Michelle de Kretser's Theory and Practice is an elegantly written exploration of identity, longing, and intellectual obsession. The novel, steeped in literary allusion and personal struggle, follows the unnamed narrator, a young woman from Sri Lanka studying in Melbourne, as she navigates life as a young adult in love with intellectualism while wrestling with her fixation on Virginia Woolf.

The title, a nod to Aristotle's Poetics, sets the framework for the novel's thematic underpinnings. The narrator's life is a collision of theory-the ideals of art, beauty, and intellectual pursuits-and practice-the messy, unpredictable realities of human relationships and social awkwardness. This duality pervades the novel, providing a fertile ground for meditations on jealousy, obsession, and the universal yearning for meaning.

De Kretser crafts a vivid and introspective narrative voice, capturing the narrator's inner world with poetic precision. Her preoccupation with Woolf serves as both an inspiration and a burden, shaping her worldview and relationships (the"Wolfmother"). The novel subtly explores how admiration can blur into obsession, as the narrator attempts to reconcile her literary aspirations with the realities of her own coming of age as an adult. The people she encounters-those she loves, hates, admires, and finds inspiring-serve as mirrors reflecting her insecurities and ambitions.

At its heart, Theory and Practice is a meditation on the tension between ideals and reality, between the lives we imagine for ourselves and the ones we inhabit. This is a novel for lovers of literary fiction, for readers who savor books about the intricacies of the human condition