So for Moorhouse it is never rigidly true, for example, that no one is an island, any more than it is true that everyone is an island. If he sets up a cosy situation of togetherness between people it is always undercut, sometimes by returning to a given situation through the perspective of a different pair of eyes, or from an earlier or later moment in time. Sometimes it is simply the introduction of a new fact, a throwaway comment by the narrative voice or a chance remark by a character, like Dell in ‘Dell Goes Into Politics’ (The Americans, Baby), who tells us right at the end of the story that she might be pregnant, throwing the whole shebang onto another plane. Or when the narrator of ‘Across the Plains, Over the Mountains, and Down to the Sea’ (Futility and Other Animals), discovers that the journey of his life, the moment of togetherness that has meant so much to him, has been completely forgotten by his former lover. Eh? What journey? This is basically what his readers understand him to mean by ‘the discontinuous narrative’.

But I would want to take issue with those critics like Don Anderson, who argue that the emphasis of Moorhouse’s work is on isolation. As Anderson has formulated this interpretation in his insightful and, I suspect, extremely influential article, ‘Frank Moorhouse’s Discontinuities’ (Southerly, No. 36, 1976), his characters are alone, ‘isolated in an indifferent universe’. Anderson backs up his claim by quoting Moorhouse himself in a National Times interview, (1–6 July 1974) in which he remarks of the discontinuous narrative that: ‘It’s got a lot to do with seeing life as a series of fragments. I don’t see any underlying harmony or unity in life’. And neither he does, certainly not in the way a Patrick White, for instance, might see it. But it would seem to be a serious distortion of Moorhouse’s work to claim that there is not, along with the emphasis on isolation, an equal attention to momentary togetherness, the fleeting experience of unity, of connectedness, indeed, of continuity. These moments are not illusory. Moorhouse is not saying that love or connectedness is illusory. These things are only illusory if we think of them as something other than they are – undying love and philosophical systems by which to live your life being the biggest culprits.

This means that if there can be said to be a thread running through Moorhouse’s work, it is Doubt. If anything can be said to be certain about the human condition, it is the condition of uncertainty, even the value of uncertainty (although there are many sides to the coin) – and this is where Moorhouse takes leave of most other writers of fiction today.

The uncertainty that most of us, writers and readers alike, spend the best part of our thinking lives trying to eradicate as we struggle to clarify and shape whatever notions we have, is, in Moorhouse’s fictional world, the best bit, the bit that informs every word he puts down on the page. So that while most writers worth their salt will eventually arrive at a sense of ambivalence in their work, for Moorhouse this is the heart of the matter, this is where it all begins. In his world, paranoia is often seen to be a pretty healthy state.

Moorhouse as writer is a man of many parts – sad, thoughtful, funny, almost always ironic. His characters are also sad, thoughtful, funny and ironic. Quite often they are rank escapists, but never unsympathetic – they all represent aspects of the case. His latest collection, Room Service: Comic writings of Frank Moorhouse, is a marvellously funny look at the same themes that have always interested him, but none the less serious for that. As they say Downunda, ‘Ya Godda Larf’.

Francois Blase, character-in-chief of this collection, is an itinerant freelance writer whose idea of travel is to get from Hilton to Hilton with the least possible fuss. He’s happiest researching native customs, local colour and quaintnesses in bars.

Blase is the exponent par excellence of the gentle art of paranoia. On the face of it he’s got everything going for him – an enquiring mind, an eye for the significant detail, the desire to communicate, to be helpful etc. Really he’s a thoroughly likeable chap – the only problem being that poor Blase can’t seem to decode the messages he is picking up in quite the way their encoders intend. When he sticks strictly to the rules (the ‘protocol’) as he does in the hilarious ‘Cultural Delegate’, it is only to come unstuck when he discovers that the Chinese have studied their protocol too, and know all about how to behave with Aussies, so that when he arrives at the Chinese banquet decked out in his ‘elegant Mao jacket’ from Buck’s of Melbourne, all prepared for a sexless, sober ‘do’, he discovers that everyone else is in dinner suits, and so it goes, from bad to worse, in the classic tradition of the Comedy of Errors.

They were also a bit drunk, slapped everyone on the back, threw food at each other, kissed him on the mouth, grabbed his genitals at every occasion and asked not too subtly for gifts, including automobiles and motorbikes.

He was offered sex, and the party did not stop ten minutes after the hot towels, but went on into the early hours.

Then there is the wonderful tale, ‘The Drover ‘s Wife’, based, so we are po-facedly told, on a paper given by a certain Franco Casamaggiore at the Conference on Commonwealth Writing in Milan. This Italian chappie has got it all nutted out that what the various versions of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ are really all about is Australian men in the outback making love to sheep, ‘an elaborate. example of a national culture joke, an "insider joke".’ But Franco has the inside story, and he’s not silly – he’s checked it out with his Aussie mates, who certainly get a good giggle out of Franco:

They experienced an undefined relief by joking about such matters – that is, the relief of confession. I let them joke at me for it was the joke to which I listened not them. This is the manoeuvre of the national joke, the telling and the not telling at the same time. So yes, I was being ‘taken in’ by my Australian sources – ‘taken in’ to the secret. Taken in to their confidence.

This is how it is in Moorhouseland – as the narrator of ‘An Incident from the Wake for Jack Kerouac’ puts it, ‘... straining as always to be part of it, feeling always some distance from the centre ...’

It’s always a worry when you pick up a new work by an author whose work has been very special to you. But never fear. Franco/Francois/Frank hasn’t lost his grip, not a millimetre. Room Service is one of the funniest books any Australian has ever written. And while it’s beaut to see that our Francois has recently been discovered en France by les Francais, who are now, it seems, au fait (à leur avantage) avec Frank-de-Balmain, let’s just hope the semioticians and post-whatsits don’t get their hooks into one of the most accessible writers who ever produced ‘Grey Tart’.