Relatively Famous

Roger Averill

Transit Lounge, $29.99

In one corner of Roger Averill's Relatively Famous is literary genius Gil Madigan. Hailed as the greatest Australian novelist since Patrick White, he's a global celebrity, has a Booker to his name and is a serious contender for a Nobel. In the other corner, his son Michael, who grapples with living in his father's shadow. Their relationship is coloured by absence: when Michael was eight, his mother Marjorie grew tired of Gil's adultery and selfishness, moving with her son from England back to inner-city Melbourne. The book weaves together Michael's story – he eschews writing in favour of painting and music and being a stay-at-home dad – with Gil's literary life, narrated largely in the form of a full-dress biography. Exploring vexed terrain between father and son, Averill achieves clarity of style and subtleties of emotional register in a tale of reckoning that also muses on the intricacies of fame and obscurity, success and failure, art and life.