Driscoll’s style is keenly observational and cool, a kind of lucid detachment with a whiff of the ponderous (‘I thought’ appears forty times in eighty pages, once three times in five sentences). In places, this can come across as a stretch towards profundity which doesn’t quite do justice to the scenes, for example when he writes, ‘I thought to myself that the dream had felt like silt,’ without giving the readers any of that grainy affect when describing the dream. We are left hungry for a little more specificity, as in the next line where he writes: ‘There seemed to be something incredibly sad, I thought, about the whiteness of the house, the way the sun would light up its big triangular face.’ Again, ‘I thought’ drags the sentence unnecessarily, yet the sentence is otherwise both efficient and smoothly evocative – I can almost see the stark blue sky behind the house, feel the affection and nostalgia nestled behind its ‘big triangular face’.
Elsewhere, the specificity can feel strained, perhaps striving for a Lydia Davis-esque balance of brevity, wit and weight, but not quite achieving it. In one scene, Driscoll describes watching someone in a car and notes, ‘With the angle, the top half of his head was obscured, though I could see his mouth was moving. Oh, I thought to myself, he’s talking.’ The lines build, a movement toward something that the realisation ‘he’s talking’ cannot meet. In turns such as this, the reader might wish for fewer words, less exactitude, a quicker pace. Even so, this might also be my favourite ‘I thought’ in the collection – to think the exclamation ‘oh’ to yourself is utterly ridiculous, and also – at least if your brain works like mine – perfectly believable.
It is moments like these, moments that blend particularity and recognition, where Driscoll is at his strongest, as when, for example, he describes his neighbour coming to his apartment to take some books:
This was the first time this neighbour had ever been in our apartment, despite having lived above us for several years, and I was surprised and a little disappointed that she hadn’t been at all curious to see beyond our kitchen.
He is especially good in scenes in which he describes a subtle yearning, a familiar desire for connection and then the sharp click of its opposite, for example when he describes wheeling a table down the road:
I felt gently and pleasantly elated moving the table, and when I passed a woman pushing two children in a pram in the other direction, it felt as though we ought to acknowledge each other. The woman, however, looked away.
Driscoll’s talent lies in his ability to capture instances like these and in doing so, to transform our estrangement into connection, to hit on an experience just so, and to leave it exactly where it needs to be, to let the puncture of its enunciation do all the work required.
Yet despite Driscoll’s attention to detail, he refuses to give the book any specific geography. Places remain nameless, as ‘in our old house in the north-east of this country’ or ‘an island south of this city’ or ‘a large city to the north of here’ or ‘by a dry creek bed on the edge of a largely emptied-out inland town with a disused tin mine’ or ‘this city’. New York and Paris, LA, Tokyo and Manila appear as points on a web whose centre is empty, so-called Australia left devoid of its geography and the historical and political context of that geography. It is, of course, a kind of disconnection to land that settlers can easily nurture into beauty, but there is a violence in that beauty, an erasure.
Elsewhere, histories are rendered opaque: some writers and artists do not earn their names written into the pages and some names mentioned are allowed to sit without their baggage: Gauguin clean of his racism and paedophilia, Pollock of his abusive misogyny, Handke of his genocide denialism. This is not to say that you cannot talk about these men without talking about what they have done, or that you cannot talk about so-called Australia without talking about the land you are on, but it is to say that some people can do this more easily than others.
Driscoll is not unaware of the privilege that allows him this book, nor the ways in which his lack of constraints constrains it. In an aside on architecture, he writes about Kengo Kuma’s work on Rudolph Schindler, an architect whose work, Kuma writes, was made possible by the mild, undemanding LA climate and by all its space. White Clouds, Blue Rain is a work similarly made possible by the relative freedom and bounty of Driscoll’s life. But, as Kuma writes, without external pressure, Schindler’s designs became safe; he was capable (in Kuma’s words) only of ‘endlessly reproducing the commonplace as commonplace’. Driscoll knows this to apply to all art but believes that eradication or escape from ‘the pressures that add and force complication, is likely to be temporary’. Which is, of course, true, but does not account for the fact that what is commonplace for some is not commonplace for others and that not all pressures are created equal. Many of them – racism, ableism, poverty, homophobia and transphobia, sexism, for example – are not so easy to escape, temporarily or otherwise, and can be so crushing as to preclude the possibility of art, temporarily or otherwise. ‘Any liberation,’ Driscoll writes in closing this paragraph, ‘may well swing us right back to the commonplace.’ Perhaps for some. For others, the question of liberation is much more than aesthetic.
Whether or not ‘liberation’ per se has swung Driscoll towards the commonplace, he is immersed in it and immerses his readers in turn. But in reproducing this particular commonplace, over and over, Driscoll does not allow it to become stale or tedious. He is not reproducing his commonplace as commonplace, he is reproducing it under new light, as something enlivened from within, something which unfolds in multiple directions at once and which is both small and close and, potentially, endlessly unspooling.
