‘Written as a monologue, Jen Craig’s Wall is a masterful display of narrative control. The narrator describes returning to Sydney from England on the occasion of her father’s death. As she sorts through the mountain of junk crammed into his house, she has an idea for an art installation that will display these quotidian remnants of his existence.
Rendered in long, fluent, perfectly controlled sentences, the novel moves seamlessly between present and past, at times approaching a stream of consciousness, as the narrator reflects on her father’s death, her battles with anorexia, her troubled time as a young art student and her subsequent artistic career. Her ambitious art project becomes analogous to the novel itself. In transforming the material remnants of her father’s life into an installation, the narrator is attempting to understand her own.