[In the following laudatory review of Three Uneasy Pieces, Sage praises White's short story collection, calling it “a marvelously cunning raid on the inarticulate.”]

Patrick White's new book isn't slim, it's emaciated. If his last one, Memoirs of Many in One, was about role-playing and multiplying yourself, then Three Uneasy Pieces is pared down with a vengeance to 59 pages. He's trying out a new route in his cranky, self-consuming search for illumination—not so much reviewing his repertoire as puzzling about what he has left out.

The negative way (in mystic's jargon): and though if you followed this paradox to its conclusion you would find yourself contemplating a blank page, Three Uneasy Pieces is good value in every sense, a marvellously cunning raid on the inarticulate that pulls off the hardest trick, simplicity.

This makes paraphrase more embarrassing than usual. The pieces come in ascending order of explicitness. The first, ‘The Screaming Potato’, takes a kitchen sink dilemma (‘wondering whether to gouge the eyes … a certain amount of flesh would disappear with the gouging’) as a metaphor for cruelties inflicted ‘in the name of morality and justice’. The second, ‘Dancing with Both Feet on the Ground’, is a danse macabre featuring ‘the Contessa del Castelmarino, alias Gladys (Baby) Horsfall of Gundy, New South Wales' taking a senile pratfall on the brink of eternity. ‘When the draughts started blowing down her cleavage, she knew she needed a faith’: but needing is not finding.

The third and longest piece, ‘The Age of a Wart’, comes closest to spelling out the unwisdom old age can bring. It starts as a vivid reminiscence of Bluey Platt, the alien boy at school with warts (and poverty, and kindness): ‘he lurches against me … holds a fist against one of my knuckles, and mumbles “Twins!” as he grinds his wart into mine.’ Bluey leaves school early, drifts off to visit the Abos, is heard of over the years in Blitzed London, a Japanese POW camp, Hiroshima, and is never found again. And gradually the story converts itself into a vision of the alternative life you didn't live, that stays with you like an invisible excrescence, the long-lost wart, the (impossible) identification with human suffering, the twin.

The narrator finds at the last that all his self-gougings in search of perfection have served only to bring him to this realisation of his spiritual emptiness, the beginning of wisdom. Patrick White, a Gemini, contemptuous of his name and Nobel fame and always convinced he was ugly yet fully human inside (‘this black, bubbling pool’), has here found a triumphant metaphor for his twin nature, his heritage of doubleness. He may look forward to silence and dismiss ‘carefully chosen words and the studied sentences of literature’, but only his own words on the page (down there in black and white) can get him there.