5 Questions with Raeden Richardson
Raeden Richardson grew up in Melbourne and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
His work has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, La Napoule Foundation and Yaddo.
His writing has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings and New Australian Fiction.
No.1
The Degenerates is your debut novel. Tell us a little about its trajectory: how did the conceit occur to you, and how did the writing of it evolve over time? How did you keep the momentum going as you wrote?
To consider the trajectory of The Degenerates, I’ll defer to [Greek philosopher] Nikos Kazantzakis, who said ‘my greatest benefactors have been my dreams and my travels.’
I grew up in Melbourne’s outer suburbs. As a kid, I roamed around Waverley Park, a development built from the carpark of a forgotten football stadium. I’d heard that unruly fans crashed their cars after the failed grand finals of yesteryear; from my bed, I’d stare across the red fields at the yellow bellies of the diggers, imagining shards of glass and broken teeth buried in the clay. Instead of following my family to church, I followed a friend into the construction site and wandered through the unfinished houses alongside him. I still remember the semi-trailers howling on the Monash Freeway, a howl of profound grief. Day by day, our dreamscape slowly gave way to sanitised Mirvac homes. None of it would last. It was my first encounter with anicca, the condition of change that permeates all reality. The passing of time haunted me deeply. One evening, we discovered an electric mobility scooter left in a pit. Who else had wandered into this shrinking dream? Who else loved it like we did—and could not belong? In this way, I first met Maha, the architect of The Degenerates, an icon for all of us unfulfilled in the outer suburbs.
Ten years later, I moved to New York, hustling after a career in publishing. After two months, I was ruined: I was broke, jobless and hadn’t written a word. One fateful afternoon, I ran off Madison Avenue and into St Patrick’s cathedral. Deranged, I hoped that God would take me back, that there would be some peace for me in that empty church. I did at least remember to kneel at the pew. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’ Then a custodian entered and started testing the grand organ. Imagine! The cathedral erupted, howling away, mocking my fairweather faith. Now I recognise that howl from my days by the Monash Freeway; leaving St Patrick’s with tears in my eyes, there on 51st Street I saw an old woman in an electric mobility scooter. I remembered Maha. She’d followed me all that way, stowed without my knowing in the overhead compartment of my mind. The Degenerates began on this day of deranged failure.
Creative momentum grew with my travels. I remember meeting Sanjeev Sane, an activist in Thane, and Avinash Kolhe, a Marathi author in Mumbai, and being struck by their insistence on the undocumented prevalence of nasbandi, imbuing Maha’s origins with a dark truth. I remember sneaking into The Box, Manhattan’s most infamous nightclub, bringing my notepad to pen everything Ginny sees on her first night in New York. Scribbling away beside the stage, watching a man paint a portrait of Hillary Clinton using only his cock, I felt like I’d seen something I shouldn’t have.
That indecent magic propelled me into Ginny’s story. I remember detailing the walk from Flinders to Degraves, following Titch’s pursuit of Maha, running my hands over the peeling layers of graffiti in the laneway. The perfume of those unwashed dumpsters sweetened each draft of The Degenerates. As a child, I was so distraught with anicca. Now, on the other side of The Degenerates, I find peace in passing time. ‘What makes time meaningful is not its sameness but its difference,’ says Byung-Chul Han. ‘Time is change, process, development. The present has no substance of its own; it is only a transitional point. Nothing is. Everything becomes.’
No.2
It’s delightful to read the instances of Indian and Aussie English that are sprinkled throughout the book. Can you speak more to the utility of featuring different types of Englishes in writing?
The way we use language reveals our architecture of the self. In committing to Somnath’s Hinglish, Titch’s outer-Australian patois and Ginny’s aspirational American vocabulary, The Degenerates disturbs the notion of one ‘correct’ English, dismantles the idea of a single voice and questions any claim to authenticity, both on the page and of the self. Teachers often ask these leading questions like, ‘What is your voice?’ or ‘What is the story only you can tell?’ These leading questions always irritate me. I need different forms of English when speaking to my aunt in Dubai, or my agent in New York, or with friends in Glen Waverley. Voice changes and morphs; selves change and morph, too. This is the case for all of us, whatever our blood or native tongue, but as Ruth Ozeki says, ‘fiction writers may have a more extreme version of this because we’re always making ourselves up.’ Those leading questions pursue a lie, further entrenching this banal obsession with identity, which is but the fashion of our day.
Language is modification. It shows that the self is really a perpetual performance. As Nam Le writes, ‘The mouth is the true / soul’s window / seeing, taking in, disintegrating.’ The self is a process of modifying—degenerating, too. The self is a verb, not a noun. The different Englishes in The Degenerates function as masks. This is not to suggest there is something more ‘real’ or ‘true’ hidden beneath these Englishes, but that the self emerges only in the act of wearing, removing, accenting and concealing.
No.3
The Degenerates spans locations from Bombay (present-day Mumbai), Melbourne and New York City. Why these cities in particular? What does your worldbuilding process look like?
Mumbai accelerates, sprawls, horrifies. It is, according to Suketu Mehta, ‘a maximum city.’ It trembles with the exchange of money and the constant flow of stories, arrivals and catastrophes. Somnath, a young man yearning for an empire, is a made and wounded by this city of possibility. New York promises the chance to be remade. For better and worse, no one in New York cares about where you’re from, or what you’ve done before arriving. All that matters is being there. Many young people, seduced by the ability to become someone else, land in New York and can never live anywhere else; for Ginny, who cannot stand the pain of her family in Melbourne, those enchanting streets in Williamsburg let her start anew.
In the life of The Degenerates, Mumbai and New York are appendages to Melbourne. The opening in Bombay bears the reader to Melbourne; Somnath’s cruel history is placental, feeding Maha’s upbringing until the novel lets it go. New York, for all its bite, is really the book’s milk teeth. Ginny encounters the mythos of Manhattan, but her theophanic experiences in Melbourne finally lead her to outgrow her American ideals. By the close of The Degenerates, Melbourne emerges, walks upright, speaks for itself, demands its own worth.
How many novels and films set in Mumbai or New York had I consumed? Rather than denying the mythos of these places, I tried to hold it all fully in my head. Yet when researching Somnath and Ginny’s journeys in these cities, I wanted to see the most material conditions. How does betel stain the pavement outside Readymoney Mansion? How many steps does it take to run down Canal Street on a January night? The Degenerates sits in that psychic realm between myth and materiality, sitting there alongside memory and nightmare.
No.4
There’s such a sense of sprawl in The Degenerates, not only in how it features four characters across four very different locations, but the intriguing, somewhat fragmented form you use to bring out these elements too. What is your relationship to reading?
At first, I read to close the gap between myself and the world. I thought novels were instructive. I believed that after I finished a book, I ought to take some kind of action, to alter how I lived. I read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in this way. ‘Down with patriarchy!’ I thought. ‘Down with war!’
I grew up. A new relationship began. I read to understand how stories were made. I wanted to crack literary craft, to see the writer pulling the strings, to inspire me through my next writing workshop. I read Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Amie Barrodale and Benjamin Nugent in this way.
Now, I read only to experience consciousness. I want the miracle of another mind. I don’t want to instrumentalise the work for social good or writerly gain. I admire art that is vast, stupefying, that complicates notions of craft and morality, that catches the purest rhythms of the psyche. Give me reverie, singularity, cities on the slopes of Vesuvius. ‘Any outstanding work of art,’ said Nabokov, ‘is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual.’ Recently, I’ve felt this uniqueness in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Naburan Bhattacharya’s Harbart.
No.5
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about writing and/or being around other writers?
I’ve noticed that many writers carry a lot of guilt. We could’ve been doctors and healed people. We could’ve been lawyers and made enough money to help our ageing parents. But we’ve done neither. The ship is going down. Sometimes this guilt turns inward and forms a great well of self-loathing. Or it turns outward: we denounce whole canons for their chequered histories, or ridicule ideas we don’t like, or bemoan someone else for being published.
This outward loathing often reveals the ugly pathology of scarcity. We often carry this fear into our writing communities, believing that there are only so many seats at the table, that some of us must miss out. Ultimately this pathology impoverishes both the work we create, making it derivative, and the experience of creating the work, which can feel rushed and malnourished. I’ve been saddened at how often I notice this pathology in myself.
I take solace in recognising that all writers must make the same choices. Existentially, we’re all on the same ship. Arguing over who sits in First Class and who hides in the hold seems futile when we realise that we’re all on the Titanic. I’m learning that living a writing life means sitting with this guilt of unproductivity. We should accept being dishevelled, peripheral, estranged from convention and subject to the storms of obscurity. Our art will flourish, as will our love for one another. The writers I admire know how to whisper, to soften their touch, to keep working despite the cold.
Find out more
Following the interwoven lives of four characters across India, Australia and the United States, the novel takes root in Melbourne and brings its streets, shopping centres and laneways to life with astounding originality—the city may never be the same again.
The Degenerates radiates with Titch’s fanaticism and Ginny’s obsessions. Somnath’s devastating history reflects every life divided around the globe. And Maha, the heart of the novel, is an extraordinary creation, an abiding figure of modern salvation. Brimming with vitality, humour, intelligence and brilliant writing, The Degenerates engages with the realities of modern loneliness and every form of departure—from our homes, from our families and even from life itself.
In propulsive prose, The Degenerates summons the power of storytelling, disrupts conventional narratives and pays tribute to those lives often lost in the margins.
Get it from Text Publishing here.