[In his unfavorable review of The Burnt Ones, Kiely maintains that the “exceedingly gifted writer may be dabbling in the wrong form” by penning short stories.]

Most Americans are not quite sure how to take Australia. The vast stretches of land, the rough living and ranch humor appeal to us and remind us of what we once were and would sometimes still like to be. But the little pockets of provincial snobbery and British respectability disturb our frontier ideal. They not only alter the vistas of open spaces and natural living, they stand right up and block the view, making it strange, incomprehensible, and unreal. The seven Australian tales in Patrick White's collection of eleven stories entitled The Burnt Ones are effective explorations of this problem, told not from an American but from an Australian point of view.

None of the stories takes place in the great “outback,” but rather in the smallish cities and suburbs fringing the continent's rim, suspended between the deep interior and the sea. The fellow countrymen whose lives Mr. White explores huddle at the edges of these desolate and immense regions cultivating their rose gardens or picking through their rubbish piles in a variety of pathetic and bitterly comic efforts to guard against the intolerable emptiness of their lives. As an evoker of this atmosphere and its osmotic effect on the human psyche, Mr. White is a master. The Australian stories in this collection could have been written by no one but an Australian. The use of the English language, in both diction and cadence, is unmistakably not American nor British; and this is as true of the descriptive passages as it is of dialogue.

But the very authenticity or, more than that, the truth of the Australian stories makes the four tales set in Greece and Egypt appear artificially contrived. Even the Greek names and idiomatic phrases fall heavily and self-consciously from the author's tongue, which fact would be less objectionable had Mr. White been willing to adopt the narrative voice of an outsider. He doesn't do this, however; he wants his Greeks to be exotic and strange and yet, at the same time, he wants to see them from the inside. Of course, he cannot have it both ways. Athens and Alexandria simply do not seem as bizarre to Athenians and Alexandrians as they seem to Mr. White.

The longest of the Greek stories does, in part, show Athenians as they may appear to outsiders, in this case, a prosperous Greek-American couple returning to the old country for a visit. The narrative centers on several encounters between the unintellectual “Americanized” Hajistavrous with Kikitsa Alexiou, who has an obsession for cats, and her flabbily contemplative husband, Aleko, who is not a cat but almost. Yet “The Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Keep Cats” is one of Mr. White's least convincing stories partly because the “joke” is told as a knowingly inside one at the expense of the predictably nouveau monde outsiders. Actually, both couples are vaguely grotesque caricatures which appear to be equidistant from the author's sympathies and comprehension.

The Australian stories are a different matter altogether. However much Mr. White's narrative devices tax our credulity and occasionally our patience, the created presence of the lives he probes remains undeniable. The themes are remarkably unvaried: a good-natured futility and the consequences of moral vacancy are examined under slightly different conditions. The white sun and metallic sea—two of Mr. White's favorite images—cancel out or absorb most attempts at self-definition with their own blank permanence. We are shown youth without hope, old age without respect, marriage without love, sex without pleasure, friendship without affection, and wealth without comfort.

The characters who symbolize and personify this hollow state of affairs are also themselves very much alike from one story to another. The domineering and vain women, the passive, silent, slightly insane husbands and sons could move from story to story without even being noticed as intruders from another world. Indeed, they wouldn't really be intruders at all because the world they inhabit, though presented in segments, is all of a piece.

And this is probably the clue to Mr. White's success as a writer of fiction generally and his limitation as a writer of the short story. Many of his tales read like chapters from the same novel which somehow got mixed up and out of proper sequence. And two of the longer and more successful stories, “Dead Roses,” which is the first in the book, and “Down in the Dump,” which is the last, seem like curiously condensed summaries of much longer works.

Mr. White often likes to cram the events of several years and occasionally of a lifetime into the pages of his stories. This is an interesting ambition, but it places particular stress on the artist's skills with transition and endings, neither of which appears to be Mr. White's forte. He resorts to chance meetings in unlikely places ten years (more or less) after previous significant encounters and with reckless abandon, precipitates his characters into sudden sex, death, or madness. There is an unavoidable sensationalism in the abruptness with which obsessions, hallucinations, masochistic tendencies, and other assorted oddments are pulled out of the hat. In one story there is a silly and unlikely exposure, by means of a tape recorder, of a supposedly “steady” husband's extramarital love life in the bush. In another, called “Letters,” a man reveals startling Oedipal desires after fifty years of dotty but peaceful repression.

The trouble is not that the reader cannot believe these things may happen but that we sense Mr. White invented them to get on with the story or, more accurately, to get it over with. He makes himself apply the brakes of short fiction to material with the texture and breadth normally associated with the novel. If we wince to see him do this, it is because we suspect now and then that an exceedingly gifted writer may be dabbling in the wrong form.