Divining

David Malouf

Pantheon: 508 pp., $27.50

AMONG the collected letters of Patrick White, the sole Australian to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, is a 1977 note to the editorial director of the Viking Press. "There's an Australian writer at last who I think has it," White wrote. "His name is David Malouf, his origins mostly Lebanese, part London-Jewish. He was born and grew up in Queensland. He is a poet, who wrote a kind of autobiographical novel called 'Johnno,' which to me is one of the best books about Australia. He has now written another very imaginative novel based on Ovid in exile. It will not be the big money-spinner, but it is literature and perhaps Viking can still afford that."

The latter novel White alludes to is "An Imaginary Life," in which Malouf's Ovid announces, "What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become." And that is what life has been like for the dozens of characters Malouf has spun out since. White's enthusiasm grew so high that in the early 1980s he wrote the Nobel committee directly to suggest Malouf for its award and told others, such as fellow Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower, that "some of David's short stories are amongst the Great Short Stories of the World (at least two)."

Whether or not one agrees with White's judgment, it is clear from the string of novels that ensued -- including "The Great World," "Remembering Babylon" and "The Conversations at Curlow Creek" -- and the story collections "Dream Stuff" and "Antipodes" that a writer of enormous seriousness and compassion has been laboring in the harsh sunlight of that nation-continent for a generation. Malouf may not be as well known in America as his countrymen Peter Carey and Thomas Keneally, but the release of his "Complete Stories" brilliantly illustrates his range and the adhesive quality of his prose and characters, which stick in the mind as if, as one of his characters puts it, nothing is to be forgotten: "Not a soul. Not a pin."

Malouf is a realist, whose work often orients itself tightly within the immediacy of the physical surround and the experience of life as bodily driven, and yet his characters are also apt to slip toward the otherworldly -- experiencing a transcendent moment amid the prosaic -- at the pop of a neuron. They stand in awe of a world that is infinitely mutable and nearly inscrutable as well, pondering their place in it and wondering where their better self went -- or might be found to begin with.