Love & Virtue by Diana Reid
“When you take so many privileged people, and you insulate them from outside influences, it's no surprise they end up in this bubble that's super sexist and racist and classist. It makes total sense that you're a bit, I don't know, morally impoverished.”
Love & Virtue (2021) is the debut novel from Australian author Diana Reid, written amidst the lockdowns of the pandemic. Reid was on the precipice of a successful theatre career that was poised to take her across the globe when she found her plans on hold indefinitely - and so decided to dedicate her time writing a manuscript.
The novel charts Michaela’s first year at Fairfax, a (fictional) women’s residential college at a prestigious Sydney university. Michaela is a high-achieving student from Canberra, but she doesn’t come from wealth and takes her place through a hard-earned scholarship. She is swiftly thrown into an entirely unfamiliar world, as everyone around her already seems to know one another from their days at the private schools that have landed them at the same university.
Michaela feels uncertain about her choices so far in life. She seems to have always felt unsure of herself and a bit of an outsider - feelings that are only amplified in her new surroundings. As she grapples with fitting in, she inevitably becomes friends with a group for no other reason than they are all existing in the same space:
“I didn’t question whether these were really ‘my people’. That suggests too critical a stance. I was conscious only of surviving the week with a secure reputation, and it felt not so much that I’d chosen these friends as that chance and circumstance had thrust them upon me.”
Michaela also forms a friendship with her enigmatic neighbour, Eve, a character unlike anyone she has ever met. Eve uses performative masturbation in a monologue-skit for a college talent contest. She quizzes their philosophy professor during their first-ever lecture and makes no secret of believing herself to be above the ‘moral poverty’ she finds herself surrounded by.
Michaela and Eve are vastly different from one another and yet inexplicably drawn together. Despite how close they appear, there is always a darkness just festering at the edges. We already know from the flashback that opens the first chapter that the friendship meets a disastrous end, and everything that follows gradually builds to this reveal:
“Whenever I say I was at university with Eve, people ask me what she was like, sceptical perhaps that she could have always been as whole and self-assured as she now appears. To which I say something like: ‘People are infinitely complex.’ But I say it in such a way - so pregnant with misanthropy - that it’s obvious I hate her.”
I went into this book with a feeling of apprehension. The opening flashback depicts two young drunk freshers fumbling their way through an unfortunate sexual encounter. At first read, it could be easy to dismiss this book as nothing more than a YA romp through the murky waters of self-discovery university often is.
But as we are drawn deeper into Michaela’s self-discovery, Reid delivers a far more complex story than excessive drinking and one night stands. With nuance, Reid explores core themes of consent, memory, privilege, sexism, privacy, and ultimately who gets to tell a story and how; does every story need to be told? And if the story serves a greater purpose, does it matter who gets hurt, cut out or misrepresented in the process?
“Of course it troubled me to think that Eve took my story when she could have just imagined one. But what was troubling me more, what had always troubled me since I first read her article, was: how much of this one was true?”
Reid’s writing is superb and compelling - I couldn’t put this down. She walks the line of intellectual while ensuring the reader never feels isolated from the story. Michaela is an intensely relatable character, and the portrayal of Eve as someone charming yet destructive, someone you want to hate but can’t help crave attention from, is on point.
Love & Virtue will keep you hooked right down the final, toe-curling paragraphs and killer end sentence.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
