SOURCE: “The Short Story Cycles of Frank Moorhouse,” in Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4, October, 1990, pp. 425-35.

In the following essay, Raines compares Moorhouse's use of the short story cycle to that of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and James Joyce.

In 1981, at the end of his article ‘Frank Moorhouse: A Retrospective’, Brian Kiernan wrote the following comment about the stories in The Everlasting Secret Family:

Each may be discontinuous with the other, but discontinuity would seem to presuppose some continuity to depart from, and this latest collection suggests the ‘familial’ though ‘secret’ relationships between them all which provide his work with its unique, imaginative pattern.

(94)

The first section of Kiernan's discussion noted the ‘polymorphous’ relationship within and between collections of stories and commented that these ‘composed collections’ are amongst ‘the most original extended fictions of the past decade’ (75). Between this opening and the conclusion quoted above Kiernan explored...