A Brief Affair by Alex Miller
Alex Miller’s website has a section about writing. There he states: ‘The serious novel is an act of imaginative truth and requires the writer to confront unclear aspects of the self; to delve, in other words, into the unconscious and awaken repressed emotions and memories.’ Keep these thoughts in mind when you read his latest novel, A Brief Affair, because this is a story that revels in the hidden self. Sure, it is a love story as the title suggests, but this is an Alex Miller novel, so you already know to expect more than a traditional approach. This novel is an examination of how contentment, happiness even, is realised and at what cost.
The story centres on Dr Frances Egan, an academic living comfortably in country Victoria with her young family and husband. On a work trip to China, she experiences herself as another person – one without familial expectations – and this allows herself to be that free self for one perfect, glorious night. The story uses that evening as the catalyst for change, but the driving incentive is really the discovery of a diary at Frances’ workplace of the old Sunbury Asylum, which is now part of the university. A Brief Affair is the story of who Frances Egan can be if she allows herself to be truly honest.
Miller is one of our greatest storytellers. Each of his novels shares a steadiness of voice but feels completely unique. You know you are reading an Alex Miller novel because he does not shy away from intimate details, nor broad strokes of observation and humour. Yet always at the very centre is a storyteller looking for the answers to the human condition. Miller holds up our follies and archetypes to consider how they react in different lights, and A Brief Affair is his compassionate way of exposing us all.
