“I feel like it’s better to be judged on the spirit of your book, rather than trying to account for every single word.”

Some metaphorical dogs:
Bernese Mountain Dogs
Small, baseball patterned bandana-wearing bulldogs
Un-Australian Australian shepherds

A few years ago, at a party thrown in Manhattan, a friend introduced me to Lexi Freiman. It was winter, and everyone wore black, except for Lexi, who wore a sleeveless, vintage white lace dress I envied tremendously. We spoke about the things you tend to speak about upon meeting other Australian writers living in New York—how you came to be here, how long since you’ve left home, which visa, which city, which school. We established that she had moved to America three years before me, and we were both from Sydney, but I am from the gentrifying western suburbs, and she from the leafy east. Over the years, I ran into Lexi at other parties, and she was always wearing something that I envied.

This year, Lexi published her debut novel, Inappropriation, a satire of identity politics, which takes place at a Sydney private girls’ school. Ziggy has transferred from a Jewish school and has to make friends. She falls in with girls who have become wayward disciples of Donna Haraway and the Cyborg Manifesto, girls who insist on the “correct” kind of language and thought, who run through the tunnel beneath Central Station accusing every passing man of committing “eye rape,” belligerent and forthright socialist feminists, whose feminism has been stripped of any of the hallmarks of socialism. I read Inappropriation a week after its release, and the night that I finished I sat at a bar with a friend, fumbling any attempt at articulating my thoughts about it. “Smart,” I said, as if that were sufficient. “Engaged with theory,” I stressed, trying to evoke the feeling of being excited about ideas for the first time, before you’ve sat through seminars on Deleuze and longed to scream. “Australian,” I said, in a way that meant something particular, familiar, and tribal.

When Lexi and I sat down to talk about her book, she suggested we go to the dog run in Washington Square Park. It was an incredibly hot August afternoon, a day when the sweat rolls down the backs of your thighs as you stand waiting on subway platforms, and people start fights on the street. Neither of us owns a dog. In the park there is a sign when you enter through the gates, warning you of the trouble you’ll be in if you’re found malingering in the dog run without a dog to run. We chanced it. We found a bench,...