Miller, Alex 1936–

PERSONAL:

Born December 27, 1936, in London, England; son of Alex M. (a chef) and Winifred Mary Miller; emigrated to Australia, c. 1952; married Stephanie Ann Pullin (an academic), December 21, 1983; children: Ron, Kate. Education: B.A., 1965. Religion: Anglican. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, traveling, being a father and husband.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Melbourne, Australia. Office—28 Ingles St., Port Melbourne, Victoria 3207, Australia. Agent—Curtis Brown, P.O. Box 19, Paddington, New South Wales 2021, Australia.

CAREER:

Author. Has worked at a number of professions, including cattle ranching, horse breaking, art brokering, and teaching.

MEMBER:

Australian Society of Authors.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Commonwealth Writers Prize and Miles Franklin Literary Award, both 1993, both for The Ancestor Game; Barbara Ramsden award, 1993, for best published book; New South Wales Premier's Award, 2001; Miles Franklin Literary Award for Journey to the Stone Country, 2003.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Watching the Climbers on the Mountain, Pan (Sydney, Australia), 1988.

The Tivington Nott, Penguin (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1989, reprinted, Allen & Unwin (St. Leonards, New South Wales, Australia), 2005.

The Ancestor Game, Penguin (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1992, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1994.

The Sitters, Penguin (Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1995.

Conditions of Faith, Scribner (New York, NY), 2000.

Journey to the Stone Country, Allen & Unwin (Crow's Nest, New South Wales, Australia), 2002.

Prochownik's Dream, Allen & Unwin (St. Leonards, New South Wales, Australia), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Australian writer Alex Miller has produced several books that touch on the transcultural experience. According to a Contemporary Novelists essayist, his first novel, Watching the Climbers on the Mountain, is concerned with "the pressures of alienation and the need to belong." Set in Queensland, Australia, the book tells the story of a teenaged English stockman working on a remote cattle station. As he is drawn into the conflicts and desires of the family for whom he works, his own actions lead to a tragedy when he becomes involved with the owner's wife.

Miller's next novel, The Tivington Nott, is set in the English West Country. The protagonist, a young Londoner, has difficulty adjusting to the strict class divisions evident in the provinces. Retreating to an inner world, he begins to identify with a wild stag ("the nott") which for years has eluded hunters. The story revolves around a hunt which symbolizes the opposition of nature and civilization.

The Ancestor Game again deals with questions of home and homeland and the sense of alienation. An English immigrant, Steven Muir, struggles with his own identity as he lives and teaches in Melbourne. Other characters include friends of Chinese-Australian and German-Asian origins—both of whom add to the cross-cultural currents in the novel. As Steven embarks on research and comes to know much about the heritage of his friends, he also confronts his own past and the way it impinges on the present.

Sophie Masson, who reviewed The Ancestor Game for the Australian Book Review, felt that the book is an example of a postmodern work in which "the present and the future are no longer seen as a linear progression but, rather, as a kind of giant tapestry where threads weave in and out." Masson wrote that the book effectively explores the concept of exile, which "can indeed be the only tolerable condition for certain people" in a complex world. Masson asserted that this is "not an ‘easy’ book. Its prose is rich and evocative. … [It] conceals complexities in its rich gowns, brings them out from hidden sleeves, makes use of illusion and strangeness in a way that forces the reader to think twice, look twice, read twice." In the New York Times Book Review, Lauren Belfer called The Ancestor Game "a dense, complex work" which is also "intriguing, both for the ambition of its structure and for its absorbing exploration of the past." The Contemporary Novelists essayist found that the book "reappraises Australia as a country of postcolonial possibility where ancestry, allegiance, and identity coalesce in an uncertain process of becoming."

Miller's The Sitters concerns the way art can bring a sense of wholeness to human lives. The protagonist is an English-born painter from Canberra whose wife and son left him some years before. He meets an Australian academic who has been working in England but has returned to Australia as a visiting professor. Attracted to her, the narrator is inspired to resume his painting. His renewed artistic energy also leads him to face some unresolved conflicts from his past in England. When he takes his friend to her childhood home in New South Wales, the artist achieves a sense of belonging.

According to the Contemporary Novelists essayist, The Sitters "draws to some extent on Roland Barthes's speculative essays on words and images" and is effective in its "interweaving of present circumstances with vignettes of memory." Veronica Brady wrote in the Australian Book Review that The Sitters "is about the place in which, collectively as well as individually, we find ourselves today, the place of modernism as a form, if you like, of unknowing." Although World Literature Today contributor Ray Willbanks expressed disappointment that the narrative voice in The Sitters "wavers between working-class and highbrow and [the author's] pontifications on art and life are murky," Brady praised the novel as "elegant yet compassionate, austere yet profoundly human."

Miller loosely based his next novel, Conditions of Faith, on a journal kept by his mother when she was living in Paris in the 1920s. The protagonist, Emily Stanton, is a young Australian woman who has recently graduated from university with honors in ancient history. Instead of using her education as her family wishes, she suddenly marries Georges Elder, a half-French, half-Scottish engineer who promptly takes her to Paris to live. When Emily's fascination with Paris wears off, she discovers that her life with Georges has become weary domesticity. While visiting the cathedral of Chartres, she has a chance encounter with a young priest, with whom she makes love. Finding herself pregnant, she realizes that the child's father may not be her husband. After a period of illness, she goes to Tunisia to rest and meets a young female archaeologist, who makes her see what her life could have been like had she not made unwise choices. She is finally left to deal with the wrenching possibility of leaving her child to find her own identity.

Critics of Conditions of Faith found it a provocative commentary, not only on the social vicissitudes of the late-nineteenth century, but also on the dilemmas of being female during that period. Judy Lightfoot remarked in the Seattle Times that, while "all the other characters talk more than [Emily] does … the writing is provocative and absorbing on subjects ranging from Arab politics to the politics of motherhood." Lightfoot concluded that she was "glad Conditions of Faith can't be described as a ‘page-turner.’ You want to put this book down and think about it." Reviewing the novel for the New York Times Book Review, William Ferguson wrote that, although at times the "characterizations can be thin," the novel is "highly readable, and it explores the psyche of a woman torn between family and career with subtlety and grace." Calling Conditions of Faith a "rich and deeply emotional novel," Booklist contributor Grace Fill particularly enjoyed Miller's "compelling portrayal of a young woman's complicated feelings in the face of motherhood."

Australian Book Review contributor Andrew Riemer put Conditions of Faith into the same literary stream as Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary: "This fine novel follows a trajectory that leads it into experiences and possibilities of life of a kind that late-nineteenth-century novels habitually explored." Although Riemer did not suggest that the novel is derivative, he added that the "novel clearly reflects the aesthetic, ethical and social preoccupations that generated those masterworks, and much else besides." Like Emma Bovary, Riemer stated, Emily's "longings and desires bring her into conflict with a narrow, hypocritical and fundamentally provincial society." While noting that the reader is "never allowed access to the deepest recesses" of Emily's thinking, Riemer concluded that "I think we shall see few finer or richer novels this year."

In Journey to the Stone Country Miller examines history, ancestry, and the politics of development. When Melbourne historian Annabelle Beck learns that her husband has abandoned her for a younger woman, she heads for her childhood home in North Queensland. While helping a friend conduct cultural surveys, Annabelle meets Bo Rennie, an Aboriginal ringer she knew as a young child. Bo invites her on a journey to his homeland where a developer plans to construct a dam, a project that Bo opposes, even though he realizes it may benefit his people. "The poignancy of his apartness is that it is temporal—he does not fit in a younger generation, nor easily with the older one," noted Australian Literary Studies contributor Peter Pierce. The pair eventually reaches Verbena, the homestead once owned by Bo's grandmother that Bo hopes to reclaim. According to Alan Gould in Quadrant, "Alex Miller allows his story to follow the natural weft of life, and from that physical basis the novel's marvelous vision for the human spirit arises. A renewal of lives, a reconciliation of black and white, rich and poor, one cast of intellect with another, is shown to be possible and proper."

Prochownik's Dream concerns Toni Powlett, an artist who is unable to paint after his father dies. When Toni is contacted by Robert Golding, his former instructor, and Robert's wife, Marina, he is suddenly energized, creating a new series of works titled "The Marina Suite." As Toni pours himself into his career, spends time with the Goldings, and enters an affair with Marina, he begins to neglect his wife and young daughter. "Miller weaves these relationships into an intricate but always lucid pattern," related Andrew Riemer in the Sydney Morning Herald. "At the heart of his concerns stands the age-old dilemma of the artist: how to reconcile the call of art with the individual's duty to others—family, friends, associates." Reviewing Prochownik's Dream in the Sydney Observer, Scott Whitmont concluded that "Miller ruminates over the inner life of an artist and about the nature of love and obsession with absorbing complexity."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Novelists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Australian Book Review, August, 1992, Sophie Masson, "Where Are You from Really," pp. 4-5; May, 1995, Veronica Brady, "A Portrait of Absence and Silence," pp. 43-44; June, 2000, Andrew Riemer, "Nineteenth-Century Trajectory," pp. 38-39.

Australian Literary Studies, May, 2004, Peter Pierce, "The Solitariness of Alex Miller," p. 299.

Booklist, July, 2000, Grace Fill, review of Conditions of Faith, p. 2010.

Bulletin with Newsweek, August 22, 2000, Peter Pierce, "A Miller's Tale."

Library Journal, June 15, 2000, Judith Kicinski, review of Conditions of Faith, p. 116.

New York Times Book Review, August 28, 1994, Lauren Belfer, review of The Ancestor Game; October 8, 2000, William Ferguson, review of Conditions of Faith.

Overland, winter, 2006, Ian Syson, "Literary Publishing in a Nutshell," review of Prochowink's Dream, p. 23.

Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2000, review of Conditions of Faith, p. 70.

Quadrant, November, 2004, Alan Gould, "Nerve and Trust," review of Journey to the Stone Country, p. 89.

Seattle Times, August 6, 2000, Judy Lightfoot, "Conditions of Faith Tackles Provocative Subjects."

Sydney Morning Herald, November 5, 2005, Andrew Riemer, review of Prochownik's Dream.

Sydney Observer, December, 2005, Scott Whitmont, review of Prochownik's Dream.

World Literature Today, spring, 1996, Ray Willbanks, review of The Sitters, p. 467.

ONLINE

Allen & Unwin Web site,http://www.allenandunwin.com/ (May 1, 2007), profile of Alex Miller.

Aussie Reviews,http://www.aussiereviews.com/ (May 1, 2007), Sally Murphy, "Exploring the Inner Life of the Creator," review of Prochownik's Dream.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation Web site,http://www.abc.net.au/ (March 14, 2004), "Books and Writing with Ramona Koval," interview with Alex Miller.