As a reviewer – and, most curly of all challenges, a reviewer of fellow Australian writers – Goldsworthy is witty, perceptively generous, and courageous. A great reviewer. (And I use the term aware that this currency is being taken on a forced dive when we are presented with books that include the work of ‘100 of our best reviewers’. Let’s be sensible: I’d say we have maybe a dozen really good ones. Happy the few authors who get even one of those dozen.)

His poems are nimble, various, not just clever but intelligent, and incremental giveaways of an immensely attractive personality. As a performer of his own work, the circuit impresarios are cottoning on fast to his audience appeal. And in between all this he stitches the coral-opened feet of American novelists, eases the trauma of celebrities accused of harbouring forbidden substances in their luggage, and dispenses sleeping draughts, antibiotics, and the needful generally to alienated, blocked, and homeless writers. In brief, services to literature.

Ah, Peter, but you want my thoughts on Maestro. For, to date, the corpus of Goldsworthy fiction has been my least joy. But, to come out with it, half of Maestro is a delight to me, and the other half provides the more perverse pleasure of observing a technical problem that I know is close to the writer’s heart. In fact I own up to getting excited by the symptoms of this case and the body’s ever more energetic and subtle reactions to them. Please, somebody, do an article on Peter Goldsworthy that takes us beyond ‘a regional writer concerned with yuppies’.

Goldsworthy has long been obsessed with the concentrated effect possible in the short story and with the extreme difficulty of achieving the same effect in the novel, where there is a forceful pressure to relax and dissipate and bridge and fall into the episodic. The most celebrated instance of this was a review of Peter Carey’s Illywhacker, where he discerned, and specified to the page, two beaut short stories lurking in that novel. Now, after three volumes of short stories, he has tackled a novel and the problem himself. He very nearly proves that it can be done but, of course, ‘Is water at fifty degrees half­boiling?’

Paul Crabbe, a high school student, lives in Darwin with his parents, professional and amateur musicians, and takes piano lessons from a very elderly Austrian, Eduard Keller. There are two revelations in the novella, that of the crisis in Keller’s life which so profoundly changed, inter alia, his musical attitudes and brought him to Darwin and, dependent on this, Paul’s own realisation of the degree and nature of his talent and the attitude he must take.

This quartet and their interplay are a joy. The writing is precise, sensuous, funny, and there is a complexity in the human intercourse that in previous Goldsworthy fiction has been absent or at least never so sustained. The opening pages, introducing these characters, are masterly: ‘One or two drunken whistles had also followed us up; whistles living far beyond their sexual means, my mother later reported to my father contemptuously.’

The skill is further refined in that the constant wit of all four of these characters never remotely resembles a clever author’s string of one-liners. It is a humour that is always differentiated and utterly in keeping with the wisdom and maturity of its source. Keller works out his salvation, Paul his vocation, and the parents hover and encourage and accompany.

But no adolescent works out his vocation in such restricted company, or in one day. So we wander away from the title character and have something of a bildungsroman and portrait of the young artist (except that Paul is no Abb Liszt nor was meant to be), and the novella covers ten years and the schoolyard bullying and a rock group and first and last love and travel in Europe. None of this is ever less than well done, and yes it is relevant, but it is thin in comparison with the direct interplay between the four main characters. Could we somehow have Maestro manage the same spiritual journey but within a classical unity of time and place? How it must gall a poet to write and then leave a line like ‘The years in Adelaide, at the Conservatorium, passed quickly’.

Yet the problem is not nearly as simple as I might suggest. For Maestro is centrally about beauty. Most particularly about the narcotic opulence of sense and sensual experience. Paul Crabbe is immersed in it. ‘I was lost to the world of ideas – lifted to some high hormonal plateau, feeling manly, invulnerable, immensely content.’ And at the end of the book he says: ‘Can I know that mine was a foolish, innocent world, a world of delusion and feeling and ridiculous dreams – a world of music – and still love it? Endlessly, effortlessly.’

But this has been the world of his youth, of Darwin, of his family – of all the finest writing in the book. He has to accept a world that is less exotic, more drained, perfunctory, horizon-bound – the world of the novel’s less inspired writing. And if there is a subtle beauty in un­romance – the pudgy Rosie, Paul’s true love, as opposed to the flawless Megan, the object of his first lust, or The Children’s Bach (textbook, not H. G.) as opposed to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody – it goes against the grain of Goldsworthy’s writing in this book.

Yet it is Keller, the most eccentric growth ‘in the steamy hothouse of Darwin’ where the ‘people were no exception … exotic, hothouse blooms’, who in fact embodies the post-aesthetic stance that comes to be seen as the higher wisdom. So Maestro is a fiction full of an internal tension, partly very satisfying, partly a problem left hanging.

If the concentrated perfection of the short story eludes Goldsworthy here, there are other strengths of the genre that he fits and tunes with a sure touch. His chapters have much of the shape of stories, and with his endings he can turn up/turn on the dying fall past the point where the more contemporary short story would dare to go. The ambitiousness of a finale (to a great paragraph) such as ‘And thus, while I listened, the future became the present, unchallenged; and all too soon the regretted past’ might hark back to another tale of a lost dream, the last line of Gatsby, but it also reproduces the cadence and exact syntax (principal clause, semicolon, concluding clause) of the last sentence in nearly half of the stories in Dubliners.

The necessary elusiveness of perfection, the unplumbed ocean beneath articulateness, the ambivalence of beauty – these are the revolving concerns of Peter Goldsworthy, and handled not just with irony but with an effervescent, compassionate wit. He can’t help being funny, but he’s wise too. There is a situation he uses frequently, the marital conversation, and his rendition is classical, elegant, plangent, and yet jokey, gravid and yet bouncy, a noble manner of moving through the dark. A dazzling case in point is the recent poem ‘After the Ball’ in the August issue of Sydney Review. But much of Maestro hums with the same warm, steadying virtue.