I’m not offering solace: Michael Winkler on his new book about masculinity

Beaming from the door of his Brunswick home, Michael Winkler greets me in a T-shirt so bright I feel relieved to be wearing Ray-Bans. Recalling Winkler’s writing, the jaunty design (six tinned tomato cans, like Warhol finding inspiration at Brunswick’s Mediterranean Wholesalers) hides its aesthetic seriousness.

Guiding me towards the kind of velvet red couch that might have once graced the set of Twin Peaks, Winkler says Grimmish, his runaway debut – Australia’s first self-published novel to be nominated for the Miles Franklin – was a “mutation”. Incorporating decades of work, including “six or eight pages” taken from a project 20 years earlier, the road to his debut lay paved with unpublished manuscripts.

“They will not be published. At the time, I was devastated they weren’t picked up,” he says, “but there’s no gems sitting at the bottom of the drawer.”

Griefdogg’s origin story is a little less dogged. Beginning the manuscript in 2019, Winkler set off to Mildura to complete it in 2024. He was optimistic. “I’d told everyone I was going to Mildura to write a book – and it all fell in a heap. I just couldn’t find the voice. I remember floods of tears. I assumed that it would be a failure. Another humiliating torment.”

At this point Winkler realised what he lacked: not a voice but voices. In a matter of months, Griefdogg was born. Among those voices is Jeffrey Watson-Johnson, a world-beatingly disaffected Mildura hydrologist. In his forties, Jeffrey is a vegan straight-arrow and (by his own estimation) sex god. Whenever he feels envy or resentment, he consoles himself that the object of his disdain would likely be “a flop in bed”. Is he a godforsaken parody of insecure masc men? A brave new species of voluntarily incelibate incel (a volincel)? Or just the most wretched Aussie water scientist imaginable? Call it a hat-trick.

“He’s a decent person,” Winkler says, having confirmed Jeffrey is “not a gooner”. “He’s just got locked into this idea of striving and being the best in all spheres. There’s no room for flow.”

To say Jeffrey lacks flow is a vigorous understatement. His relationship with his wife, Martine, is drier than the Sahara (they are “more like friendly co-tenants than lovers”). Jeffrey is confident the research he pursues will “assuredly be ignored” by the government and demonised by big business. He is a middle-aged man sailing up shit creek with a paddle but no purpose.

Still, why have a midlife if you can’t find time to enjoy some crisis? In short order, Jeffrey sleeps with his cousin, hooks up with a stranger at a water infrastructure conference and worries, with a mix of rugged stoicism and solicitous concern, about the state of his sagging ballsack.

Condemned to “the helpless loneliness of lugging around a shabby secret” or three, something unexpected happens: Jeffrey’s aunt dies, leaving him a sizable inheritance. Given “a life-changing balance to contemplate”, you’d be forgiven for thinking he might be changing his life. Instead, he doubles down.

He tells his family that he wants to live in the household like a pet, complete with the “same rights and obligations”. His wife worries that he wants to be a furry. It’s not that he wants to explore kinks or become a dog, he explains. It’s that he no longer wants a life involving decisions. Adopting a new alias (“Hubert”), he commits to non-commitment, becoming the kind of stay-at-home father a family yearns to have leave the house.

I’m glad to be speaking to Michael early, before the publicity machine kicks into gear. Think of it as a kindly ambush. You got to the author before he had a chance to refine, repeat and, eventually, ventriloquise his explanations of the work! But you have to be quick to keep up with Winkler. Writing Griefdogg, Winkler says, he retained the “fragmentary” approach he adopted writing Grimmish.

“I’ve got a short attention span,” he says, smiling, admitting a willingness to pursue narrative decisions even if they “bug people” or risk failing. What he values in novels is their ability to function as “freedom machines”: “We don’t have to be stuck with complete narrative logic all the time.”

It’s fair to say Grimmish and Griefdogg treat run-of-the-mill realist fiction and its logic as a la carte options. “I think I can be impatient, maybe,” Winkler says. “I’m not terribly interested in plot. I certainly take the opportunity to try to pull the rug out.” He wanted, however, to pull back on Grimmish’s “wacky, zany” aspects. Exploring masochism, vulnerability and pain in his work, Winkler says, simply, “I’m not offering solace.”

Griefdogg is an existentialist’s journey into the void, combining Winkler’s trademark instinct for philosophical speculation with something not unlike Luigi Pirandello’s 1926 novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, the story of a bourgeois businessman who discovers that if he acts contrary to others’ expectations, he can escape the predictability of his life.

“We haven’t had an old-fashioned existentialist novel for a while,” Winkler admits. Reflecting on the impact of Camus’ L’Etranger (fair bit of sex in that novel, too, I note), Winkler says, “I don’t understand people who aren’t confronted by the question: why am I here and is it worth going on? I assume that a lot of people don’t ask that question regularly.” Men especially “seem to have such limited tools. And fall back on such a small range of responses. Cynicism is often one of them. Aggression. Retreat.”

Jeffrey certainly retreats in a big way. It’s a response Winkler says he understands. “I’m trying to show my vulnerability, which is probably the most radical act an Australian male can do. Even if I’m doing it within this literary milieu where everyone’s exposing themselves, it felt like it needed some bravery.”

As someone “rapidly growing older”, Winkler says he’s been reflecting on “late style”. (“How rarely I find it terribly rewarding.” ) He audibly groans at the idea of how much time he has to make up before getting “soft”.

Could be a blessing in disguise, I suggest: start late, avoid late style. “That’d be nice!” he laughs. Growing pensive, he adds, “I’ll be the grandpa Moses of prose styles.”

The idea of art that exists out of time, irreconcilable to received ideas, feels apt to describe Winkler’s place in local literature. As literary fiction is rapidly abandoned in favour of treacly and manipulative narrative contrivances and gimmicks, Winkler has succeeded not only in publishing boundary-pushing work but in becoming a male artist unafraid to mock masculinity. When I ask if he regrets not starting earlier, he simply laughs. “I did start earlier. It’s just that I was no good! I was bashing into the wall for 40 years.” He appreciates Grimmish’s broad appeal. “Cutting across the generational gap is incredibly nice.”

Jeffrey/Hubert’s dedication to non-action suggests withdrawing too much from the world is risky. Like Bernhard’s angsty geniuses, Melville’s Bartleby or Perec’s sleeping man (whose sole desire is “to endure”), one senses that inaction – especially when it is neither conscientious objection nor reasoned refusal – is harder than being resolutely gung-ho.

Paraphrasing a line from one of Griefdogg’s characters, I ask Winkler whether he might have a talent for making things harder than they need to be. He gives the longest “ah” of the interview. A kind of thoughtful scream. “I’d say that’s true of me. And probably true of Jeffrey.” Winkler is, he concedes, a pessimist by nature.

Even as a child? “Yes! But I live with Karen, for whom the glass is always half-full. I’m always assuming things will go badly and then pleased when they don’t.”

Griefdogg (Text) is out now.

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