David Foster has established himself as the most ferocious literary satirist in Australia. Idiosyncratic and intellectually adventurous, Foster writes novels that express a despair with the state of Australian, and all Western, civilization. While he stands apart from his contemporaries, he nevertheless writes in a recognizably Australian satiric and comic tradition evident in the novels of Joseph Furphy, Xavier Herbert, Peter Mathers, and David Ireland before him. Foster has been the most consistently experimental Australian writer of his generation, seeking out lost satiric forms and mixing genres and vocabularies in novels that challenge the limits of fictional structure. Yet, his political and social stance appears conservative, as he challenges many of the assumptions of contemporary liberalism.

Foster's satire seeks out paradox and duality, but a desire for some kind of spiritual consolation lies not far beneath the surface of his mockery of the material world. While his novels...