There’s a moment in Patrick White’s Voss when Tom Radclyffe remarks that he would be ‘curious to read little Laura’s thoughts’. Little Laura responds, mischievously, if not maliciously, that she has been thinking ‘of nothing in particular. Which is another way of saying: almost everything.’ This is almost certainly the recognisable condition of those currently in possession of an internet password and the hardware to put it to work. We are mushroom people now, our mycelium constantly interacting with countless threads that have been sent out by others to find, lose, or avoid us. We are novelists now, too, digging out beautiful caves, as Woolf had it, for ourselves and our myriad interlocutors, spelunking ourselves to frenzy in the frequently better looking, more luxuriously decked out caves of others. The internet is our collective unconscious, our objective correlative. Networks of signs, readable and otherwise, keep us connected. 

Though The Vivisector is one of my favourite novels, I’ve never made much headway with Voss. It took a randomly sighted photograph of a painting of a boab tree to spill my concentration across the tablecloth of Australian history and decide to give it another try. Jonathan Franzen shouldn’t worry so much about the devaluation of research for the novel. One of the writer’s key tasks now is to siphon, to sort, to find a path. Which is perhaps how I came to be reading Rachel Cusk’s Kudos alongside Voss. Test tubes of literary methodology to accompany White’s ‘brittlest baskets of caramel, great gobbets of meringue.’