AustLit

'I don’t want to start with Larkin because Josephine Rowe’s debut novel, “A Loving, Faithful Animal,” makes an ocean from his aphorism. Even if Larkin’s declaration remains stubbornly true — that old, known poem of how our mum and dad mess us up — Rowe’s book, a slim beauty, does so much to complicate this idea, in such a small space, that I found myself considering those rare things only books can do, feats outside the purview of film or fine art. Imagine Rowe taking a page of blank paper — call it linear time — and crumpling the page into a ball. Nineteen-sixty-seven is flush against 1990. This crumpling, collapsing of Chronos is what it means to have a memory that’s associative and wild, or a family that might be equally uncontrollable.' (Introduction)