AustLit

'The subject of Ross Gibson’s novel The Summer Exercises (2008) is a past society of which the author allows his readers only glimpses. How might Gibson’s work provide inspiration or direction for the fiction writer concerned with representing the other? In his work, Gibson utilises disparate real and fictional elements to reveal traces of a society no longer accessible: the city of Sydney, Australia, circa 1946. An analysis of the text, as it is understood by a creative writer in search of models for her own project, contends that the manner in which Gibson interweaves the miscellany of his narrative produces a ‘crowded style’, a form that eschews a dominant voice and invites a range of interpretive possibilities. The reader is thus encouraged to defer drawing any definitive conclusion from the text. Gibson’s experimental form and its ability to create a sense of ambiguity in its reading thus provides a stellar example of how one writer’s choices have mobilised imaginative and sensitive possibilities for representing the other.' (Publication abstract)