Nadine Browne’s debut novel carries a dedication to a man called Danny Kronenfeld, who died in 2019. A few chapters in, we meet an elderly retired social worker named Danny Kronfeld. We’re in the hands of Noni, a “jaded thirty-eight-year-old” from Western Australia who has relocated to New York to undertake a master of fine arts at New York University. This happens to be a path also trodden by Browne.
Gone Guru is a novel that makes merry in the shadowy area between memoir and fiction. Both Browne and Noni are preoccupied with the relationship between identity and storytelling, with the ethics of telling stories about other people and maybe ourselves. And yet this book resembles not at all those po-faced tomes that are generally classified as autofiction. Instead, Browne twists together a set of familiar tropes to contrive a clever, funny metafictional caper.
By the time we meet Danny, Noni is up to her eyeballs in at least three competing generic storylines: that of the writer on the hunt for a story; the hapless provincial trying to make it in the big city; and the amateur gumshoe with a mystery to solve. The pleasure of Gone Guru is in the collision and entanglement of these storylines.
Noni thought she was in New York to write a book based on her life: “I had some rambly idea, based on reality, about how I left a Born Again Christian community, became a kleptomaniac and drug addict, then reformed myself as a youth worker.” But her mentor, Joyce Carol Oates, who happens to be on faculty at the NYU writing program, hates the cult memoir. It’s got “no narrative arc, no drive, no engine”. What Noni needs is a “shit-hot premise” for her new book project. As it happens, while Noni’s manuscript is getting torn apart in workshops, her flatmate Vincent has gone missing, along with her bond and rent.
Voilà: Noni has a new writing project and a quest. Her narration of her quest to find Vincent, which summons an ever-widening cast of characters from his life, including Danny, stays just a day or two ahead of the material she takes to class. Her peers love the manuscript, which is a thinly fictionalised account of Noni’s time in New York. Their feedback shapes her approach to the mystery, and Noni gets to tell the reader the story she really wanted to tell, about growing up in a religious community, leaving it, and then living with her aunt “in a dejected sprawl of council houses called Horrie Swamp”.
Noni’s story gradually converges with Vincent’s. Her erstwhile flatmate is a teacher of meditation and his YouTube videos help Noni cope with the stress of her many storylines. Of course, there are clues lying in the comments to his videos, and he keeps advising his audience to let go of their identity. Is this a clue – or just useful advice? Has he merely let go of his life in Harlem – or is something more sinister afoot?
The title of Browne’s novel is a playful nod to Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl, a blockbuster of misdirection, self-impersonation and plot twists. Antics and hijinks abound here too. Noni is, as she often insists, an unreliable narrator – “if anyone was full of shit, it was me.” Her snooping is utterly inept and she struggles to navigate the barriers of race, class and culture that separate her from her neighbours in Harlem and her classmates at graduate school. “I definitely overestimated my ability to read people,” she confesses.
In spite of this, Noni makes new friends as she snoops, including Danny and her neighbour Merelis, and sketches them with affection and humour. Likewise, the scene at NYU provides many moments of incidental comedy. Author John Freeman, for example, seems to Noni “too wholesome and handsome, in a successful farmer sort of way, for the New York literary world”. Noni is prone to editorialising, especially on class and literature, and she really takes advantage of the sham detective’s prerogative to pursue every last clue, and to mull over the bona fides of everyone she meets. Mostly, she’s good company.
Under the guise of a charming and rambly missing person mystery, Browne smuggles a set of serious questions about fiction and identity, about where the truths lie in the stories we tell about ourselves. Noni and Vincent are both pretending to be someone they are not when we meet them. Most of the characters are trying to leave trauma and shame behind, it seems. And yet when Noni manages to loosen her attachment to rigid truth about the past and the present, she finds she’s able to live much more happily: “I didn’t feel like I knew any more about God or the universe, but I was still curious about what it meant to be alive in the world, and I suppose that was the point.”
• Gone Guru by Nadine Browne is out now in Australia (Fremantle Press; $34.99)
