Barley Patch

This spectacular novel from Murnane (Inland), originally published in Australia in 2009, takes the form of an internal dialogue about the images, memories, and obsessions the author values as a reader and writer, beginning with the question, “Must I write?” His response, inspired by Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, combines summaries of an abandoned manuscript with inquiries into the meanings and necessities of a life devoted to literature (“I suspect that I had already accepted, more than 50 years ago, that no writer could be required to deal fairly with his or her characters, let alone readers”). Recurring images—the jockeys’ colors and horses’ names on the Australian racing circuit, the mesmerizing views of the “level grassy countryside” of Victoria, the convents that defined his Catholic childhood—construct a world that feels at once autobiographical and surreal. Murnane holds the reader’s attention with his erudition and dry wit, as when he describes his penchant for eschewing conventions such as character and plot. “My preferred way of summing up my deficiencies was to say simply that I had no imagination,” he writes, adding that reading other authors showed him that “powerful imagination, it seemed, was no preventative against faulty writing.” Murnane’s effort to push the novel from its traditional bounds pays dividends. The result is nothing short of genius. (Feb.)