SOURCE: “Potato Peel,” in Observer Review, October 30, 1988, p. 44.

In the following laudatory review of Three Uneasy Pieces, Sage praises White's short story collection, calling it “a marvelously cunning raid on the inarticulate.”

Patrick White's new book isn't slim, it's emaciated. If his last one, Memoirs of Many in One, was about role-playing and multiplying yourself, then Three Uneasy Pieces is pared down with a vengeance to 59 pages. He's trying out a new route in his cranky, self-consuming search for illumination—not so much reviewing his repertoire as puzzling about what he has left out.

The negative way (in mystic's jargon): and though if you followed this paradox to its conclusion you would find yourself contemplating a blank page, Three Uneasy Pieces is good value in every sense, a marvellously cunning raid on the inarticulate that pulls off the hardest trick, simplicity.

This makes paraphrase more embarrassing than usual...