Volume 6, Number 4 · March 17, 1966
Bouillabaisse
By Bernard Bergonzi
The Solid Mandala
by Patrick White
Viking, 309 pp., $5.00
The Magus
by John Fowles
Little, Brown, 582 pp., $7.95
The Evening of the Holiday
by Shirley Hazzard
Knopf, 152 pp., $3.95
A True Story
by Stephen Hudson
Dutton, 599 pp., $6.95
There is a critic in London who thinks that Patrick White is, without any argument, the finest novelist now writing in English. When I heard this judgment I couldn't believe it; certainly his imposing but eccentric talents have always seemed to me to stop somewhere short of greatness, except perhaps in Voss. Nevertheless, the fact that such claims are now being made for White is at least an indication of the way in which his reputation has been creeping up; his compatriots in Australia, as it happens, seem to have the largest doubts about his stature; one of them, the poet and critic, A. D. Hope, dismissed The Tree of Man as 'pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge,' which may show the vigor of antipodean critical language, but is surely unjust: The Tree of Man is a very boring book but not quite that bad. Mr. Hope does have a point, though, about the pretentiousness, which is an obvious failing in White's fiction: The wonderfully rich and intricate structure of his last novel, Riders in the Chariot, was (for me, at least) harmed by the willful imposition of the chariot symbol.
Review, 2069 words
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