The Long Prospect by Elizabeth Harrower

Hastily, one night she turned from the memory that induced the heart-felt pang of pain and delight. Tossing round in bed the sensation faded. She held the dammed-up knowledge back a moment longer, and then began to feed again to her slow-thumping heart, the memories of the day, realized anew. She was valued! She was valued! The thumping and the tenseness dissolved in slow, self-conscious, thrilling tears. They fell briefly.

Emily lives with her grandmother Lilian in a suburb of Ballowra, a fictionalized version of the Australian city of Newcastle. Her mother lives in Sydney and her father in the Outback, the result of a hasty marriage between two people who didn't know any better, and whose interest and capability in raising Emily are both zero. Lilian, for her part, can be both remarkably protective and remarkably cruel toward her granddaughter, who casts a shadow over what she considers to be a still-thriving social life. As a result, Emily lives a life that feels isolated and diminished; her parents are strangers ("it was immensely embarrassing to have a stranger as an intimate relation," Emily notes) and her grandmother is as likely to forget she exists as to cut her down.

Into this scenario walks Max, who takes a room in Lilian's house. Max, a university lecturer, takes an instant liking to Emily and soon they're spending most of the day together, talking about astronomy and ancient Greece and things like that. This is a state we are told about but not quite shown; Harrower is one of those writers who believes that real conflict and narrative exist within, and mostly we're treated to long passages of Emily thinking through her feelings for Max and the startling realization that for once there is someone in her life who values her. The long prospect of the novel's title is Emily's awakening to the stultifying nature of her suburban upbringing and the small-mindedness of her grandmother's set, and the need to understand the arc of her future life as taking her away from it: "Where were her people? Where were the others like her, to keep her company? And where was she to look for help or information? She might, she felt, have been told something before being dropped off in Ballowra."

Max encourages her to ask Lilian to plan a college career; but Emily doesn't see Max as an entry into another world with another kind of people, but a world within himself that she is unable to do without. (In one scene, she tosses away a gold bracelet given to her by another of Lilian's borders, to whom she had once been attached.) But Max's attentions to Emily don't go unnoticed by Lilian or her hangers-on, who gin up vague accusations of impropriety in order to push Max out of the house and out of Emily's life forever. Lilian and the others are the kind of people who see only social form, and not reality; because they believe more strongly in the social idea of the proper relation between children and adults--even as they forsake their own responsibilities with regards to Emily's upbringing--they're unable to see the way their actions threaten to murder Emily's soul. They don't even understand that Emily has a soul to begin with.

For me, The Long Prospect unfolds under the shadow of The Man Who Loved Children, another Australian novel about bad parenting. Max is a kind of image of the man Sam Pollitt believes himself to be, a genius who can meet kids on a level of intellect others have not recognized. I preferred the satire and bombast of the latter to the sensitive, languid manner of The Long Prospect but it's easy to see why Christina Stead herself loved the novel, and why she was a long-time friend of Patrick White, and why modern reviewers called for a renewal of interest in Harrower's books when she died earlier this year.