Randolph Stow is one of the Australian novelists of the 1950s and 1960s who abandoned the social- realist mode that had dominated Australian fiction long after the modernist novel had achieved prominence and acceptance in England and the United States. Following the lead of Patrick White--who returned from Europe to live and write in Australia in 1948, introducing the modernist novel to Australia with works such as The Aunt's Story (1948), The Tree of Man (1955), and Riders in the Chariot (1961)--younger writers such as Stow and Christopher Koch produced novels that combined realism with a poetic response to the Australian landscape, a preoccupation with the inner lives of their characters, and a sense of the mythic qualities of the Australian experience. The initial response to these new novels from an Australian audience more accustomed to social-realist narratives was a mixture of skepticism and enthusiasm. Stow's early novels and poems won...