AustLit

'By the time Laurie Clancy’s second novel Perfect Love was published in 1983, Clancy had established himself as an academic, critic, short story writer and novelist. Westerly had published his first short story ‘The Wife Specialist’ in 1971. A debut novel The Collapsible Man followed in 1975, to some critical acclaim. It was to share the National Book Council Award of that year. A collection of short stories under the title of his first published short story appeared in 1978. He was already working on his Reader’s Guide to Australian Fiction, though it took a decade to complete, being published in 1992. ' (Author's introduction)

'Laurie Clancy is very much a writer of the modern secular city. Although he was brought up in a Catholic household, he had left the Church well before he left school. The world he describes in his fiction is a post-modern world, where there is no God to offer comfort or authority to offer meaning. Clancy approaches this world from a realist perspective, but his realism breaks down as his characters find their efforts to make sense or to find fulfilment break down into fragmentary episodes of frustration or futility. Indeed he published many of these individual scenes as separate short stories. Even in the novels the narratives tend to collapse into series of fragments, rather than follow any kind of progression towards unity. These fragments record the frustrated attempts of his characters to create a unity in their experience, or to bend the outer world to their desires. Their constant failures produce an absurdity that ranges from the farcical to the tragic. ' (Author's introduction)