Jack Hibberd's voice is unusual in contemporary Australian literature. Best known as a playwright, his work has been consistently antinaturalistic in a theater culture steeped in naturalism, while his dramatic sources are substantially located in European modernism rather than the "well-made play" of English repertory theater, which has otherwise dominated Australian playwriting. Similarly, Hibberd's poetry and novels go against the local grain and, despite their surface vernacular, also belong in the tradition of European modernism, although the novels pay added homage to the much older and more widespread picaresque inspiration.

Hibberd is a comic writer whose humor is neither parodistic nor situational but generated by a particular epistemology or worldview. That he has had a parallel career as a medical doctor--most of it spent either with alcoholics, drug addicts, the homeless, the working class, or, in recent years, with people afflicted by allergies--goes some way toward explaining his...