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VANISHING POINTS
AN ESSAY ON THE WORK OF NICHOLAS JOSE

Evelyn Juers

THE AUSTRALIAN HEROINE OF Nicholas Jose's most recent novel, The Red Thread (2000), invokes Dante's Paolo and Francesca, who had started out reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere one afternoon until they are so overcome by their own feelings that they can read no more. Her Chinese boyfriend Shen, on the other hand, likes to compare their relationship to the folktale of the cowherd and the weaving girl, star constellations separated all the year round except for the seventh night of the seventh moon when they are joined by a bridge. For one night only!
      All Jose's novels and most of his shorter prose pieces are love stories. If love is a relational ideal, if the power of two -- or as is sometimes the case in Jose's work, more than two -- is greater than the power of one, then what is this ideal being set up against? Love stories as antidote for what? In London, where she experiences an obscure smothering illusion [that the city] stretched forever and its immensity couldn't be grasped, the Australian heroine of Jose's first novel, Rowena's Field (1984), visits the National Gallery, where she becomes mesmerized by Vermeer's A Lady Standing at the Virginal. Rowena sees the lady close-up, as a mirror image of herself, while she overhears another visitor's comment, that the poor creature...looks at us with a silent cry of uncomprehending pain. She then hears his companion's less sympathetic response, that there's something a bit precious about her melancholy.
      Some critics have described the virginal lady's glance quite differently, as insistent and confident. These variations notwithstanding, the lady makes contact with sensitive viewers and gallery hordes alike, during opening hours, by turning her gaze out of the space in which she is alone, inviting the viewer in, perhaps to sit more intimately in the empty blue chair in the foreground of the painting, and watch her play.
      The chair remains empty. Its colour repeats the blue of the sky of two of the paintings hanging in the the room in which the lady stands. Dominating the space just above her head with a strong black frame, a third painting-within-the-painting heralds a blackening sky above a rather argumentative cupid, leaning on its bow as if resting from its targeting job, and holding up a message card. The lady wears an elaborate blue collar over a creamy white dress. Her face has a greenish tinge achieved by painting green over pink, with two more layers of green for the shading. She looks a little unwell, a little understated. There is just a breath of deeper red on her cheek, nose and lips, echoed equally sparingly in the barely visible red ribbon over her neatly contained hair-nest and on her sleeves. With a certain aesthetic opportunism, these subtle hints -- the colour of life, and the possibility of love -- aggregate around a pinhole still visible in the paintwork, that marks the vanishing point for Vermeer's perspective composition.
      Like love, perspective is the perception of relationships in space. Perspective in art conquers the flatness of the surface and the disorder or meaninglessness of life outside the frame. In love, the partnership established between the distant view and the point of view -- between the lady and you -- also promises to vanquish flatness or emptiness. Stand too close or too far however, and the lady vanishes.
      A roguish band of cupids decorates the border of blue and white tiles around the base of Vermeer's virginal space and just where this background border meets the outline of the lady's skirt at thigh level, one of those cartoonish imps is pointing an arrow suggestively upwards.
      Jose's Rowena is restless. She has moved from Adelaide to London to Italy. Far away in an obscure Milanese hotel room, her new outfit of finest cottons of heavenly blue and white hung up in the wardrobe, she eats a green apple which didn't appetize her and like a latter-day Eve considers going for a night time stroll. No ordinary stroll. She has escaped a series of claustrophobic situations and needs desperately to lose some mental baggage which filled up the vacancy she had become. Rowena reckons rather naively that she could be rid of it with a vanishing trick of the mind, but then elects her body as the battleground between profligacy and a deeply held chastity, until she had been headlong into the pit of her own subconsciousness and prostituted herself there. A couple of days and nights later, before returning to London, she enters a Milanese art gallery, this time sinking bloodlessly in front of Raphael's pink and blue Marriage of the Virgin. Rowena is exhausted.
      The red thread -- symbolic of all that the image of a thread and the colour red might signify -- which constitutes the title and leitmotif of Jose's latest novel is there from the beginning. So what kinds of love stories does he write? What kind of space are they pitched against? What can we decipher from his cupids' message cards?
      In the early 1990s, ten years into his writing career, Jose was assessed by the critic Laurie Clancy for A Reader's Guide to Australian Fiction. Of the two volumes of short stories, The Possession of Amber (1980) and Feathers or Lead (1986), Clancy wrote:

Many of them are marked by a calculated inconclusiveness in which enigma tends to triumph over complexity...It is as if Jose is determined at all costs to avoid being obvious.
Hitting the enigmatic nail, on the bias if not on the head. Critics are usually at least half right.
      Even earlier, reviewing Jose's first novel, Don Anderson had also addressed the question of enigmatic deliberation. With more of a nail-biting than nail-hitting stance, he worried terribly that with Rowena's Field, the brave if not foolhardy author risked bringing feminist wrath down on his head, because the heroine was too passive: too much screwed, as Anderson suggests deftly, not screwing.
      Clancy complained of catching Jose with his ideational pants well and truly on, calling the stories scrupulously restrained, the first novel determinedly old-fashioned, and the second novel, Paper Nautilus (1987), epicene. He judges that Jose's ideas and themes are more interesting than his treatment of them, to the extent that in formal terms, he remains deeply conservative. What exactly does this critic mean by epicene, I wonder?
      His sport of stirring the literary possum and spotlighting ambiguities may account for Anderson being a spokesperson for feminism on the one hand, and with the same hand, being eager to dob Jose in for not wearing pants at all. Anderson speculates whether writing about and for a woman means that the author has access to the female psyche, or whether Rowena is merely a man in drag, metaphorically speaking. It's a valid point, with wide-ranging implications: exit, Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler, Anna Karenina, Daisy Miller... He concludes his review by noting the book's place on the bestseller list, undoubtedly the mark of being in a fictional middle ground...with its appeal to the middle class.
      In similar fashion, a more recent appraisal of the German translation of The Rose Crossing (1994; Die Rosenkreuzung, trans.1996), admires the author's imaginative energy and generously recommends the book zumindest für mittlere Bibliotheken -- at the very least, for the literary middle-brow.
      Since those initial responses, and now after the six novels and three collections of shorter prose which Jose has produced over the last twenty years, the reception of his work continues to identify an enigmatic deliberation in the author's discovery and surveillance of the middle ground.
      Jose's interest in manifestations of congruence and mediation has been aptly described by one critic, Lyn Jacobs, as work which negotiates sites of difference. Jose's commitment to the writing of love stories resides unexpectedly in the difficult aesthetics of balance, embodying stillness and slowness, which he has called a quality of stone, not water. In his essay 'On Reticence', he writes,
I am drawn to the relationship between speech and the spectrum of responses covered by all those words starting with 're-': repressed, retentive, recalcitrant, reluctant, retiring, reserved and, especially, reticent, where the prefix 're-' suggests an ingrained resistance to prevailing currents. A quality of stone, not water.
 All of which seems to be about as far from the contemporary conventions of love as you can go.
      Aware of an almost primal social mistrust of silence, slowness and secrecy -- It suggests the ghostly guest at the feast, the inaccessible speech codes of the stranger, the silences of eternity that we imagine but can never quite hear -- and sensitive to the apparent contradiction of trying to articulate reticence, Jose observes that most of us would not rush to invite an awkwardly quiet person to a dinner party, and once invited, would encourage this guest to unbutton.
      He goes on to describe the appetitive urgencies of our cultural climate, with its special taste for gossip, or life utterances, dressed up as authenticities. He confesses that he also loves gossip, while always assuming a gulf between the story and the truth. This gulf is another middle ground, a place of blurting and bumbling, coincidence and misinterpretation. Jose himself does not appear to be socially inept. Reticence requires a partner, he explains. And sometimes that partner can be the part of oneself that is a social performer adept at blocking access to the spaces behind doors. This is a notion of reticence as axis between the personal and the communal, between diction and contradiction, a dialogical discretion which either blocks or activates the gaps around words.
      Jose's stories begin slowly, charting their narrative field with a Proustian obliquity that builds tension with the frustrations of approximation, wishful thinking, ineffectuality or avoidance. A pattern is established early, in all his work, counterposing slowness and suddenness -- plateaux and pitfalls, plateaux and highs -- where almost trancelike states are eerily related to intense disruptions. This gives much of the prose a sense of unreality -- of being spellbound. One of his earliest and most appealing stories, Coogee Spring, is about a teenage boy who lives in Titania Street, in a moored fibro galleon...afloat on a drooping bank of pigface and buffalo. Turning fifteen in the spring, this boy didn't know what to want for his birthday and all of a sudden things were unendingly slow. In Rowena's Field the heroine's coming-of-age is grotesquely and tragically and irreversibly, it seems, accelerated and violated. Jose has a knack for the kind of deeply ironic metaphor which is here invested in the image of Rowena's own mother speeding up the car which kills the girl's lover. But that abruptness is later reintegrated, eroded by the forces of incompleteness and inconsequentiality of a bigger picture.
      Jose suspends his narratives. Much like the nautilus shells of his second novel, which drift ashore with a kind of bio-mythical obstinacy, once every seven years, and then only if the winter is right, the more unhurried and disengaged his tone or his characters appear, seemingly oblivious to interpretive urgency (in the early work, with names relaxed to Flo, Ro, Marce, and the symbolic potential of Penelope contracted to Penny), the more the stories tread water, the greater is the reader's expectation that something must snap. The reader grows restless.
      Avenue of Eternal Peace (1989) plays out themes of withholding and minimal disclosure, based on the central idea that Chinese traditions, particularly in medicine, present a powerful secret weapon in an East-West cultural tug-of-war. The Rose Crossing (1994) is built from the same logic. Alongside political and botanical themes, the book scrutinizes an overriding quest to turn time's slow and formless passing...to crystal. Events evolve from the metaphorically rich, tumultuous waters of the Chinese and English seventeenth century. The players are historically weighted and dis-oriented, in a world of confinements: family, class, courts, ships, islands, maps and other limiting frames of reference. One of the canniest but physically most compromised characters, the eunuch, is also quite literally the one carrying most ballast. In an attempt to escape and survive, someone figures: we must go with care, show resistance, close our eyes, turn our backs, until a space forms into which the alien element can be received. Character speaking for author, author for character? Escape happens, only to usher in more circumscription. The gaps and openings activated by reticence, Jose shows, can be abysmal or elysian. A city is read as a honeycomb of secret worlds within worlds; a person reveals and conceals alternately, making it sometimes apparent and sometimes hidden. Many characters are aggregates of self-suffiency, intent on building conventions of privacy. You don't have to say everything you think, says one of Jose's custodians. Why should I move? asks a protagonist during sex, in one of the earlier stories.
      But move you must, sooner or later, Jose's work estimates. Like a seventeenth-century scientist you can sail slowly, very slowly, down the coast of Africa, towards even more freighted moments of solitude. Like a twentieth-century aesthete in small polite steps you can be admitted to a chamber of the heart as incorporeal as the moonshadow of an orchid.
Reticence, with its linguistic care, steps sideways, from stone to stone across the water, finding and leaving equivalences, making each positioning a metaphor for something else in an act of hoped-for communication.
 Going overseas, as we call all travel beyond our shores, is one of those equivalences Jose has explored, for stepping across the water.
      The heroine of Jose's first novel comes of age in Adelaide in the 1970s. She liked to spend her Easter holidays with her childless aunt Flo, who lived alone, beyond the fertile barley belt of the South Australian Yorke Peninsula, near a minimal place on a hill which to the eye of an outsider scarcely coalesced into a community, the township of Wooka which is revisited, with Faulkneresque contiguity, in Paper Nautilus. The reader has a strong sense that the author knows this place well.
      With its terraced gardens and gravel paths, aunt Flo's two-story, orange-brick homestead called Mollymawk, after the local seabird, was an exotic which bloomed in the reluctant peninsula soil. Even when it becomes neglected, paint flaking, creepers rampant, it continues to inhere a higher order, something of a citadel, always the focus for Rowena's changing perspective.
      Beset with the responsibilities of making new kinds of decisions, the generation of the seventies is portrayed as ambiguously guided and misguided: by political convictions, and the mythical imperative of those immense faces of the personality posters, by existential questions only magnified by a growing burden of buff-coloured Modern classics lining the walls of students' houses, and the inescapable dogma of broken-backed American books on self-liberation.
      Rowena tries to move beyond the nervous sparks of disenchantment that hover about the drinks-on-the-terrace-at-sunset life of her mother, and Jose paints an empathic generational canvas, cross-hatching the glow of youth with the resilient but inevitably receding energies of an older generation, to introduce questions of dispossession, inheritance and guidance. Similarly, generational shifts and associated issues of guidance and self-guidance determine the narrative momentum of The Custodians (1997), parts of which are set in mid to late twentieth-century Adelaide:
The children found it strange that the sun went dark, and stranger still that the round silver moon could turn into a flat round disc giving off no light of its own. In the pinhole camera a cartoon image of the moon was passing in slow motion across the sun...[and] only Alex stared directly at the real thing with his naked eye.
       When an old man steps off a ferry at the docks on a chilly winter afternoon, in the opening sentence of The Red Thread, we know at the very least that in Jose's economy of significance this fellow is no mere passer-by. Avenue of Eternal Peace also deals with the transfer of knowledge. A medical researcher is guided at one extreme by the death of his wife to find what might have been alternative cures, and at the other by a host of characters, including a Mrs Gu who might be either malignant or benign. And one of Jose's best-known essays, on contemporary Chinese art and cultural disorientation, is tellingly titled My Search for a Shaman. 'If only we had an author carrying us forward...towards his climax. That would be sublime...', a Proust-reading character in one of the short stories laments to his friend, at which point the author obliges and their car conks out stranding them in the middle of nowhere, their hopes for the sublime fired off as the expletive Fucking Hell!
      A quest for the remembrance of things past is how another Proust-reader, Claude Levi-Strauss, defines myth. He sees psychoanalysis as a shamanistic technique necessitated by our contemporary devaluation of slow time, or myth, a remnant core of which remains deep within our selves.
      The act of re-membering, a dominant feature of Jose's narratives, can be regarded as a search for partnership, for a true match of some kind to counteract feelings of disaffection. And Jose's heroines, Rowena, Rosamund and Ruth, have more in common than memory-surfing, green eyes and the alliteration of their names. Each one wishes for a companion one day to cross the horizon and glide to her shore from the infinities of space, and each one gets to experience, however briefly, a kind of fairy-tale fulfilment of absolute closeness where neither partner could tell whose feeling was whose, as if they were twins.
      The shamanistic desire within Jose's love stories is perhaps most explicit in The Custodians. Criss-crossing the country with his ambitions and detours, between friends, partners, Adelaide, Canberra and the Walls of China, Alex Mack, the epic story's eclipse-defying central figure, accrues increasingly complex layers of private, social and historical experience, which occasionally, amazingly concur. One of the most significant of these coincidences is a drug-facilitated sexual encounter with Ziggy, who had been his childhood friend. Afterwards Ziggy asks him, 'Will you love me forever, mate?' But Alex is in a self-realizing trance, '
It felt as though I left my body. I saw a skull against the moon. Blocking the sun...When I was a kid, I kept that Aboriginal skull that I dug up. I kept it in my room. He was my mate, only I never realized it at the time.
 Ziggy objects, 'I was supposed to be your mate back then!'
      Alex continues to dredge, telling how the skull, whom he had named Joe, had been his secret imaginary mate, how his mother had taken it to the rubbish tip during a clean-out and he thought of this as a betrayal, a curse, since he hated her for it. That instance of hatred towards a mother whom he otherwise loved, and the associated guilt that overwhelmed him after her suicide, come to represent a kind of Oedipal centre against which all else is tested: the sun (son) is temporarily denied its (masculine) radiance, as it is crossed by the round silver moon...a flat black disc, giving off no light of its own, which is crossed by a skull. Alex has been double-crossed.
      Jose's heroes are often misunderstood. Fathers are absent, marginal or sadly displaced. Surrogate father-figures prevail. While Shen's father in The Red Thread is frustratingly ineffective, especially regarding the imminent destruction of the family home, Shen steps sideways and finds equivalences:
[he] recognized himself as part of the system of flow and exchange, part of the circulation of timeless objects. He was pleased to be admitted to Old Weng's domain in that way.
Old Weng is the old man who steps off the ferry in the book's opening sentence.
      The women are strong, at least in appearance and in spirit. But female power is handled ambiguously, as both attractive and infernal, arousing and frustrating. The symbolically potent quest for the exotic black rose in The Rose Crossing is a see-sawing of promises and dangers. Jose has elaborated numerous paths of approximation, where the feminine nonetheless often remains at one remove, protected by a secret, an illness or by death. In The Custodians, Alex's mother goes to drown in water of a power so much greater than her own. One short story, which recounts the author's attempts to travel to the mysterious matriarchal community of Ru Gu Lake in China, becomes a tangle of bureaucratic misinterpretations -- also often presented by Jose, with irony, as a greater power -- and ends in failure. His heroines display the archetypal symptoms of melancholy, passion, instinct, chastity, interiority; and painted with a sure brush, they focus a strongly visual aesthetic.
      With characters addicted to observation, or on the look-out for symbols, with painterly descriptions of the familiar and the foreign, of yellow light, a milky sea, lemons, nudes, often framed, by curtains or half open doorways, the earliest stories in The Possession of Amber, already juxtapose degrees of sight and vision. Concepts of sighting, with the Orphic choices of looking back or looking forward, are crucial to readings of Paper Nautilus and The Rose Crossing. One of the custodians completely forgets a young woman who is carrying his child and another, a painter with a passionate style described as somewhere between Bonnard and O'Keefe, enjoys international success while tragically losing sight of a friendship that had been the inspiration for her art. And visual orientation and discrimination, with imagery remembered, written, photographed, painted and glimpsed, directs the protagonist of Avenue of Eternal Peace towards clusters of clues in his medical quest. Many are teasingly deceptive, like the mass of plastic trattoria grapes festooning the ceiling of the New Age Bar.
      Jose mistrusts the eye and would like the reader to do the same. There is a kind of recalcitrance built into visual activity, with the uneasy result that what is seen is either devoid of inherent significance or if you think about it, becomes a flux of possible meanings and misinterpretations. The eye has to be pulled into line, to focus.
      Textual possibilities of visualization are tested again in The Red Thread, with reference to a Chinese dialectic of writing and painting. The thread -- the Jamesian ficelle -- is read in the image of a red thread. Believing what you're reading is a momentary enchantment, a suspension of disbelief. The reader is tricked by what she sees and then the text reveals its mischief...the moment of difference between real and fake [which] may seem like a small thing, but it's the biggest thing in the world. In order to understand perspective, readers, artists and archers - Vermeer's cupid when he resumes his task of taking aim - need to close one eye. With a horizontal flourish across a vertical grid, Jose has sparrows flit through bamboo thickets.
      The puzzle of an unfinished story, an ancient classic with two missing chapters, on which The Red Thread is based, takes on meta-mimetic proportions in its flesh-and-blood rediscovery of the old text. The two missing chapters skip generational, cultural and existential boundaries, the original love story mirroring in the lives of three contemporary characters, Ruth, Shen and Han. It is a premise one impatient critic has called preposterous. But the author does not seem to be trying to pull the wool over the reader's eyes. He highlights the fact that the reader's disbelief cannot be totally suspended and demonstrates how this irremediable incompleteness - the intrusion of the larger frame of reference, the reassertion of the two-eyed witness - is a vanishing point in the illusionary process.
      Humour is another vanishing point. Jose catches his characters when they are most self-absorbed and few escape his wit. When souls are carried away in a mist of passion or golden showers are freely enacted, subtle comedy spills from the epiphany. The displays of eccentric earnestness of Ro's aunt Flo in Rowena's Field, and the botanist Popple in The Rose Crossing, raise a distancing grin from the reader. Images of a woman resembling a huge shrimp as she bathes, an Australian diplomat in a yellow suit, a four-year old who recites the world's capital cities in alphabetical order at the drop of a hat, the author himself sharing a hot pot of squid rings, pigs' brains, geese tripes, congealed ducks' blood, and cows' trachea (the part that moos)...make us step back to enjoy the comedy. Often the humour is idiomatic, a kind of kick of recognition: someone is sozzled, someone else sucks a hamburger. The eye trained on detail often lets the detail do the talking. Addressing questions of potency - sexual, historical, literary - in The Rose Crossing, the author lists some colourful cures for infertility - bull's penis, rhinoceros horn, bee's jelly, turtle flesh, asparagus, oysters and musk, tiger paw and gold dust, excess and denial, manipulation, hypnosis and drugs...fecund peasant girls, actors, child duchesses, boy soldiers - which burst from the page to raise the reader's eyebrows and stimulate her imgination, even if no climax was possible for the prince. Like scepticism, humour places the reader outside the text. It distances. It widens the dimensions of the domain in which Jose is most interested: the middle ground.
      Jose does not want to effect distance or indulge intimacy so much as to want to bring the reader into the middle ground between the two extremes of distance and intimacy.
      When the viewer's gaze is moved closer, things blur. Parallel selves emerge and reintegrate. The act of beholding an object of desire from afar -- woman, man, botanical or ceramic rarity, medicine, chocolate -- is recast as a holding, or any other of the more immediate sensory modalities. And themes of transference, inheritance, possession and custodianship -- where touch plays an important part -- are sexualized.
      In The Custodians, the young Alex wants to touch Ziggy's mother's exotic face, her lips glossy with Cha-cha red, the hair sprayed in place like a helmet. In The Rose Crossing a jadestone talisman grows warm to the touch. In other works, primitivist initiation is effected with bear claws, and a libidinal catharsis takes place in the tentacular shadow of a cathedral. Human remains are hand-excavated by schoolchildren feeling their way through sloppy mud. Floorboards are ripped up to reveal hidden treasure. Buddhist beads are fingered, and someone else lets his fingers reach for [a blanc de chine] bowl that the Emperor himself must have praised. The narratives proceed in this way in a constant push and pull between the visual and the tactile.
      Like Shen and Ruth hurrying out of the nightclub to follow the singer Han in The Red Thread, many of Jose's characters are alert to erotic possibility. Through physical contact -- sex, but also painting, sewing, washing, holding, handing on, breaking -- Shen, Ruth and Han form a physical chain of association, the metaphoric propagation of which is shown to be even more fertile than sex. This pattern of passing ideas through the gateway of flesh also applies to The Custodians. It applies also to Popple, his daughter and Taizao in The Rose Crossing, where visual (self)deception and seduction become co-extensive: the father watching Rosamund sleep, Taizao watching her pee, Rosamund watching the horizon. Paper Nautilus begins with a wedding, and with another chain of association between the visual and the tactile and fate, which is invoked by the narrator, in the iconic image of a tree, on a promontory across the bay...sometimes so close he could almost grasp it...other times a blur on the horizon...the tree was the point inside himself where all things came together.
      In a narrative economy of metaphoric manipulation, of contingencies, parallel lives and cultural intersection, from remote angles and complex lineages which are often distracted, interrupted or transposed, Jose's love stories strive for a point of deepened perception, where all things come together, with almost religious purpose. Remote realities are hybridized and absorbed. Differences are accommodated. In Rowena's Field, Paper Nautilus and The Custodians, and several of the short stories, it takes two men to father, two women to mother one child.The familial is folded into the familiar. In an essay on the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, who never moved far from home, Jose argues that familiarity is indispensable to an understanding of his work. Morandi's minimalism -- his concentrations of vessels as carriers of (his) convention, as custodians -- appeals precisely because it was created at a time of historical turmoil from within which it offers a constant point of return, a solid point, a distillation.
      Born in 1952 in England, Nicholas Jose grew up in Broken Hill, Traralgan, Perth and Adelaide and was educated at Adelaide's St. Peter's College. He studied literature at the ANU and attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Since then Jose has lived and worked in Canberra, England, Italy, and in China as Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing. He now lives in Sydney. This, it might be argued, is the space into which Jose has been opening doors and windows to catch Vermeer-like glimpses of the inhabitants, their love stories and their ghost stories. One big Gothic family? It depends on your perspective. Someone like Ziggy, of Lithuanian parentage, never thought of Adelaide as his place. It was as inimical to the Gothic as any place could be. But for Rowena, being in Milan was suddenly like being in Adelaide, and it amused [her] that Adelaide should finally be her yardstick.
      Stepping 'from stone to stone across the water', Jose has been redrawing his map three-dimensionally, 'in an act of hoped-for communication', with Australia pitched as paradigm -- like Vermeer's lady -- between vantage and vanishing points.
Quotations are from the following works: The Possession of Amber (UQP,1980), Rowena's Field (Rigby,1984), Feathers or Lead (Penguin,1986), Paper Nautilus (Penguin,1987), Avenue of Eternal Peace (Penguin,1989), The Rose Crossing (Hamish Hamilton,1994), Chinese Whispers (Wakefield,1995), The Custodians (Macmillan,1997), The Red Thread (Faber and Faber,2000), 'On Reticence' in HEAT 5 (1997), 'Giorgio Morandi: A Squeeze of Lemon Every Time' in Quadrant (September,1997). And reference to Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (Penguin,1972), Johannes Vermeer, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington (1996), Lyn Jacobs' essay on Nicholas Jose, in Philip Butterss (ed), Essays on South Australian Writing (Wakefield,1995), Laurie Clancy, A Reader's Guide to Australian Fiction (OUP,1992), Don Anderson, Hot Copy:Reading and Writing Now (Penguin,1986).

Complete:
Evelyn Juers is an art and literary critic and co-publisher of Heat.

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