Of Elizabeth Jolley’s first novel, Palomino (1980), Nancy Keesing said it ‘establishes Elizabeth Jolley as absolutely one of the best writers of fiction in this country’ (ABR, March 1981). Of The Newspaper of Claremont Street, Tom Shapcott said its ‘capacity to touch the very nerve centre of human fragility, of exposing the tragedy in human needs within the small comedy of existence, is something I have not seen done with such delicate balance and precision since the ‘Pnin’ stories of Vladimir Nabakov’ (Fremantle Arts Centre Broadsheet, January-February, 1982). Sally McInerney’s judgement of The Newspaper is that ‘this slight and disturbing novel sways between socio­political allegory (about work and non­human relations) and conventional storytelling, and the two elements work against each other’ (National Times, 17–23 January, 1982). I agree with Keesing and Shapcott, but can understand why McInerney might have come to her conclusion.

Xavier Herbert is probably the most enigmatic of Australian writers, but there is nothing enigmatic about Laurie Clancy’s treatment of the man and his works in Twayne’s World Authors Series. This is the best assessment of Herbert since Vincent Buckley’s article ‘Capricornia’ (Meanjin, 19, 1960) forced critics to take Herbert seriously as a writer of stature and an experimentalist with the form of the novel, and since Harry Heseltine’s Xavier Herbert (OUP, 1973) drew attention to what Heseltine saw as the ‘deep motive’ of Herbert’s writing in the works that preceded Poor Fellow My Country.

Clancy’s book will be valuable to the student of Herbert and also to the newcomer to his works; it may be used mainly by Australian readers, but it should also help to change that situation which Clancy rightly refers to as ‘Herbert’s relative obscurity overseas’. The book is well written; Clancy’s critical judgements are unequivocal and, I believe, basically sound. That last statement will provoke dissent.

This novel raises more interesting questions about its author than about its characters and action.

The story, set in Chicago in 1913–14, is told by a well-to-do businessman, called Mr Cavarley, who sympathises with feminism and females, and sharply criticises men whose sexual and social life is corrupted by ‘the toy idea of WOMAN’. He falls in love with an independent-spirited secretary-editor, Sybyl Penelo (a name clearly suggesting some link with Sybylla Melvyn in My Brilliant Career, and with Miles Franklin herself, to whom in many ways Sybyl bears a close resemblance). Sybyl has radical doubts about whether she should ever get married, and though she likes Cavarley, she is also attracted to the younger, sillier, richer, but quite charming Bobby Hoyne. After Bobby’s convenient death in a car race, she draws closer to Cavarley and becomes engaged to him, though right to the end of the story it is not certain that she will actually marry him.

In a way, two words suffice for Plumb. Read it. It would be fair to add, ‘Make yourself read it.’ The inexorable, old man’s voice of its narrator George Plumb may irritate you, but before long you will respect his unrelenting and unsparing honesty with himself and his memories, and you will realise that everything he says has its place in this splendidly fashioned novel. At the end, he writes: ‘I thought, I’m ready to die, or live, or understand, or love, or whatever it is. I’m glad of the good I’ve done, and sorry about the bad.’

Plumb’s recollections span a few weeks in about 1946 during which he journeys from his home near Auckland to Wellington, in what he perceives, probably rightly, as a farewell visit to those of his New Zealand children whom he has not seen for a long time. His memories are of a full and spiritually adventurous life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is a man of strong beliefs that changed from time to time, not from any Vicar of Bray expediency, but from inner conviction. During World War I, as a socialist and pacifist, he went to jail for the mildest of seditious utterance: he opposed pro-war rituals in primary schools.