Do not attempt to judge this book by its amazingly beautiful but iconographically confusing cover. A close-up photograph of a single leaf shows its veins and pores in tiny detail. The colours are the most pastel and tender of creamy greens. Superimposed over this lush and suggestively fertile image is the book’s one-word title: Drylands.

I love Thea Astley’s writing and always have. I love its densely woven grammar, its ingrained humour, its uncompromising politics, its demented metaphors, and its undimmed outrage at human folly, stupidity, and greed. I love the way that even at its most savage and despairing it has always had a suggestion of redemptive energy working away somewhere in the plot, no matter how subterranean, outmanoeuvred, or comprehensively beaten down.

‘Few evade full measure of their fate.’

Hart Crane, ‘The Bridge’

Just before the publication of her novel Dark Places in 1994, Kate Grenville said that she was thinking about her next book, ‘a heart-warming old-fashioned love story’. Well, The Idea of Perfection – and isn’t that what all love stories are about? – is that love story, though it warms both heart and head, for the bliss it affords is not so much visceral as aesthetic, even architectural.

For one of its lovers, both of whom have been married before – he having bored his wife into leaving him, she having had a husband commit suicide in a manner of which neither Bret Easton Ellis nor the Coen brothers would have been ashamed – is a structural engineer, the other a quilter. Both are quietly passionate about shapes and structures, though not about ‘post­structuralism’ which, as Margaret Jones has noted, is of no use with Australian fences.

He, Douglas Cheeseman, son of a VC decorated war hero, is a bridge builder, a ‘pontist’, who suffers from vertigo and a shyness that borders on inarticulacy. He has come to the moribund Karakarook to replace a bent timber bridge with a concrete one. She, Harley Savage, who has recently suffered a heart attack, or ‘infarction’, or ‘dicky ticker’ – this novel is wonderfully deft in its use of italics, though it wouldn’t get away with them in The Sydney Morning Herald – is the daughter of a famous artist, represents the Sydney Museum of Applied Arts, and has come to Karakarook – Aboriginal for ‘elbow-shaped’ the local Chinese butcher-photographer tells the carnally explosive Felicity Porcelline as an occasion for touching her elbow – to assist in establishing a Heritage Museum in order to attract Tourism, that last resort of once-noble communities and ignoble universities.

Somehow You, the Reader, know that Douglas and Harley, not to mention the dog which adopts H. the minute she hits town, are made for each other, like the two halves of a bridge that must meet perfectly in the middle – no symbols where none intended, as Beckett wrote. Or, more appropriately, to quote the novel’s epigraph from Leonardo Di Caprio, I mean da Vinci, ‘an arch is two weaknesses which together make a strength.’ But you can’t for the life of you see how they are going to overcome their respective inglorious muteness in order to come together, to quote the Beatles and Thomas Gray. Under a bridge, gazing up at the corbels, of course.

But The Idea of Perfection is not only a love story.  It is also a lust story, and its account of the repressed, emulsion-conscious, ‘sometimes she thought she would rather be dead than old’, Felicity Porcelline – ‘porcelain’ and ‘little pig’, I take it – for Freddy Chang, especially the fly on his jeans, is quite wonderful, if perhaps unfair to rural bank-managers. But the lust, like the love, is lightly done. Indeed all is light, from the bright sun to the yellow detergent to the benign mood, just the thing to serve as an antidote to the dark of Dark Places. The only Singer in this novel is not the terrifying Albion Gidley of Dark Places and Lilian’s Story but a sewing-machine, an agent not of destruction but of creation, of Harley’s quilts.

The Idea of Perfection is written with the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of fine structural engineering – a Gladesville Bridge of a novel, though modest. Its own poetry appreciates the poetry of others. Douglas tells Harley about concrete.

It was not good at bending, that was true. If you wanted it to bend, you had to combine it with steel, which bent rather than broke. The strength of the concrete, the flexibility of the steel: it was the perfect marriage. The thing no one seemed to really appreciate about concrete was the way it was a kind of negative. It just took up whatever space was left vacant for it...Concrete is the form of the imagination, ladies and gentlemen, having none of its own. They were words, but even he knew they would not be the right ones.

This novel is replete with elegant shapes, ‘forms of the imagination’, elegant sentences, and beaut words. Like ‘corbels’, ‘frowsty’, ‘thrummed’, and ‘waggas’. This last was new to me, though W.S. Ransom’s Australian National Dictionary devotes a column to it; but like Saul Bellow’s Charlie Citrine,

‘I’m a city boy myself.’ So perhaps I can’t be trusted when I say that the city girl Kate Grenville writes about country folk with no less affection and lack of condescension than the Boeotian Les Murray.

And another thing. I am one of more or less fifty people thanked by Kate Grenville at the beginning of this book. I don’t know what I did. I do know that, every now and then, while Kate was honorary writer in residence in our department, we’d stand in the corridor between our rooms and have a good old nag. Reading this wonderful book reminds me of that.

In one sense, the publisher’s blurb on this novel says it all.

On the edges of the salt lakes, in the harsh Mallee country of north-west Victoria in the 1920s, isolated soldier settler farms struggle to survive the dust and despair. There are few travellers: just the Debt Adjuster, or the Indian hawker Cabel Singh. Or a girl who turns up out of nowhere. Eileen. When Eileen disappears, a young boy sets out with his horse and pup to find her …

Publicists obviously rack their brains for innovative ways to promote their books: new novels have come equipped with bookmarks, balloons, and boxes of matches (Rosie Scott’s Lives on Fire), and six pages of variegated hype is not uncommon for a book targeted as a future best-seller. Random House, however, have recently come up with a format that is genuinely useful to reviewers: a neat, double-sided fold that incorporates – instead of the insistent ‘marketing points’ and the publicist’s puff picking out all the best quotes and rendering them instantly second-hand – a summary of the plot, a couple of style-bytes, and an interview in which the author discusses the genesis of the novel.

When Geraldine Brooks went through her father’s possessions after his death, she found the bundles of letters which prompted her to write Foreign Correspondence. Lawrie Brooks had been in the habit of writing to politicians and intellectuals with ideas and questions, and he had kept all their replies. Each letter, Brooks reflects, is ‘a small piece of the mosaic of his restless mind’. Because her father hoarded his past in photographs and newspaper clippings as well as letters, she had the makings of an intimate portrait of a reserved and unhappy man.

Brooks also found an unexpected way into her own past. Her father had kept the letters from the penfriends of her teenage years. Haphazardly acquired in the 1960s, these penfriends wrote from affluent North Sydney (a world away from her own inner west suburb of Concord), from America, Israel, Jordan, and France. Re-reading their letters, she reconstructed the younger self to whom they were sent.

On getting hold of Grace Karskens’s new book, I went straight to the colour plates of artefacts resurrected from the neighbourhood of the title, part of the historic Rocks area of inner Sydney. I love to look at salvage: pieced-together dinner plates, dolls’ heads, and brass buckles and buttons whose verdigris defies any amount of elbow grease. But the photo that really grabbed me was of a dug-up gold wedding ring, modelled on one finger of a hand neatly manicured but for a crescent of black dirt embedded deep under the thumbnail. To me, that minute trace of the Rocks neighbourhood spoke vividly – more so, somehow, than any of the scrubbed-up artefacts – of the peculiar joys of dabbling in other people’s cesspits and of the adventure into history that underlies Inside the Rocks.

Andrea Goldsmith’s second novel, Modern Interiors, is about a family, and marked out by its goodies and baddies. This is a moral novel about capitalism and the choices open to people within its system. Goldsmith uses outrageous caricatures to represent the baddies – those seduced and corrupted by the family’s damned money. And all of the goodies have an interest in and strenuously pursue the higher knowledges – poetry and fiction, philosophy and philanthropy. They are all good, and fair-minded people, if sometimes with too much sweetness and light.

I was tempted to do a wicked thing when writing about Between the Fish and the Mud Cake: to take its subjects and describe my experiences with them. So I would tell you all about my lunch with Georges Perec at the French Embassy in Canberra. What he said, and I said, and the ambassador said, and what I made of it all. The book mentions touring with Carmel Bird; I could describe my friendship with her. But Andrew Riemer is not that sort of reviewer, and his book is much too interesting in itself to be one-upped like that.

In the notes that I made as I began reading the book, I noted that its prose was plain, workmanlike, efficient. By the time I reached the point where Riemer himself tells us something like this, I was already qualifying this judgement. Like Othello, he suggests he is delivering ‘a round unvarnished tale’, and like Othello he is doing nothing of the sort. The prose isn’t the kind that you’d read to find out where the English language is going in the hands of those who are forging it anew, but it is an instrument of clarity for dealing with the important themes, in fact mainly one large theme, that structure the book. In a series of elegantly constructed essays, he examines the large questions of art and morality.

Central to this theme is a visit to Bayreuth, which is overlaid with accounts of past and future visits, of the company he meets there, of the history of the Wagner family and its liaisons with Nazism, of the role of Jews in enjoying and supporting the music, and what he later calls ‘the implication of Wagner in the great European outrage of the century’. He meets Judah Waten at dinner after the opera, who tells him how he always waits in the lavatories for a cubicle to be free. ‘In Bayreuth of all places,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t do to be circumcised.’

Through all this Riemer weaves the big questions. The age-old inevitable dilemma of moral responsibility. How long should guilt be retained? How much can humanity bear to remember? Travelling with several Australians and a French writer, he wonders whether harsher lives would have given them better subject matter. What if he had stayed in Budapest? Miroslav Holub is the other member of the party; he stayed. On the other hand, Australia is one of the few countries in the world where you can look at The Ring as ‘nothing other than an enthralling musical and dramatic fable’. And that is how it should be.

Some of these ideas make you want to be having a conversation with Andrew Riemer. To ask him whether he thinks it is necessary to have suffered to be a writer. Especially in a society which tends to think that you don’t even have to have lived, let alone had some bad times.

Another subject is the apparently successful insiders, the middle-class cultivated prosperous citizens who, in old societies, know absolutely how to live, what schools, what brothels, what cake-shops, what cemeteries to patronise. And yet when it comes to the point, they are outsiders. Finally, they do not belong. He discovers the same desperate awareness of hierarchies in contemporary Buenos Aires, where people behave as his family did in the 1930s, holding on with a kind of manic gaiety to the illusion that life is ruled by chance, not malevolent fate, that the future is undetermined, not inevitable or preordained.

But even more finally, this book is a celebration of a kind of community of outsiders, which, when you consider its members, is no doubt the best place to be; if you can stand it. A community of outsiders must inevitably be a place of paradox and ambiguity, where against the odds or perhaps because of them the human spirit flourishes. The insiders may seem to have the power, but would you want to be one of them?

Riemer is in the habit of examining his own life; it is the ostensible subject matter of his earlier books. This one is a series of essays about certain subjects, Bayreuth, Perec, Patrick White, Shakespeare studies, Borges, and Buenos Aires, but Riemer is the central questing figure in all of them, and we are aware of his mind making connections and exploring what it all might mean. Particularly poignant is his puzzling over the Jewishness of himself and many of his fellows, that they belong to a race, culture, religion that means little to them but which many of them have spent a long time suffering for.

And it is about cities; Riemer is a man who likes to dwell in the great old cities of the world, even if at the same time they inspire hatred as well as love. There is some interesting writing on Vienna in this context. Cities are where civilisation happens, as well as where it is betrayed, and civilisation is the subject of this book.