Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings Debut Spotlight feature. For September that debut is The Degenerates by Raeden Richardson (Text Publishing). Following the interwoven lives of four characters across India, Australia and the United States, the novel takes root in Melbourne and brings its streets, shopping centres and laneways to life with astounding originality—the city may never be the same again.
Can you tell us about your journey to publication?
I’d been working on the novel for about five years before my agent and I sent it out to different publishing companies. When we saw the responses from different teams and had conversations with different editors, it became apparent pretty quickly that the team at Text, led by Penny, were going to be a great home. Mainly because they were able to bring life to the book in a way that I didn’t think possible, having toiled away at it for so long on my own. We worked on it for about a year, a little bit longer, and brought it into the world this September.
It does feel sometimes in publishing that things move tremendously slowly. Then all of a sudden, they move really quickly. So you go through this period of time where it feels like you’re trudging through molasses and then suddenly the wind’s at your back. It’s been really important for me to figure out ways to continue to have a depth of practice, care and excitement around writing and reading, in spite of those great periods of silence and those periods of excitement.
Setting plays a big part in this novel. How do you create such an immersive experience for the reader?
In constructing the different scenes of this book that are set in different cities, from Mumbai to New York or Melbourne, it was really important for me to walk the streets that every character walks with a notepad. I found myself on Dalal Street doing some research into the stock exchange down in the Fort area of Mumbai, running up Chrystie Street towards different nightclubs [in New York], taking notes as specifically as possible. Over time I realised what I was doing was counterbalancing the grand and mythic with the tremendously concrete and specific. Which is what I think makes for an immersive experience when you read a book—you’re bringing to it your own narratives around a place, and yet the place is being built from the ground up by the characters and what they’re observing. It’s this temporal space between the mythic and specific which I think makes for interesting and compelling settings as they play out in fiction.
As an experienced short story writer, what made you decide to complete a novel-length work, and do you find that your writing practice differs between the two forms?
I’m not exactly sure if there was a specific moment where I thought that I had to write a novel, but I did begin to feel that as I was working on different stories—they felt contained and careful in a way that a novel doesn’t allow you to feel. Writing short stories felt like they were bookended in some ways by the form and the relatively miniature scale of them, of working on one for a few months or maybe a year. Whereas working on a novel requires a kind of reorienting of your life—from your writing routines, to how you begin to see the world. There’s a kind of abandon that comes with that.
A lot of my experience of writing these contained, smaller works felt like I was learning to swim by swimming in a pool and I had lanes and a certain boundary, and I could do laps and appreciate it. Then transitioning to writing a novel was like swimming in the ocean. This was beautiful, vast and terrifying and there was always the possibility that you might swim too far, which you never really feel in a pool. I think many novelists that I know adore that feeling of abandon and the possibility that you might disappear.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve received in your writing career so far?
I don’t exactly think of having a writing career, so much as trying to cultivate a writing life. Which has its own set of problems and considerations when trying to build a set of priorities. I can’t always align with convention, ease and security. But I remember a conversation with a friend in graduate school where we spoke about the value of equanimity and both of us having experiences of arriving at the desk one morning and finding our work to be so exciting, alive, fresh and compelling. Then arriving at the desk at exactly the same time, exactly the same space the next day—to the same page—and thinking that everything we’d written was terrible and a waste. Trying to develop a certain level of poise and almost a non-attachment—to feel these feelings of doubt and joy and continue working in spite of them—I think is the most important thing.
What books have you loved lately and what’s on your TBR pile?
I recently picked up The Golden Ass by Apuleius which is described as one of the earliest novels of the Roman Empire. It is tender, sweeping and tremendously debauched—it’s just disgusting in a really fantastic way. So that was a real romp!
About once a year I make a pilgrimage back Stig Sæterbakken’s Through the Night, which is a novel that drastically altered and elevated what I thought a novel could do, so I return to it as often I can.
I’ve also picked up Margarita Garcia Robayo’s The Delivery, which I’m really excited to read. Some of her early work is really honest and direct in a way that I feel is lacking a lot these days, so hers is work that I really love.
Lastly for some philosophy and cultural theory, I’m returning to Byung-Chul Han’s Topology of Violence.
You can pick up a copy of The Degenerates at your local bookstore today.
View this post on Instagram
