[In the following negative assessment of White's fiction, Frank deems White's short stories “disappointing,” arguing that while they exhibit a “verbal richness” and “psychological acumen,” they feature characters who never seem real and plots that “verge on melodrama.”]

The Nobel Prize for Literature has often been a suspect award. Writers have frequently been honored not for their literary greatness, but for their moral courage (Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn) or for their good fortune in coming from a country that had not yet had a winner in this most famous of literary sweepstakes.

No one can deny that in their desire to honor literature, morality, and nationalism, the Nobel committee has at times immortalized some deservedly neglected authors. (Remember that of the six Americans to receive the prize, three were Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, and Pearl Buck.) On the other hand, though, in recent years truly great writers like Samuel Beckett and Pablo Neruda have also been singled out by the sages of Stockholm. Which all means that you never know with the Nobel Prize; maybe the winner is the genuine article, maybe another dud.

Patrick White is the Australian who won the prize in 1973. Few people I knew had ever heard of White; fewer still had ever read him. Was he being honored merely for being Australian, or was he in fact a great novelist carelessly neglected by our provincial selves? History, of course, will render the final judgment, but for now it appears to me that nationalism, not literature, was being honored. While White is no mere chronicler of convicts, kangaroos, and koala bears, neither is he a modern master. He is a serious novelist with serious limitations.

NO ASTONISHMENT

White was awarded the Nobel for his immense novels about Australia, cited for his “epic and psychological narrative art … and a wrestling with the language in order to extract all its power.” And, indeed, the novels are difficult, even exhausting to read. The prose is verbally dense and complex; each paragraph, each sentence demands careful attention. The characters are described with a rare degree of psychological detail. But where the Nobel committee discerns epic power, I find only highly skilful, often ponderous melodrama. For this reader, White's complexity seems willed and unnecessary; his sculpted prose turns turgid; and his characters, however well-portrayed, remain case studies. Despite all the obvious intelligence and sophisticated craft in his novels, they never convince or astonish.

White's short stories are equally disappointing. The Cockatoos is a collection of six recent ones, ranging from the novella-length “A Woman's Hand” to the 20-page “The Full Belly.” Again one finds a verbal richness and psychological acumen, but they are still coupled with characters that never seem quite real or alive and plots that verge on melodrama. White has learned all the lessons of the modern short-story masters except how to make his fiction come to life.

A typical Patrick White story involves the unusual or the unexpected in the course of an ordinary life. A retired couple meet a long-forgotten friend, with consequences that shake their apparently settled lives. Another married couple, vacationing in Sicily, have their lives disturbed by the husband's toothache, leaving the wife available for a bizarre sexual escapade. In the title story, a group of beautiful cockatoos settle on a family's lawn, and around their appearance and disappearance a number of lives are altered or rearranged. In all of these stories something out-of-the-ordinary disrupts the customary routines of living; the characters are flooded with memories of past pains and disappointments; old wounds are reopened. In the end the unexpected event has either destroyed, changed, or merely redirected the characters' accustomed ways, quotidian reality regains its power, and the characters continue to muddle through.

THE UNORDINARY ORDINARY

White has a superb eye and ear for the social conventions that give coherence to our lives, especially for the half-truths and unspoken proprieties that make marriage endurable. And he is equally sensitive to the private terror and confusion hidden behind these public decencies. He knows that ordinary people are never really ordinary: They may live conventional lives, but they still seethe because life has delivered so much less than it promised.

If White has such manifest talents for understanding our reluctant compromises with growing up and growing old, why is The Cockatoos so unsatisfying? Well, a great psychiatrist is not necessarily a great writer of fiction, and White's characters are simply never engaging enough. Despite the wealth of psychological detail lavished upon them, they remain mere manikins onto which his insights are draped, locked into plots that are strained and arbitrary, leading lives that offer the appearance of authenticity but not the substance of it.