Dalla Rosa has been careful not to embarrass himself. I was surprised he even had an AustLit entry, despite failing to appear in the bloated back-catalogues of print periodicals or obscurely-monied short story competitions, not one weird poem on a glorified blog run by regional cat people.
Who is his agent? I would seethe, watching his bylines appear in Granta, The Paris Review, and, most recently, Forever, a magazine so cool I paid $100AUD for it to get lost in the mail. The reader has forgotten they exist as a being apart.īefore the publication of his first collection of short fiction, An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life, Paul Dalla Rosa enjoyed a remarkably slick career for a local short story writer. But if the writer knows what they’re doing, relatability doesn’t come into it. Particularity can be dangerous, even violent, so writers learn to be careful what they ask their readers to relate to. They let you in, and there’s plenty of room in their blousy descriptions for you to bring yourself and everything you already knew. In the first person, the speaker invites you to where they are, which is very generous of them. A popular template from the middlebrow almanac: name a place, throw in trees, quality of light, some vague cultural analysis, no real particulars. Too much specificity and you alienate your audience, who go from book to book looking for themselves. You have to meet your reader in the middle. Look at Dennis Cooper: even snuff is ‘tender’. Literary evil is thin on the ground these days all those charming pedophiles, sadists, murderers, crowded out by neurotics, malingerers, failed imposters. I retained none of the context, only the pull quote, and why wouldn’t I? What a seductive proposition – giving readers permission to banish the author, or at least the spectre of their moral character giving writers permission to write without thinking, first, always, what does this say about me?
It might have been that good writers are indifferent to evil. I read somewhere that good literature is indifferent to evil.
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