Randall, Charlotte

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RANDALL, Charlotte

PERSONAL:

Born in Dunedin, New Zealand; married. Education: Attended University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Wellington, New Zealand. Agent—c/o Penguin Books, Penguin Putnam, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER:

Writer.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Reed Fiction Award and Best First Book Award, Commonwealth Writers Prize, 1996, for Dead Sea Fruit; Victoria University of Wellington writing fellow, 2000.

WRITINGS:

Dead Sea Fruit, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1995.

The Curative, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2000. Within the Kiss, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2002.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Painting the World on the Wall, a novel.

SIDELIGHTS:

Novelist Charlotte Randall won the Commonwealth Writers Prize's Reed Fiction Award and Best First Book award for Dead Sea Fruit, a novel about two families in Dunedin, New Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s. As Donald Matheson observed in the Wellington Evening Post, the book deals with the familiar theme of growing up in a stifling and conformist era, but does so with exceptional depth and skill. The novel has "huge emotional energy," Matheson wrote, and transcends the confines of its "heritage in New Zealand writing."

Randall followed this successful debut with The Curative, a novel set in Bedlam, London's notorious hospital for the insane. It is the Napoleonic era, and William Lonsdale, a middle-aged and once-successful theater critic, has been incarcerated in the madhouse, a victim, he insists, of an unfair plot against him. Chained to the wall, he tells his story to his cellmate and to a woman inmate with whom he rehearses a therapeutic play.

Critics found The Curative an ambitious and interesting, if not wholly successful, novel. In a review for Landfall, Patrick Evans raised questions about Randall's decision to limit her character's freedom of movement. Because the narrator cannot move, Evans wrote, the novel "highlights language" and ultimately subverts the conventions of fiction: "that novels have protagonists, that those protagonists have lives, wives, husbands, children, and environments, that these characters do things in the quotidian, and that in the good old days fiction used to be about something as well, something that was somehow larger than the sum of those events." In the end, Evans found The Curative an overly intellectual novel, lacking the emotional appeal and the authentic regional grounding of Dead Sea Fruit. Penelope Davie noted in the Brisbane Courier-Mail that Lonsdale is a "very unlikable" character whose story about the events that landed him in Bedlam is "convoluted and unpleasant." Even so, Davie added that this very unpleasantness is part of Randall's message: "being bad, or clever, or different, or even stark raving mad is no reason for the arbitrary evil of this sort of incarceration." The book, she went on to say, "has moments of genuine horror, and a clever, creative, and often humorous plot." The Curative was nominated for the 2001 Montana New Zealand Book Award.

In Within the Kiss Randall reimagines the Faust myth. Her Faust character is a New Zealand tennis-mom who aspires to literary fame but who has questionable talent. She agrees to sell her daughter's soul to the girl's seedy tennis coach, who promises to make the girl into a tennis star and the mother into a best-selling author. The process of writing itself, which Randall treats with humor, becomes a central theme. "I wanted it to be …humorous and whimsical," Randall explained in an online interview for Book-Club. "But always with this grain of truth about the true horrors of writing and the true horrors of competitive sport." Randall also pointed out that her Faust is not really a serious writer, but a "desperate scribbler. The person to whom writing itself means very little and publishing success means a lot. And they are always looking for the story, the one that's going to be the bestseller, and makes them whatever they think a writer is—rich, famous, and unemployed. I'm not that kind of writer. I'm going to write what I'm interested in and if no one else likes it, well I guess that means it's too bad."

Reviewing the novel for the New Zealand Herald, contributor Jenny Jones commented that "Reading Charlotte Randall is like being caught up in a lolly scramble. There's so much largesse bombarding you from her intellectual helicopter you haven't time to unwrap each individual sugarplum. It doesn't matter, you grab what you can.…Youare immersed in a world of delight made exquisite by intellectual refraction." Randall, Jones concluded, is "an original and I'm glad she can't keep it simple."