Appreciation by Liam Pieper
“The day has started, and Oli must rise to meet it.”
Australian author Liam Pieper’s third novel Appreciation (2024) follows protagonist Oliver Darling rising to meet the tasks before him, and oftentimes falling short. Oli is an artist. He is queer, masculine, ostensibly working class, and about to do the hardest thing he’s ever had to: face the consequences for his actions.
When the novel begins, Oli is gearing up for his new exhibition: a selection of works he’s not entirely happy with but will suffice. He’s taking part in interviews, telling anyone who’ll listen about the “river of violence and toxic masculinity that runs through the Aussie heart.” That is, until he goes on live TV and says enough to upset just about everyone.
Because Oli – despite the curated self he presents to the world – isn’t really an exceptional person. I’d go so far as to say he’s fairly unpleasant.
Appreciation, then, despite the façade of its humour and sardonic narrator, offers a portrait of a complicated man; a portrait that gives insight into a complex depiction of queerness. Oli’s self-proclaimed identity as a “queer artist from the country” provokes us to question the kinds of characters we allow, or are comfortable with, representing queerness. He is unapologetic about his identity, but also “winkingly tells interviewers he’s never going to shove that fact down your throat.” He is “wonderfully charming” but also thoroughly wrapped up in his own status of celebrity in Australian culture. Oliver Darling feels like a walking contradiction, and that’s exciting.
This more multifaceted depiction of queerness reminds me of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019). In her memoir of domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship, Machado asserts the necessity of showing queer characters, and queer people, in all their messiness. She says, “by expanding representation, we give space to queers to be – as characters, as real people – human beings … We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.” Oli is more real, more genuine, because of his bad behaviours. His character eschews prescriptive ideals of identity, allowing him the potential to be varied, multifaceted, and shitty. Though he’s not always likeable, Oli is by no means a trope.
“‘It was fucked, boys,’ Oli tells the children. ‘It was absolutely fucked. You finally get the nerve to come out of the closet and all you’ve done is step into a slightly larger closet.’”
Despite Oli Darling’s complexity, there remains the expectation from Australian media, and society at large, that he play a part. He is aging – Oli is feeling his early forties. Throughout Appreciation, the narrator offers glimpses of the life (and love) that has seen Oli reach this point. These reflections give insight into a man flailing for a life slipping from his grasp.
One incident sees Oli travel to speak at the Anglican Adventure School Camp for Boys. On arrival, he meets some students he soon determines are in the throes of “forbidden love.” Yet, to these students, the love is not all that forbidden. During Oli’s talk, these students kiss in front of their classmates. While they giggle, and express no shame, Oli is terrified for them – he yells, he stutters, he is overcome with panic:
“He tries to explain how it was for him. The sheer terror of his first kiss, the first clumsy fumbling in cane fields—the dread that permeated that moment and has lasted a lifetime, so that sex has never lost that feeling of a lonely town menaced by a thunderstorm that refuses to break.”
Oli presents a version of himself that is unflappable. He’s a bloke; as much a man from the country as he is queer. Yet, despite that, he’s haunted by what queerness meant for him growing up, and what it continues to mean. Oli feels acutely that he can never fully be himself. He says, “They just want two dimensions … I never got a chance to grow into a person.” Through Oli, Pieper makes explicit Australian society’s expectation that queer people fit into simple, definable boxes. Personhood is not given easily.
The second half of Appreciation speeds toward its conclusion by way of a depraved art world laid bare. Despite all the excitement, though, I found myself saddened. In this novel, as in our contemporary day, art is held in tension between having some intangible moral or spiritual value, and the value it is assigned by a culture focused entirely on prizes and profit. Yet, throughout Appreciation, it seems art is deemed more product than anything else.
“Art is worth exactly what you’ll pay for it, nothing more, nothing less.”
Several times, Oli – who finds himself artistically unmotivated – feels inspiration emerge only as ideas for winning the Archibald Prize. Art is, in this way, stripped of its parts, and deemed valuable only for its financial worth. Art cleans dirty money, it makes the rich richer, and it is entirely inaccessible to the lower and middle classes. There do remain redeemable moments about what art can be, they’re just always out of reach.
Appreciation is a novel of queerness, art and wit. Through glorious narration, we are offered an understanding of the potential of queer identity and the corrupt underbelly of the art world. Oli Darling, though somewhat agonising, is a complex example of what it means to be more than just tidy labels and tired tropes.
James Gobbey (he/him) is a writer and bookseller from lutruwita/Tasmania. He recently graduated with First Class Honours from the University of Tasmania, with a project focused on contemporary fiction and its potential to transform the present. His work has previously been published in Togatus magazine.