Melinda Harvey
Melinda Harvey is a Lecturer in English at Monash University and Director of the Centre for the Book. Her research interests include the borderland between academic and mainstream literary criticism, and especially the women writers who have worked within that space, such as Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Hardwick.
All essays by Melinda Harvey
She Thinks She Is The Boss: The Story of the Lost Child
It’s worth wondering why readers respond to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels the way they do. Which is to say that these four books haven’t just been read, enjoyed and praised: they have been devoured, adored, rhapsodised about, eagerly awaited – and now there will be no more of them, mourned. Well might we talk of ‘Ferrante Fever’, for there has hardened a core set of symptoms: neglect of responsibilities, reduced productivity, sleep disturbance, difficulty rising from a seated position. The condition is more common in women than in men but, curiously (well, at least for those people who believe that Jennifer Weiner’s ‘goldfinching’ theory holds merit), as common in critics as in readers.
Is this a novel? Speedboat & Pitch Dark by Renata Adler
Speedboat and Pitch Dark were sometimes not recognised as novels, or were seen to be new kinds of novels. Muriel Spark, reviewing Pitch Dark for the New York Times, went so far as to claim that its ‘discontinuous first-person narrative’ inaugurated ‘a genre unto itself’.