SOURCE: “Crusades Against Hoopla and Pain,” in Critical Essays on Patrick White, edited by Peter Wolfe, G. K. Hall & Co., 1990, pp. 65-7.

In the following review, originally published in Antipodes: A Journal of Australian Literature in 1988, Bliss maintains that the stories in Three Uneasy Pieces “lack the convincing density and scope of the major novels and even of much of White's short fiction.”

Patrick White's Three Uneasy Pieces is a slender, 10,000-word short story collection, which makes a sharp and caustic statement in its timing, an intriguingly antiphonal suggestion in its prose. Published in December of 1987, it was rushed into production before 1988 in order to avoid any appearance on White's part of having validated Australia's Bicentennial by issuing a celebratory volume. So anxious was White to disassociate himself from the Bicentennial hoopla that he snatched the manuscript from its original Melbourne publisher, when that house was unable to...