continental Voorstand some years later. Defamiliarization distances the reader from Carey's imagined spatio-temporal world.

In an interview broadcast in Australia, Carey confides that his reading of Kafka's America, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Beauty and the Beast all influenced his new novel. He started with the idea of choosing for his hero a deformed character. This was confirmed when the author happened to see a grossly deformed young man in a wheelchair one day: “I couldn't bear to look at him yet I carried with me afterwards a vision, this bright, bright intelligence and this weird twisted up face.” Such a vision gave birth to Tristan Smith, referred to as a monster and a mutant in the novel. He is described as a “three foot six inches tall, bandy-legged, club-footed, rag-faced” cripple in a wheelchair. Carey's midget antihero is ugly (the author takes umbrage at the term grotesque), in the tradition of Günter Grass's tin drummer, Oskar Matzerath.

Carey's expatriation has a lot to do with his new novel. Efica and Voorstand, the two locales of The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, obviously have some relation to Australia and America. Carey's preoccupations are typical of the postcolonial debate. In the same interview he reveals: “I wanted to deal with [the idea of America] and the notion of the centre and the periphery.” Efica seems to be based on a remembered, mythic, colonial Australia, whereas Voorstand is a mélange of historical colonizers—South Africa mixed with a phantasmagoric Disneyland. Carey's novel is about national identity viewed from the outside and the periphery. On page 117 we read: “No one can even tell me what an Efican national identity might be. We're northern hemisphere people who have been abandoned in the south. All we know is that we're not.”

This quest for identity is carried out on a personal level. The deformed mutant, Tristan, believes that he can be transformed through art and theater. He leaves his native Efica in order to become part of the glamorous entertainment culture of a fictionalized America seen by Carey in terms of metaphor. Such has been the fate of Carey himself.

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