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Laurie Clancy

Laurie Clancy (1942–2010) was a leading Australian critic, fiction-writer, and teacher. His novel A Collapsible Man (1975) was a joint winner of the National Book Council Award for Fiction while Perfect Love won the FAW/ANA Literary Award in 1984. He published book-length studies of Christina Stead, Xavier Herbert, and Vladimir Nabokov as well as A Reader's Guide to Australian Fiction (1992). In 1980, he joined ABR as associate editor.

Laurie Clancy reviews 'About Tilly Beamis' by Sumner Locke Elliott

April 1986, no. 79 01 April 1986
Expatriate Australian writer and now naturalised American citizen Sumner Locke Elliott seems to have written this novel to dramatise his own sense of cultural displacement and identity. Cutting back and forth in time (between 1978 and 1950) and place (Australia and the United States), it traces the attempt of a woman named Tanya van Zandt in New York to retrace the whereabouts and identity of an A ... (read more)

'Arabesques and Banknotes' by Laurie Clancy

July 1982, no. 42 01 July 1982
With the reissue of The Beauties and Furies (1936) this month by the British feminist press Virago, virtually all of Christina Stead’s work is in print for the first time in the half century long career of this distinguished writer. That this is so is largely due to Virago Press itself, which has reprinted no fewer than eight of Stead’s books, five of them in their Modern Classics series. Apar ... (read more)

Laurie Clancy reviews 'Child's Play' and 'Fly Away Peter' by David Malouf

September 1982, no. 44 01 September 1982
The prolific David Malouf, another of our poets turned novelist, just had two short prose works published within a few months of one another. Although Child’s Play (which also includes two short stories) is set in Italy, where Malouf now resides, and Fly Away Peter in Brisbane where he grew up, the two books are thematically related, not only to each other but to the author’s earlier work. In ... (read more)

Laurie Clancy reviews 'The Morality of Gentlemen' by Amanda Lohrey and 'This Freedom' by John Morrison

December 1985–January 1986, no. 77 01 December 1985
This fine first novel by a thirty-six-year-old Tasmanian woman was first published in 1984, but to the best of my knowledge has received only one review. Certainly, ABR missed it, and I would not have read it had it not been entered in the Vance and Nettie Palmer Victorian State Government awards for fiction. Had I been able to persuade my fellow judges of its merit, it would certainly have made t ... (read more)

Laurie Clancy reviews 'A River Town' by Thomas Keneally

May 1995, no. 170 01 May 1995
The river town is Kempsey on the north coast of New South Wales, 300 miles from Sydney. It is the new year and, we soon learn, just around the turn of the century, immediately before Federation. Once more Keneally has plundered Australian history in order to explore his concern with Australian identity. Like Keneally’s earlier The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, the novel is set against the backgro ... (read more)

Laurie Clancy reviews 'An Item From the Late News' by Thea Astley

February–March 1983, no. 48 01 February 1983
Returning to live in Queensland seems to have done something to Thea Astley’s perception of Australian country life. In this novel, as well as in her previous one, A Kindness Cup, she gives as appalling and scathing a vision of life in rural Australia as has come from any novelist since Barbara Baynton. Although her prose is as bitingly astringent as ever in this book, it lacks the sardonic humo ... (read more)

Laurie Clancy reviews 'The Bodysurfers' by Robert Drewe

December 1983–January 1984, no. 57 07 February 2020
This collection of twelve stories by the author of The Savage Crows and A Cry in the Jungle Bar seeks to explore and define what Drewe sees as a part of our national psyche, the preoccupation with the coast and with the ‘careless violent hedonism’, as one of the characters puts it, of beach life. In ‘Looking for Malibu’, David Lang, who appears in several of the stories, defines it for a t ... (read more)

Laurie Clancy reviews 'Harland’s Half Acre' by David Malouf

October 1984, no. 65 01 October 1984
Apart from the theme of growth and adolescence (with which it often merges), perhaps the most common preoccupation of Australian novelists is the progress of a young man (usually) or woman towards artistic achievement and fulfilment. Frequently the field of art is pictorial. Patrick White’s The Vivisector, Thea Astley’s The Acolyte, Tony Morphett’s Thorskeld, and Barbara Hanrahan’s The Sce ... (read more)

Laurie Clancy reviews 'Brilliant Creatures' by Clive James

November 1983, no. 56 01 November 1983
Brilliant Creatures is not so much a novel – a first novel, as the title page coyly points out – as it is a presentation pack. The text itself is bookended by an introduction at the front, and a set of extensive, very boring notes and index at the back. A set of notes and an index for a novel, a first novel? Yep. Clive James has heard of Nabokov and Pale Fire. He has also, as the four-page int ... (read more)

‘Love, longing and loneliness: The fiction of Elizabeth Jolley’ by Laurie Clancy

November 1983, no. 56 01 November 1983
Elizabeth Jolley has been around as a writer for some time. Her work dates back to the late 1950s (she came to Australia from England in 1959) and her stories began appearing in anthologies and journals in the mid­1960s, but it was not until 1976 that her first collection, Five Acre Virgin and other stories, was published by the Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Since then, her rate of publication ... (read more)
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