Oliver Darling,a “queer country artist”,built his artistic career from a mix of luck,a degree of talent,and manufactured authenticity. He spends more time “talking about himself and fielding questions about art he produced a long time ago” than actually getting around to the canvas.
He’s no Hurtle Duffield,protagonist of Patrick White’sThe Vivisector,who scorns the wealth and fame associated with his artistic success. On the contrary,everything Darling does career-wise is about commodifying his artworks to sustain a life of debauchery and leisure. His performative charisma,wooing of Australia’s rich collectors,invention of narratives about life and art that complement the politics of the day — he’s a chameleon.
Liam Pieper’s novel satirises the life of a narcissist.Matt Collins
Art,in Liam Pieper’sAppreciation,is not a romantic arrest of the sublime. It is forever tied to market forces. “The value of a painting is whatever someone is willing to pay for it,” writes Pieper. You can imagine Andy Warhol nodding in his grave.
In this chronicle of a narcissist,Darling’s cruisy life nosedives after a botched appearance on live telly. After a few too many nose beers,Darling,usually full of gruff machismo and enfant-terrible provocations,blunders by insulting the Anzacs and casting himself as a “pilgrim entering a sacred heartland” when recounting a week-long tour of Indigenous communities. There’s some guff about toxic masculinity in there too,ostensibly the subject of his forthcoming exhibition.
It’s all not very PC. None of it has much to do with art. Overnight,the internet becomes a pandemonium of cancelling and denunciation and Darling,whose favourite pastime is Googling himself,experiences a crisis of identity. He is now more terrible than enfant.
On the brink of being cancelled,Darling’s agent Anton devises a scheme for redemption. Anton enlists a ghostwriter to help Darling compose a memoir because there’s always the “possibility that the media attention that Oli’s cancellation has attracted could translate into a bestseller”. What do they say about any publicity?
From there,Darling embarks on a series of misadventures that confirmAppreciation’s satiric impetus. We forgive the improbability of escalation after escalation that moves the plot forward because it’s,well,fun. An all-night bender ends with someone bringing terrible news,a haunted past resonates into the present,a single plot challenges the foundation of Darling’s ego.
As he slinks like a dog in the bad books back to Australia’s high society,we realise that he is an opportunist whose inflated sense of importance derives from a nefarious plot established by his trusted agent Anton.
We can’t ignore the gender aspects of this form. Neither does Pieper. Irony is his carapace. In the first chapter,Pieper encapsulates Darling’s antihero journey:“Redemption;man trying to climb out of a pit;Icarus,in which a man (always a man) flies too close to the sun. There’s Cinderella — a fall and then a rise — and classical tragedy:a rise followed by the inevitable fall.”
This is a way for Pieper to acknowledge the literary precedents for the satirical novels of hideous men who simultaneously despise and crave validation from their respective societies:Patrick Bateman inAmerican Psycho,John Self inMoney,Bruce Robertson inFilth. These masters of their own universes are Oliver Darling’s brethren.
But why doesAppreciation leave a lasting impression? First,because it never forgets the power of entertaining the reader. It is more playful and ludic than Pieper’s earlier novels,The Toymaker andSweetness and Light. It’s less “earnest” (a sensibility Oli Darling rallies against in the novel,which may be an ironic jab at Australian literary tastes more broadly). But it also gestures towards a relative dearth of Australian satirical novels in the contemporary scene.
Although Pieper’sAppreciation imports certain qualities from American and British traditions of satire,it gives the impression of something new and energised when gazing upon Australia. Back in 2015,Sam Twyford-Moore published an article calledWhy so serious,in which he bemoaned the solemnity of much of Australian writing. Has anything changed since then?
Satire,my most beloved genre of novels,is alive and well offshore — I’m thinking specifically of the Americans,such as Percival Everett,Jennifer Egan,Joshua Cohen,George Saunders. We have,on a commercial and critical scale,maybe Steve Toltz,who has always seemed to me more comedian than satirist. So where are our satires for the public imagination? Pieper’s novel is a step in that direction.
Liam Pieper is a guest at Sorrento Writers Festival () and Melbourne Writers Festival ().
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