Amazon.com (ISBN 0375420533, Hardcover)

The Australian writer David Malouf, best noted for An Imaginary Life and Remembering Babylon, is a master of restraint. In Dream Stuff, he gives us a cast of lost Antipodeans. "Sally's Story" features a kind of homey prostitute to American GIs during the Vietnam War. She offers soldiers not just sex but "an illusion of domestic felicity in the form of a soft-mouthed girl and the sort of walk-up city-style living that is represented by an intercom and a prohibition against the playing of loud music after eleven o'clock." Sally does not think this arrangement "would be damaging," but, the author tells us, "she was wrong." No further commentary is granted us, nor is this woman allowed much more interiority. Malouf falls firmly into the show-don't-tell camp. In the end, what he shows us is Sally doing just what her GIs do: she seeks refuge in a strange man's domestic arrangements.

Another refugee is Colin, the novelist protagonist of the title story. Upon his mother's death, this Londoner returns to his native Brisbane. In "half a dozen fictions," he has recalled the Brisbane of his youth, "the density of tropical vegetation, timber soft to the thumb, the drumming of rain on corrugated-iron roofs." Alas, what he finds instead, is a "new addiction to metal and glass." The home he has plundered for his writing is gone, except, of course, in his writing. He is further displaced by circumstance: he lands, improbably, in jail. Malouf writes again and again of the way adult life necessarily distances us from the dream stuff of childhood. His characters ping back and forth between past and present, unable to rest. Maybe this is a theme especially haunting in Australia, with its literal watery distance from everywhere else. At any rate, Malouf's Australians demand careful reading. When we pay attention, we start to feel unsettled too. --Claire Dederer