SOURCE: “Form and Meaning in the Short Stories of Frank Moorhouse,” in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring, 1985, pp. 67-76.

In the following essay, Kanaganayakam explores the complexity of Moorhouse's narrative style and thematic concerns.

The short stories of Frank Moorhouse have remained so consistently complex and open-ended during the last thirteen years that any attempt to identify them as realistic, experimental or internationalist can be misleading. Since each collection explores new dimensions of experience and fresh possibilities of expression, the reader is constantly called upon to shift his focus and seek different modes of interpretation. Not that one cannot speak of the evolution of Moorhouse in terms of a diachronic axis, but in doing so one is also leaving out significant aspects of his writing. On the other hand one cannot totally ignore the process of evolution which is germane to the author's mode of...