Yes, this reviewer had to stagger across the room and lie on the couch to recover from the episode above, in Winton’s story ‘Blood and Water’. I wasn’t disgusted by any means, Winton is not a Thomas Keneally, though as our Sydneyside prophet of the parturition might himself have said, Winton does come perilously close. (To be told, in ‘Forest Winter’, that ‘the job and the cabin were a sudden mercy’ does make it feel like Bring Larks and Heroes under a new cover. Tim, Tim, don’t let the word get too sacred, mate – you’re on a good thing, stick to the old transparent medium, you can save your self-consciousness for book reviews!)

No, the fainting fit was brought on because suddenly, and in one of those powerful rushes of significance that Winton should be famous for, your forty-one- year-old male reviewer was back in another labour ward sixteen years ago where, in spite of Lamaze and the Childbirth Education Association he had to sit down in a faint while his wife and son carried on as best they could. Tim Winton gets under your skin. He is pushing relentlessly into a cluster of subjects he knows best – adolescence, the end of the nuclear family, death in the family, young marriage. Eventually somebody, probably me, is going to write an article about his narrowness, but for the time being he has located two or three wonderful raw spots in pre­dinky consciousness, and he has a lot of living to do – who knows which way he’ll go.

Young marriage is something of a hallmark of the late 1960s. Morton Flack’s father in Winton’s That Eye the Sky is paralysed in a car accident early in the novel. It comes as a shock to this reviewer, who habitually presumes that paralysed fathers are in another generation, to learn that Ort’s dad had long hair, had been a hippy and has Vietnam posters on his door. As Jerra says in ‘Gravity’, ‘It’s 1985, for God’s sake ... 1973 is over.’ And ‘the boy’ in ‘No Memory Comes’ is trying to bring back a cosy past, the time before his parents split up. Separation and self-defining experimentation is part of the grammar of my generation, but how will my children see the world? If you’re asking that question, read Minimum of Two, and Scission, and That Eye the Sky.

And if, like the present reviewer. you’ve forgotten all the desperate muscular heroics born of ignorance and youth it took to overcome the impossibilities of young parenthood, if your self-protecting memory has, like mine, allowed nothing to remain but the certain knowledge that for seven years you drove a 1959 VW Beetle up the Hume Highway every Christmas, full of children, nappies and Thermos Flasks, then Tim Winton is for you. We have a body of literature about adolescence and madness, and Winton adds something to that. He also adds something to our body of literature concerned with metaphysical responses to Australian nature, and to our understanding of loss, guilt, and the psychology of the family. But his really special contribution in Minimum of Two is to open up those lost years – the late twenties – one of those two or three periods of life when we are up to our necks in unselfconscious struggle.

Six of the stories in Minimum of Two deal directly with early marriage. They interlock, all involving the same characters, Rachel, Jerra, and their baby Sam. This makes the collection feel like an evolving novel; it’s a technique that reminds us of how the ‘size’ of a work is not always a question of physical size. ‘Forest Winter’ is the first story but we are already ahead of Sam’s momentous birth. Rachel and Jerra are living with baby Sam in an off-season holiday village. They are ‘beaten’ but still all right – this winter job has saved them. Jerra comes in from his forest work to find Rachel having an asthma attack with no Ventolin left. They roar into town in the old car, just managing to catch the chemist, another emergency over.

In ‘Gravity’, Jerra is thirty, Sam is a toddler, things have improved. In this more lyrical story Jerra is brooding, over time passing, over his now dead father, the apparent superficiality of the guests at their party. It’s as if his life has felt the first touch of autumn. There is a similar mood in ‘Nilsam’s Friend’, which like a few of these pieces in Minimum of Two is more of a prose poem than a story. Jerra Nilsam is visited by a friend just back from overseas – the friend had travelled to help himself make a decision but returns, like Jerra, sober about being thirty.

It is Rachel who is ‘The Strong One’. Not long after Sam is weaned she wants to start a University course, wants Jerra to take his turn minding the baby. ‘She had pushed down walls to live, to give life. She had been where there was no dependence, only a battle of solitary forces. And survived ... In her ocean of new feelings she knew she had to be the strong one.’ Another life passage is taking place in ‘More’. Rachel is about to finish her exams, Jerra has had a one­night stand and finds it has pushed him into a twilight mood in which he has lost face, while Rachel, who wants to pass her exams, is matter-of-fact. Jerra’s father is near death, and Jerra’s infidelity paradoxically enables an intimacy between the couple that confirms them as partners for life – that is, as Jerra realises with ‘the blood beating at his throat’, until death. ‘Blood and Water’ is the last story but that, at least in this narrative, is history.

Like Patrick White, Winton has a family of themes and obsessions which he addresses again and again. There’s no point in speculating about what might have happened in the actual life of our writer, but Tim Winton certainly understands the kind of emotional strategies deployed by people under stress. Jerra sings ‘A Frog went a-courtin’ as he drives to town with Rachel suffocating; ‘the boy’ in ‘No Me­mory Comes’ grows his hair long, and remembers lists of things important to him; in Scission Kylie throws the newborn chicks down a well in the story ‘Secrets’; while another narrator is obsessed with finding ‘My Father’s Axe’. And the equivalent stories in Minimum of Two are the most central; they seem to grow from a semi-autobiographic obsession. In fact the title story ‘Minimum of Two’ is one of the least convincing – it feels like a melodramatic construction built around a lame conceit. It doesn’t seem to have the same origin as the Jerra and Rachel stories.

These stories by and large celebrate the primal struggles of late youth, but like all such assertive outbreaks, they signify the end of something – a farewell. I suspect this is something of a transitional book for Winton. It has a dark mood, as dark as blood I’m sure he’d say. It’s unrelieved by any of the black-comic fatalism of That Eye the Sky - no mad ‘Grammers’, no Errol the Rooster. And how does he manage to write so well? It’s because he has so far had more interest in life than art, and I hope he stays that way. He’s not naive, though. I think it’s time we Easterners stopped thinking of Winton as the boy wonder somebody found on a sandhill; he’s already said more than most of us will say in a lifetime.