The essays and talks collected in The Writing Life – all previously published or delivered – dissect what it means to be a writer while trying to get on with living in the real world. Especially, they examine what makes certain writers and their works memorable. In these pages, Malouf is only occasionally overtly his own subject, and yet his focus on some key works of literature tells readers, at least in fits and starts and hints, a good deal about Malouf the human being and writer. In this sense – but without wanting to push the point – in some ways The Writing Life stands as a counterpoint to Malouf’s celebrated memoir, 12 Edmondstone Street (1985).

The Writing Life follows A First Place (2014), a collection of personal, cultural, and political essays anchored loosely around the idea of home and place. (A third volume, Being There, on music, art, and performance, is forthcoming.) A First Place includes some of Malouf’s most urgent work, including his compelling 1998 Boyer Lectures, ‘The Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness’. In comparison, The Writing Life is less central to Malouf’s oeuvre, but it is still a fine and important book. As a collection of criticism, it is erudite, contextual, and playful, written with beautiful precision and calmness. Perhaps most tellingly, Malouf makes clear that in the process of weighing into living history throughout his writing career, he has understood that, as he puts it, he is a writer fortunate to have spent his whole life ‘on the light side of history’.

While no one essay or central idea defines The Writing Life, Malouf’s discussion of two types of writers comes close. In ‘When the Writer Speaks’, an address to English PEN in 1988, he differentiates between ‘the imaginative writer, the poet, the teller of tales whose business … is with discovery’ and ‘argumentative and expository sort of writing’. He goes on to say that, ‘The novel, which for the past 150 years or so has been the major literary form in our culture, is an interesting case because it is mixed.’ Malouf is at his most stimulating in this book when he probes the tensions that inhabit this mixed state, especially when the writer is confronted by a dire world – especially war. Malouf is right to claim the privileges that have flowed for him of being a mainstream Australian writer, and yet he himself is a deeply political – if not obviously politicised – writer.

The subjects in The Writing Life are predominantly male and canonical. While Malouf writes insightfully about Charlotte Brontë and, especially, Christina Stead, and includes brief asides on writers such as Janet Malcolm and Isak Dinesen,the book is largely populated by Shakespeare, Homer, Ovid, Proust, Kafka, Hugo, Kipling, Patrick White, and others. There are also two terrific pieces on lesser-known Australian writers, Frederic Manning and Kenneth Mackenzie. Throughout the book, Malouf makes little or no attempt to offer gender neutral language: in the main, the unnamed writer is a ‘he’.

Malouf’s prose has a wondrous capacity to be authoritative and forthright but also genuinely inquisitive. It is also – and he gets too little credit for how tricky this is to achieve on the page – generous of spirit. Throughout the book, his tone, stemming from the acuteness of his critical gaze, seems a little more forceful than he generally is. What is distinctive – and rousing – about his examination of other writers is the genuine profundity of his thought, and his ability to be critical while also being respectful: he honours what he sees as greatness without slipping into thoughtless praise.

Among many high points, Malouf’s 1974 review of Les Murray’s fourth book of poems, Lunch and Counter Lunch, is masterful. While displaying penetrating admiration for the poet Murray had already become, and the poet Malouf anticipates he could become, he nonetheless raises subtle criticisms of Murray’s focus on politics and his literary-political opponents. He suggests that the poems, as replies to ‘antagonists’, ‘have their source outside the poet; they are points in a public debate, they belong to the world of opinion, assertion, controversy’. Malouf worries about the collection’s tone, but traces it to the way Murray has conceived the poems. None of what Malouf writes is possible without an expert, acutely engaged and thoroughly open-hearted reading of the poems themselves. Reading the review forty years later leaves me pining for a book I cannot imagine I will ever get to read: David Malouf on the life, times, and poetry of Les Murray.

There are other high points: Malouf’s discussion of Thomas Mann focuses, again, on the tussle between the inner world of ‘pure’ creativity and the outer world of politics and war; his analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s attempts to write about Walt Whitman is pulsating; and his discussion of Proust’s letters, and what they do and don’t tell us about his novels, is fascinating. There are no duds, though ‘Writer and Reader’, the opening address of the 2006 Adelaide Writers’ Week, does not translate very well to the page; the subject cries out for a sharper, more extended discussion.

I have mentioned Malouf’s generosity of spirit towards his fellow writers. While he is similarly open with readers, in The Writing Life he sometimes sets the bar unapologetically high, presuming a good deal of knowledge and engagement. I cannot imagine being capable of going toe-to-toe with David Malouf on the subject of, say, The Tempest. Nonetheless, it is the depth of Malouf’s knowledge – he pushes himself deep inside the ideas and the sentences of great writers – that makes this volume so thrilling. Except for a tendency to insert the phrase ‘of course’ into sentences – as in, ‘Balzac himself, of course, is the Napoleon of literature’ – he avoids a tone of superiority. He is not dogmatic about the classics. Rather, he bubbles with enthusiasm.

In ‘When the Writer Speaks’, David Malouf says that talk ‘is antithetical to the way a writer’s mind works when he is engaged in the slower, and, one wants to say deeper business of writing’. For the decades of work he has produced while engaged in this deeper business, David Malouf deserves his status as a national treasure – indeed, he is under-appreciated. But of the various virtues of The Writing Life, perhaps chief amongst them is his demonstration of the benefits he has gained from a lifetime of slow, passionate, vigorous reading.