Exasperating Brilliance

The Eye of the Storm By Patrick White

Viking, 608 pp., $8.95 Few have the talent for a monastic vocation; perhaps twice that number are equipped to read properly The Eye of the Storm. Australian Patrick White, 1973 Nobel laureate, exacts the kind of steadfast application, over windbreaking distances, that one might afford Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet. It’s a novel you can’t put down: but not for the jacket blurb reasons. Eye seems to have changed modes,moved on, while you slept. Its subtle yet dynamic flow requires sustained attention, sustained enthusiasm. Lift the needle once or twice and your Bach fugue has lost its integrity. But a 600-page fugue is possibly more monstrous than beautiful.It’s as easy to be irked or bloody bored by Patrick White asitistobe astonished by him. If you cooperate, magnificence can be tedious, or tedium magnificent. White is, without conditional clause, brilliant. And exasperating.