On this Lit Show, Cate Kennedy discusses her novel The World Beneath.
Air date: Wednesday, September 14th.
The World Beneath explores the gaps between who we are and who we think we are. Rich produces cheesy infomercials for thigh exercisers and veggies shredders, but pretends to others that he’s a bold-faced name in the glamorous world of TV. Long ago, he left his wife Sandy, and their newborn daughter—and Sandy, over time, has clung to her youth with the tenacity of a Havisham. She’s in her late 40s, but she still wears flowy 70-style skirts, makes hippie jewelry and smokes bedtime joints. Sandy and Rich were once environmental activists who helped save a swath of pristine Tasmanian land from development—their memory of holding hands while the bulldozers beared down is their antidote to the encroaching banality of middle-age.
As the novel opens, Rich has never met his daughter Sophie, who’s now fifteen—so the two of them agree to spend ten days in Tasmania together, on a wilderness venture. As the they retreat farther and farther from civilization, and as Sandy is freed from parenting for the first time—the old narratives fall away like husks, and the characters fight to learn who they’ve become.
Cate Kennedy is also the author of the acclaimed story collection Dark Roots. She’s one of the most respected practitioners of the short form in Australia, where she lives, and her fiction has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker. Her latest book is The Taste of River Water: New and Selected Poems by Cate Kennedy.
