[In the following review, Avant maintains that the short story form “demands immediate rapport between artist and audience; and White, the most austere of modern novelists, isn't an intimate writer.”]

White is a master of the novel. At his best he draws us in, but only so far: the vise that grips the reader is carefully distanced, and that distance can provide an oracular power. But the short story is a form that demands immediate rapport between artist and audience; and White, the most austere of modern novelists, isn't an intimate writer. The stories in his early collection The Burnt Ones are either whimsical, with O. Henry twists and lovable Greeks talking in English except for occasional italicized Greek words, or portentous without delivering. The Cockatoos, a new collection of novellas and stories, shows White trying to shape the short form to his own special gifts rather than degrading those gifts by trying to be cozy. The title story and two others, “Sicilian Vespers” and “Five-Twenty,” are too attenuated to hold much interest; but the rest, although one doesn't necessarily like them, command attention.

“The Night the Prowler” rings changes on that hoary motif, the victim who is actually the victimizer. Felicity, the proper daughter of proper parents and engaged to a proper diplomat, longs to be mastered by brute male strength. When prowler tries to rape her, he turns out to be a slimy weakling whom she forces to submit to her ravenous desires. After staging a rape as an out from her dull engagement, she goes on orgies of destruction. If she can't find a man who is up to her, she'll vent her anger on the possessions that the respectable hide behind. She becomes a housebreaker, not to rob but to destroy, and achieves a garish release in disfiguring expensive chairs, mounting them as though they were centaurs: “Riding their thick thighs, still slashing, sawing at the mouth which held the bit, she was to some extent vindicated, if guiltily racked by the terrible spasms which took possession of her.” White completes Felicity's appalling liberation by taking her through a capsule version of the ages of man; and if he strips her of some humanity by making her a device, he rounds his grotesque fable into a bearably comic one.

“The Full Belly,” about a family of starving Greek aristocrats during the German occupation, isn't quite bearable. Although White's prose has never been more razor-sharp, he uses it to slice his characters to bits. When hunger is unsatisfied, the spirit corrodes, and these Greeks turn into vipers. They are the reverse of Voss, whose spirit expands as his flesh falls away. I think that White intended us to sense our own atavistic potentiality in the family's dehumanization, but what we sense is that the author loathes his characters. White has compressed his grimmest personal vision into 20 pages—a feat of storytelling, but the compulsive read seems an eternity.

The opening novella, “A Woman's Hand,” is less accessible and, perhaps for that reason, not nearly so repellent. I shuddered at the central figure a frigid busybody wife who brings about a marriage that leads to insanity and death. She appears throughout White's work in one form or another, and he clearly despises her. Although I'm not sure what “A Woman's Hand” is supposed to be about and don't understand the motivations, and although I suspect that White shares my uncertainties, the novella is riveting. White has gone further with one of his stylistic specialties: prose rhythms that provide equivalents for the characters' hang-ups and eruptions into madness, eruptions that the reader can only partially intuit. The madness in “A Woman's Hand” is never clarified; it's suggested by the insane friend's perception of ocean sunsets as blazing peacocks, emblems of a voluptuous redemption that is unattainable. White has taken the most lucid passages of madness from The Aunt's Story into pure impressionism. He almost succeeds, because his subliminally erotic imagery, tinged with religious elements, pulls one in although the imagery has nothing coherent behind it.

It's a measure of White's artistry that The Cockatoos, flawed and disturbing as it is, makes one eager to see what he will do next. But the short form is not, and probably never will be, the best showcase for his genius. Since White is now a Nobel winner, many readers are eager to encounter his work for the first time and may imagine that a new story collection is a good introduction. The Cockatoos, although it should be read, isn't the ideal starting point. It will tantalize some; others need to respond to the breadth of vision in the major, novels before they approach these strange but impressive minor works.

Patrick White's procession of novels is majestic; no other living novelist in English is so consistently audacious or writes on such a large scale. In America only pulp novelists like Michener are interested in full-dress productions. White, a serious artist, has given us Voss, a historical epic of Tolstoyan proportions; and his work ranges from the spacious epic to the fiercely introverted writhings of his new book, The Cockatoos. We are drawn to White's heroic writing even when he puts us off. His satiric dialogue can be overly vicious, as in Riders in the Chariot; and his schematized conceptions cripple a poor novel like The Living and the Dead and mar one of his best, The Solid Mandala. His hatred of his characters reaches a culmination in The Cockatoos. But White is full of surprises. He follows his worst novel, The Vivisector, which loads an overheated Passion Play tone onto a standard tortured-artist story of the Irving Stone variety, with The Eye of the Storm, a serenely visionary work in which his prose reaches new heights.

In the seven-year hiatus between his false starts (Happy Valley and The Living and the Dead) and the appearance of The Aunt's Story, White began developing his prose, a mixture of the tangy, lazy rhythms of Australian diction and glittering bursts of imagery that sometimes emerge from the text with a beautiful naturalness, sometimes with a shock that is like a slap in the reader's face—a prose style both precise and flexible. Speaking voices overlap into description; and points of view can be separated by slight modulations in one brief scene, even in one paragraph. Pitch is heightened by minor chord changes from sentence to sentence, from phrase to phrase. The prose daringly calls attention to itself in such passages as the German housekeeper's cabaret act before her painted death-doll mistress in The Eye of the Storm, or the aged Waldo's preening in his dead mother's ball gown in The Solid Mandala. These scenes are incomparable pieces of stage direction, but White provides everything—actors and props aren't needed. (Oddly, his plays are hopelessly “literary” and derivative, while his fiction is miraculously scenic.)

In The Aunt's Story White rearranges the pieces of an Australian spinster's mind as though they were chips in a mosaic. Although he doesn't entirely control his effects, parts of the novel even today read like a breakthrough. Unfortunately the middle section is a stiffly self-conscious nightmare-reverie, possibly modeled after “Nighttown” in Ulysses, in which Theodora is supposed to be crossing over into madness. White records the tiny alterations in Theodora's perceptions of reality without resorting to conventional explanations and metaphors for insanity.

The Tree of Man, unlike The Aunt's Story, has no obvious experimentation. It's an Australian farm saga told, for White, as simply as possible. A basic fallacy creeps in: because of the Parkers' poverty, White grants them a wholeness he denies his more affluent characters. But this epic of the soil avoids most Pearl Buck overtones by the power of the images; the fire and flood are White's first great descriptive scenes. Another important factor in White's growth as an imaginative artist first appears: the view of Australia as a primordially unshaped, almost mythic continent. The transportation of the first convicts is like Lucifer cast into hell; and the natural disasters in The Tree of Man are plagues, manifestations of divine wrath at those who would try to shape the wilderness.

The great part of Australia is still unshaped today; in the last century the land outside the few settled areas held untold terrors. White's 19th-century explorer Johann Voss, the epic figure of his next novel, meets the divine wrath head on in the hinterland, with its aborigines and their sacred death rituals in which civilized man is the natural sacrifice. What White does in Voss is immense: the cross-cutting between the disintegrating expedition and Sydney's balls and picnics, the sensual evocation of colonial life in the 1840s, the supple dialogue that flashes into epigrams, the suffering of Voss, the love between him and Laura Trevelyan (one of the strongest woman characters in modern fiction)—a love that is cerebral and spiritual rather than sexual, a love that is Voss' salvation and lifts the novel out of despair into celebration. Voss is one of those rare novels that pulls the reader up successive peaks of intensity until he emerges, purged, at the top. The book is completely achieved, despite a typical last White touch: a trivializing epilogue that neatly wraps up all the narrative threads that might better have been left free.

Voss is the last of White's straight narratives. The later novels, except for The Vivisector, form a trilogy of symbolic works. Instead of archetypal characters, like Voss and the Parkers, White gives us characters who are extensions of another kind of archetype—a risky attempt for a novelist, but White has never been one to avoid risks. Each novel's title is the governing metaphor. Riders in the Chariot, the least successful, presents four characters, various examples of the earth's wretched, who will finally ride in triumph in the apocalyptic chariot of fire. The riders are joined by tenuous plot linkages, and White uses them questionably. One is a tubercular black painter, another is a Jew crucified by working-class louts (the religious symbolism tries one's patience). The oppressed will be victors by virtue of their oppression; and, although White wastes no sympathy on the oppressors, the novel seems erotically attracted to them. Does White really like his miserable creatures, or does he only think he should? Riders in the Chariot is split down the middle; but it has powerful scenes, such as the Jew's recollection of the death camps (with White's characteristic connections between violent death and sex, connections that increase the horror), and curious exchanges, that suggest Jane Bowles, between bizarrely matched couples drawn together by mutual freakishness.

White, whose fiction is rarely far from the feel of flesh, can't get his winged chariot to soar. He does much better with earthbound symbols: the storm's eye, and the mandala, which is an ordering of chaos, not a transcendence of it. The Solid Mandala is a glass marble, a child's toy, with twin strands of color that in different lights twist and untwist in colors that blind and illuminate. The “solid mandalas” are named by Arthur Brown, the “deficient” twin, the man of “spirit,” to the derision of his twin Waldo, the desperate intellectual, the man of “reason.” White clearly wants to be on Arthur's side; and this spirit/reason duality, this division of the whole man into warring twins, creates suspicions that the novel harbors an intellectual self-hatred. But White carries this duality to visionary status. The Browns' story is told first from Waldo's view, in terse, stifled prose that gradually burns with an insane rage. It is then retold from Arthur's view, and here the rhythms uncoil and our recognition of the horrible release that must follow comes full circle. Symbol and character are fused; we and the Browns and the mandala are one. The twin lives that wind together in torture loosen in beauty. One thinks of Bernard's speech to Susan in The Waves: “Words, moving darkly, in the depths of your mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your pocket-handkerchief.”

The Solid Mandala probes further beneath the surface of human frailty than any other White novel. The Eye of the Storm—about a dying woman, once a great beauty and sexual monster, and those who wait for her to die is a panoramic view, suggesting what is underneath by resonant language and juxtaposition of shifting time and place. The themes are highly charged: the helplessness with which we anticipate death, the shame of old age and the body's ugly tyranny (the imagery, as George Steiner notes, is largely fecal), the ways that recollections of sex and sexual failure and continuing desires push us into collision with others, who are pursued by their own demons. This is the most highly plotted of White's works, and some of the subplots are embarrassments; but the plotting advances the action only slightly. The plots principally serve as supporting metaphors to the central scene: the dying woman's memory of being trapped in the eye of a hurricane. The savage beauty of destruction as seen from that small area of calm brings back her entire life, the past recaptured in that one instant of revelation. The novel is structured around the storm scene, like ripples spreading in a pool. White seems to be writing from the storm's eye, from that lucidity that is reached only after tortuous mazes have been traveled.