Casual and cosmopolitan

Press, 21 July 1984, Page 20

Casual and cosmopolitan

The State of the Art: The Mood of Contemporary Australia in Short Stories. Edited by Frank Moorhouse. Penguin, 1984. 282 pp. $12.85 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Owen Marshall)

Frank Moorhouse has had six books of his own stories published — a source of authority for his selections in this collection. In his introduction Moorhouse explains that, “Not only is this book a look at the art of storytelling in Australia, it also looks at the state of the art of living in Australia. It is something of a map of social concerns that are part of the background to these stories, mostly written in the 1980 s.” This emphasis on fiction as interpreter of a national lifestyle is shown in the grouping of stories under such headings as Marriage, Parenthood, Ancestors; Travelling About, Bumming Around, In Transit Growing, Ageing. One disappointing editorial decision was the exclusion of what Moorhouse himself terms “master practitioners,” on the grounds that their work is readily available in other anthologies. This reason seems insufficient for such omissions from a collection which purports to demonstrate the state of the art of living and writing in Australia today. The collection is rendered a good deal less representative, and presumably a good deal less impressive, than it would otherwise have been. Yet the collection has strengths and many interesting aspects. It seems that a cosmopolitan, casual, and urban

lifestyle is dominant in Australia. There is hardly a koala or kookaburra in sight, and relationships among people have supplanted relationship with the land as the prime concern of fiction. There is a general preoccupation with immediate and personal pains and joys, a lack of allegory and reflection, which support Moorhouse’s claim that, “the stories show Australia as a non-spiritual nation, an existentially casual community that does not brood about the meaning of life or the nature of death.”

The structural variation in these stories is wide, but usually incidental to their success or otherwise, as. is shown in a consideration of two of the best of them: Murray Bail’s “Healing,” and Rob Duffy’s “Untitled.” Nothing could be more simple in form than the straightforward, first person recollection of “Healing,” a story which through skilled creation of mood achieves complete conviction. Bob Duffy’s story is even shorter, less than two pages, and experimental in form; interspersed with italicised refrains and employing reduced punctuation. It works equally well because it taps authentic experience and is shaped by a writer responsive to the possibility of language. The stories in “The State of the Art” are less impressive in total than one would expect, but they provide an up-to-the-minute and sometimes invigorating experience of Australian short story writing.