Encounter with the monstrous

Kif Kehlmann can encapsulate his life in a few phrases: married to Suzy, a devoted wife, with a preschool daughter and twins soon to arrive; living a modest life in Hobart (modest home, twenty-year-old car, serviceable clothing); working as a part-time doorman (and taking on odd jobs as they arise); and writing a novel—a literary one. His wife professes unflinching belief in him, convinced that Kif will produce a book that will earn him celebrity and them a life unconstrained by material want.

Yet Kif is nearing desperation on all fronts. "I was thirty-one when the magic vanished," he states (41). The novel is going nowhere, the impending arrival of twin babies portends an insuperable financial burden, and his wife's reassurances infuriate rather than buoy him up. A timely telephone call from an old mate changes all. "You still want to be a writer, right?" his friend Ray asks (41) and then leads Kif to a lucrative opportunity: ghostwriting the memoirs of Siegfried Heidl, notorious con man and corporate criminal of the highest magnitude. The assignment is awash with challenges. One is Heidl's mercurial personality; it is nearly impossible to pin him down to any part of his past: "Our first battle was birth. I wanted it in, he wanted it out—He said it had nothing to do with him" (3). Another is the quick deadline. Heidl will stand trial in six weeks for defrauding Australian banks of hundreds of millions of dollars. Publisher Gene Paley wants the completed manuscript before then so as to capitalize on Heidl's fresh notoriety. And then there is the deleterious effect on Kif once he enters Siegfried Heidl's all-consuming sphere: "I came to fear that the beginning of that book was also the end of me" (3).

In 1991, then would-be writer Richard Flanagan received a $10,000 offer to ghost-write the memoir of John Friedrich, a man whose résumé of activities and crimes resembles Siegfried "Ziggy" Heidl's. Flanagan's new novel, First Person, uses his experience as a springboard as he recounts Kif Kehlmann's struggle to ghostwrite Ziggy's memoir, while his subject obstructs and frustrates at every turn. Had he worked with the CIA to depose Gough Whitlam as prime minister in 1975? Had he played some role in political butcheries in Laos or Chile or Nicaragua? Is there a good reason why someone brought up in South Australia (birth information is revealed) speaks a German-accented English? Kif's stream of questions meet with cryptic responses or an impatient hand wave or a sudden and spurious announcement that "he had to go to a meeting with a celebrity agent who wanted to represent him" (134).

Kif's love-hate relationship with Ziggy propels First Person, his exasperated outbursts countered by Kif's acknowledgment, "something was taking hold of me" (42). Ray, now Heidl's bodyguard, warns Kif, "Don't let him in" (53), "He's like slime" (103). Heidl alarms Kif with his ready knowledge of Kif's domestic world—the name of his wife and daughter, the potential for complications with Suzy's pregnancy. As Kif presses Ziggy for biographical explanations, Ziggy expresses a desire to come to Hobart, to meet Kif's family. Or he will turn the questioning back to the questioner: "Why do you want to be a writer anyway?" (207), laughing at the notion that Kif can call himself a novelist with no novel published or even written.

First Person is also a novel about writing, a narrative tracing the development of a man who must abandon a narrow, futile conception of a writer in order to put into print the life of a man who "contradicted his own lies with fresh lies" (122). As Kif's wife endures an extended, excruciating labor, he confronts his own effort to survive the Heidl project intact. He concedes an irresistibility to Ziggy and his aim to live large and unrepentant and a corresponding dwarfing...