SOURCE: “What Happened to the Short Story?” in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, October, 1977, pp. 179-91.

In the following essay, Moorhouse traces the development of his career, the structure of his short fiction collections, and the continuing influence of American literature and culture on his work.

What now seems to characterise my work, five books published, is a persisting with related short stories or episodic structure—what I've called the discontinuous narrative. It now seems that my work grows in clusters of stories which make fragmented perceptions of characters and situations.

The discontinuous narrative appears to relate to my preoccupations with the accidental, the unintended consequence, the non-rational factors of human conduct and behaviour.

The clusters form larger unities of book length (a hugely flexible term) and the books themselves have interconnections not only in theme but in character and situations. Some of the clusters I am working...