1. Literary fiction in Australia today is often accused of blandness. How does Subtopia break away from the dominant ‘middlebrow’ tone of contemporary Australian literary fiction?

I wanted to write Subtopia in a contemporary idiom and avoid the highly ornamental, belletristic language of so much recent Australian fiction. That’s partly why it is written in the first person, and why, at moments, there is a pared-back feel to the novel’s descriptive capacity. I really dislike the idea that literature exists to reveal the beauty in the ordinary. Subtopia avoids and at moments satirizes that assumption about literature and its aesthetic mission.

2. You have argued that it is only through independent presses that we may get to read more varied forms of writing. What can an independent company such as Vulgar Press do for a novel like Subtopia that a larger conglomerate can’t?

Independent presses are driven primarily by political and aesthetic considerations, not commercial ones. That doesn’t mean they ignore the commercial, but they don’t try to fit a book into a mould that is predetermined by the market.

3. You have accused publishers of having little idea about who reads what books and why. Who do you think Subtopia will appeal to? Who do you see as your audience?

I don’t think they have no idea of who reads and why, but that their conception of readerships reflects demographics that they think they can access easily. There is no sense of trying to forge a readership. Subtopia will appeal to disgruntled Generation-X types and to everyone else bored with national allegories, happy endings and the idea that we have to feel good about crap. It is also a novel about radical experience (or its impossibility) and the ghosts of the late sixties and early seventies. So it is pitched at the left more generally.

4. Australian literary fiction has a tradition based in the depiction of rural landscapes. Did you make a conscious decision to break away from this mould by engaging with the Australian landscape on a suburban level?

I’ve spent most of my life in cities. My experience is almost entirely urban. I think that is true of a lot of Australians. The novel reflects that.

5. Can you explain a little about the title Subtopia and how the concept relates to your depictions of Melbourne, Berlin and New York?

‘Subtopia’ is a satirical contraction of ‘suburbia’ and ‘utopia’. I wanted to suggest the ways in which urban and suburban environments deliver much less than what they promise us. I also wanted to evoke, ultimately, a politicized consciousness linked to an awareness of that fact. The sense of utopia betrayed is as evident to me in New York City as it is in the outer suburbs of Melbourne or Sydney.

6. Both Subtopia and Christos Tsiolkas’ recently published novel Dead Europe have their main character needing to leave Australia and head to Europe in order to find some kind of answer to his own unresolved relationship with Australia. Do you think contemporary Australian literary fiction has been too inward looking in its quest to represent an aspect of an Australian identity?

The question of national identity and national specificity has virtually crushed the life out of Australian literature, and sentenced it to a kind of kitsch inherited from colonial print-culture. The cultural and physical mobility of the characters in Subtopia simply embodies the sense that our identities don’t have to be formed by the ‘national space’. In the novel, for instance, Ulrike Meinhof is a more important affective presence than anyone or anything Australian.

7. Are novels such as yours and Tsiolkas’ providing a new way of looking at Australia in a more global context?

Both novels are concerned, at some level, with global experience. Global political and economic relations are increasingly defining the ways in which people are empowered and disenfranchised, protected and threatened. The national obsessions of Australian literature run the risk of screening that out. There’s something regressive in that, I think. Both novels assume a global, cosmopolitan context for identity formation, not a national one.

8. The Berlin that Julian encounters is perhaps not quiet what he had expected and in many ways his disappointment is reflected in the fate of the character of Martin. What is it about the character of Martin and the city of Berlin that attracts Julian?

Julian is attracted to the dissident element in Martin. In a way the West Berlin of the late sixties and early seventies, in which left-wing activism spilt over into armed resistance, embodies a sense of dissidence as well, though obviously in a very different register. The novel’s movement from Melbourne to Berlin is partly about an interest in this fantasy of a radical, politicized city that is sharply juxtaposed to suburbia.

9. Julian worries about his life ‘settling into one of those redemptive, coming-of-age narratives in which a fuck-up protagonist finally accepts his mediocrity and succumbs to the reality principle’. Does Subtopia offer more hope than this for Julian?

I don’t think novels need be about hope in that restricted sense of things working out for the character. That’s one of the limp imperatives of mainstream fiction, in which character development almost always implies the movement towards a happy disposition at peace with the world. Subtopia’s conclusion avoids this. It is about absence, not optimism, though that negative impulse keeps the utopian alive as a possibility more emphatically than endings that try to be more obviously upbeat.