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Tenants of Time
| Article
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20322 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
4,196 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Bawer
Bruce Bawer is the author of Diminishing Fictions: Essays on
the Modern American Novel and Its Critics (Graywolf Press). He
has three books forthcoming in 1992: Prophets and Professors,
a collection of essays on modern poetry and its critics; The
Screenplay's the Thing, a compilation of pieces about films,
and Coast to Coast, a volume of poetry. |
Who in all the world now reads an Australian novel? More and more people, one hopes, for while American fiction is increasingly mired in writing-workshop flatness and banality, Australia--with a population roughly equal to that of Texas--has in recent years made an extraordinary number of memorable contributions to the genre. To be sure, for all the distinctive qualities of books like David Malouf's The Great World and Peter Carey's The Tax Inspector, certain themes and ingredients recur. Particularly noticeable is the emphasis on family--with its characteristic rewards and burdens--and on marginal, often quirky characters, ranging from mentally impaired spinster recluses to restless young men who flee into the outback. One after another of these books, while capturing Australia's immensity, focuses tightly, almost claustrophobically, on the unpretentious everyday life of a small circle of friends or relatives, and suggests that one need not venture beyond one's own little corner of the earth to experience all that life has to offer; moreover, like the works of Australia's late Nobel laureate, Patrick White, they often celebrate nature and its infusion by the supernatural.
To mention the young Western Australian writer Tim Winton in connection with White, Malouf, and Carey is not, I think, inappropriate. Though he remains, at thirty-two, an erratic talent--more to be praised for his sweep and ambition, perhaps, than for his delicacy and polish--the brief, rhapsodic opening section of his fifth and biggest novel, Cloudstreet, exhibits his singular talents at their finest. "Will you look at us by the river!" it begins.
"The whole restless mob of us on spread blankets in the dreamy briny sunshine skylarking and chiacking about for one day, one clear, clean, sweet day in a good world in the midst of our living. Yachts run before an unfelt gust with bagnecked pelicans riding above them, the city their twitching backdrop, all blocks and points of mirror light down to the water's edge."
Like many a passage in Patrick White, these opening sentences sound as much like poetry--an Australian version of Dylan Thomas, perhaps--as prose, presenting the reader not only with a picture but with an atmosphere, a temperament, a voice. Like Thomas Wolfe's voice, Winton's is euphoric, affirmative, at its best freshly and vigorously evoking his native region's distinctive sounds, smells, and rhythms. As the reader will shortly learn, the city that provides the "twitching backdrop" to this scene is Perth, on the Western Australian coast; and the "restless mob" consists of two large working-class families, the Pickleses and the Lambs, who for
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