Elizabeth Jolley’s two novels were preceded by two books of short stories published by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Five Acre Virgin (1976) and The Travelling Entertainer (1979). She works and reworks her materials over long periods of time, filling out a description more and then putting it back in her files, developing a few more aspects·of the characters waiting there. Recently published work well might contain some of the earliest-drafted material. People and things from one story may have a minor or major place in another. Characters like Laura and Andrea in Palomino have been glimpsed in Entertainer’s ‘Winter Nellis’ and ‘Grasshoppers’, as Keesing notes; and Victor in Newspaper is very like The Doll in ‘The Wedding of the Painted Doll’ or The Prince in ‘Another Holiday for the Prince’, both in Virgin.

Elizabeth Jolley’s work has developed more as if it were a spatial than a temporal thing, as if it were a tapestry rather than a story which is supposed to have a beginning, middle and end. (One is reminded of the thirty-four brown herring-bone rows Newspaper’s main character ultimately has sewn onto her skirts.) Each work can be talked about separately, but the reader familiar with them all more quickly can accommodate to the density and texture. The newcomer to Jolley’s work may find it difficult to adjust. The characters are eccentric, their diction often strange; the situations can be quite commonplace or quite improbable; the narrative voice is often quaint, and the narrated events may seem to jump about. This may be why her audience does not seem to have increased as much as some of the critical opinion of her.

It is important to realise that Jolley’s stories really are not so much about the things and people in them per se but rather more about the actual and implied relationships among them. The meaning of her work is deep below the surface, and one can almost be satisfied just to catch a glimpse of the shape of the meaning that happens to the characters sometimes and to the sensitive and diligent reader more often. The things and the people in Jolley’s work often have a biblical dullness or radiance about them. As a girl, the protagonist recalls a passage from the bible: ‘Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?’

When asked by her teacher what she understands by that, she responds, ‘I don’t know Miss Jessop ... it’s in the Bible and only God understands the Bible’.

An indirect testimony to the depth of plot is how meagre and unsatisfying the basic story line itself is. Margarite Morris, a cleaner, is called ‘Newspaper’ because she knows all the neighbourhood gossip, and ‘Weekly’ because that is how often she goes to the houses in Claremont Street. After years as a cleaning lady, the elderly Weekly who daily leaves her dumpy rented room to sort through everyone’s real and metaphorical dirty linen, conceives the idea of moving to a small country property; she saves hard, is given a cast­off auto, buys five acres and a cottage fifty miles from town and retires there. Along the way, though, there are some relationships which complicate and give meaning to the story.

For example, her brother Victor, an intellectual whereas Weekly and her mother definitely are not, is a selfish foppish egotist who bullies and bribes them into demonstrating their love for him. When he is sick and down on his luck, trying to get $100 from Weekly, she inadvertently betrays him to his sinister creditors and he is never heard from again.

Another example is the Torben family, soi-disant aristocratic immigrants who become parasites on Weekly. Under the guise of friendship they invite her in and then demand that she cook and fetch for them. When he dies, the wife Nastasya insinuates herself into Weekly’s life, moving into her flat, her bed and eventually her home in the country.

As she creates such relationships, Jolley is posing questions: What is the integrity of the self, what are the rights of the individual? Where does Christian charity and where does love fit in the scheme of human affairs? There are many potential answers.

One answer suggested is Crazy, an aged neighbourhood cat, usually someone’s unwelcome rooftop boarder. She invades Weekly’s flat and bed, to have seven kittens there. Eventually, Crazy takes her brood into a corner, but her particular sense of the order of things requires her to leave one rejected kitten crying on the bed. Weekly gives away all the kittens she can (the Lacey’s can’t refuse a fourth or she’ll spread gossip about them), then drowns the rest in a bucket. Eventually Crazy goes away, presumably back to the rooftops. After she drowns the kittens, Weekly goes back inside and closes the door so as not to hear Crazy’s cries.

When people’s actions don’t appear inexplicable, they may seem predetermined in Jolley’s work. The narrator says ‘the Nastasya, the product of her upbringing, was ill-equipped for the life she had before her and no amount of help from Weekly could make her overcome her self-centred arrogance’. Of Victor, Weekly’s mother says ‘I don’t know why he’s like he is’, but Weekly ‘realised that what happened to him was bound to have happened’. Her next thought is of great significance to the book: ‘If only she had not played such a part in the whole thing herself.

Weekly becomes blessed in herself but damned in her situation. Late in life she suddenly realises what she wants to be free, to live in the country; but then there is Nastasya. Nastasya wants everything – her beloved Torben, the family estate with lawns and gardens and orchards, the manservants and footmen and her childhood nurse whose name she can’t remember. In other words, her husband gone, their wealth and their relationship gone, she wants her youthful past. Weekly decides that Nastasya must be institutionalised. But when she tries to drive or walk her to the mental hospital, Nastasya by instinct and by craft comes cunningly alive, is beautiful in a compelling human way. Despite her histrionics and hyperbole, Nastasya knows that she is old and ugly and unpleasant; she knows her youth and past are gone forever. She is eagerly choosing second-best, to live. She imagines Porphyry’s dilemma and affirms this awful life.

Weekly sees this and is dismayed by it. There are two things she knows, one a fact and one a truth. The fact is she wished she had not been involved in Victor’s final difficulties. The truth was told her by her mother: ‘When you knew the truth you died’, something Weekly knew only in a notional way. Seeing Nastasya, she fears she might come to know it in a real way: ‘Weekly was afraid to’find out too much for this might bring about her own death. She was getting on, she knew this, but she wanted to live long enough to have her five acres’.

Nastasya shows that she has changed. Weekly changes too by realising that to be free she must cast off the burden she calls ‘Narsty’. In other words, Jolley seems to refute the idea of predestination.

A key has been offered in the first chapter when Weekly helped Mr Kingston with his crossword puzzle. ‘A universal building material which does not last forever’ is clay. Clay is central to the novel, for its biblical significance, as in the quotation Weekly remembers (Isaiah 45:9). Clay is also central to the conclusion – there is clay on Weekly’s new property, and her boots stick in it when she tries to plant a pear tree. Nastasya commandeers those boots and begins to give orders to Weekly, actually seeming to know how to plant trees. As Weekly puts the rich black earth into the hole, Nastasya starts to sink into the clay. For the first time in her life, Weekly dances, around the pear tree to the sound of the foil label, like a bride. Then she goes to the house in the distance, where she cannot hear Nastasya’s voice.

Weekly had to change, to throw off Nastasya; and the brutality of the separation only emphasises the imperative. Margarite Morris – Weekly – Newspaper – Aunty – M. Morris – Morris – M.M. – has gotten what she wants. She is not fertile like Crazy, but she is fertile in her own way as a five acre virgin. Perhaps when getting rid of Nastasya she got too close to the truth. Although she could not hear her, ‘In the fast falling dusk she was just able to see her down there. She could make out a grey figure alone in the cold grey evening, and it looked as if Nastasya was dancing the pear tree dance’.

Shall the clay reproach the potter? What does it mean to want to change? How to presume the direction of change? For a moment we feel we have glimpsed the shape of the meaning. But then the meaning dissolves in the denouement or coda where a still older Weekly, a caricature of her former self, continues to live alone on the property with a curious earth-covered mound down by the pear tree. She is waiting. ‘No one could wait like Crazy ... No one could wait like Crazy except Weekly’.

Newspaper is an important addition to Elizabeth Jolley’s work. From what I have said above, it is clear why I agree with Nancy Keesing and Tom Shapcott in my estimation of it.