[In the following mixed review of Three Uneasy Pieces, Enright contends that while there are “brilliant passages” throughout the collection, the “book's chief uneasiness lies in the reader's fear of having missed the point.”]

On the first leaf of this slim triptych Patrick White suggests that we do indeed grow wiser with age, just as long as we disbelieve the myth about growing wiser with age. Sterility and decay are the primary themes here; and guilt: even vegans must feel guilty as they hear “the whimper of a frivolous lettuce, the hoarse-voiced protest of slivered parsnip”.

In the third and most substantial story, “The Age of a Wart”, the narrator, born into a wealthy Sydney family and now a famous writer, “a stuffed turkey at banquets”, broods on his vanity and false ambition. He compares himself with his schoolfellow, a poor boy called Bluey, who has since lived with Aborigines and taught them carpentry, helped to drag out bodies in Bethnal Green during the Blitz, kept up the spirits of prisoners of the Japanese (“‘E was the best mate a man ever'ad’”, says a survivor), and ministered to A-bomb victims in Hiroshima.

This almost excessively exemplary history, underscoring “the distance between life and literature”, heightens the narrator's sense that he has always been trapped inside his own inadequacy. Bluey, he says, “is the part of me I've always aspired to. My unlikely twin, who got away.” He cannot call his house a home: it is crammed with his books, translated into “every inaccessible language”, and he is so often away from it, making speeches on behalf of literature and ethics or collecting honorary degrees. “Being famous is such a solemn and consuming occupation, I have to laugh sometimes. If only I could share my laughter with someone who would see the point.” Bluey is never available, he has always moved on.

In the closing sentence, as the hypodermic takes effect, the old, weary, desolate “I” turns into “we”:

It is we who hold the secret of existence we who control the world WE.

Otherwise—or notwithstanding, for the apparent implication is that only with death does the evil in us die—the story is pretty cheerless, a grim, self-punishing illustration of the lines in “Little Gidding” on “the rending pain of reenactment” and other gifts reserved for age.

“O Lord”, the first piece asks, “dispel our dreams, of murders we did not commit—or did we?” Warts, whose lifetime is said to last two years, link Bluey and the narrator, and may be thought to symbolize their twinship or possibly the evil that dies in due course. But the transition from gouging out the eyes of potatoes and slicing parsnips to the cruelties we inflict on other people isn't especially convincing. The book's chief uneasiness lies in the reader's fear of having missed the point, for distinguished authors must surely mean something distinct, and Nobel Prize winners are likely to mean nobly or at least largely. There are brilliant passages: for example, in the second piece, “the skitter of drums” in the ballroom of a ghastly Alpine hotel, and the resident priest who will administer either extreme unction or an enema; the bare-bones dialogue is adroitly mimetic; and the indignities of geriatric hospitals are succinctly conveyed. It wouldn't be right to say the Emperor has no clothes, but he is scantily clad on this appearance, and perhaps rather uneasy about showing himself in public.