In the novels of highly decorated Australian author Alex Miller, the discovery of a journal or letter will often spark an unexpected, life-affirming journey. The two-time Miles Franklin award winner is a master of capturing that pivotal moment, when the tides that push our lives here or there, change. New pathways open, new friendships form and the future transforms. Following a spate of nonfiction works – 2020’s Max, and 2017’s autobiographical The Passage of Love – Miller’s new novel A Brief Affair returns to some of the themes and characters we are familiar with from his well-known books such as The Ancestor Game or Journey to the Stone Country.
Miller’s heroine in A Brief Affair is Fran Egan, whose pursuit of a career in academia is turned upside down after one night of passion with a man she meets at an overseas conference. Vowing to keep this experience a secret from her husband and children, Fran grapples with a newfound perspective. She starts to question everything, particularly her role as a mid-level cog in the academic machine.
As if by fate, the caretaker of her building at the university gives Fran an old journal, from which she discovers that the campus was in fact once a mental hospital and Fran’s office was the room of a patient, Valerie, who had a burning passion for life and love. “It was difficult for her not to feel that her possession of it [the journal] made her responsible to its secrets … This feeling of being responsible was what her Irish mother said was a call.” Fran feels a deep resonance with Valerie’s words, and despite the demands of family and career she is surrounded by, contemplates making some changes.
While at once a detailed portrait – of Fran and the shift in trajectory of one woman’s state of mind in midlife – A Brief Affair often also resembles a rich landscape. As is always the case, Miller writes his characters with great tenderness and humanity. They have often suffered, in the past and present. Joseph, the elderly man who first gives Fran the journal, is a classic Miller character; an emigre from Poland, Joseph worked as a gardener at the mental hospital where Valerie was a patient. Here he falls in love with Elani, another patient of the hospital. Their love story, one marked by the great suffering of Elani, is woven into the fabric of A Brief Affair – though by the end I found myself wanting to hear more of Joseph and Elani’s story.
A family drama also ripples beneath the surface. Fran and her husband Tom are at a crossroads; since her affair, Tom can sense that something has changed for Fran, while their son, Tommy, has also noticed the difference. Fran believes her affair was sacred. It gives her a sense of ownership over her life, even if its existence would threaten the foundations of her relationship and tear apart her family: “I will never share my secret. My secret will give me the strength to endure. I will take it whole and perfect with me to my grave. I will never tell Tom. No one would ever really understand something like that about another person, except maybe Valerie, a woman like Valerie, a woman who understands the tragic poetry of our lives.”
Miller deftly weaves this domestic drama into his broader interest in the power of reading and writing. Fran comes to see how writing enabled Valerie to understand the adversity of her life: “I began to write after I became a patient in the nut house. It was then that I discovered that facts are not the only truth. Our own private truth is elusive and hides from us. It is the truth the poets seek.”
A belief in the value of writing is not a surprising thing to read coming from a novelist. For Miller’s character Valerie, writing is a kind of therapy, a tool to help her understand the past. For Fran, reading Valerie’s journal, immersed in the story of an other, words provide a better footing in the present and let her see a clearer road into the future.
Despite its slim size, A Brief Affair is a moving study of the value of both writing and reading. In many ways it is a distillation of all of Miller’s invaluable fiction.
A Brief Affair by Alex Miller is published by Allen & Unwin in Australia ($32.99)
