Villains of Refinement

By Martha Duffy

THE EYE OF THE STORM

by PATRICK WHITE 608 pages. Viking. $8.95.

In awarding Australian Novelist Patrick White the 1973 Nobel Prize, the jury observed that he had "introduced a new continent to literature."

However true that may be, it is not too harsh to say that White might have received less critical veneration if he came from Wales or Idaho. Still, for 30 years he has quietly written long, uncompromising and cerebral novels. Voss (1957), a study of a German exploring the Australian interior frontier, shimmered with metaphysical mirages. With desert-dry irony, The Solid Mandala (1966) considered the lives of twin brothers, respectively a librarian and a simpleton, and praised feeling at the expense of intellect. Three years ago, in The Vivisector, he produced an ambitious account of an artist who coldly rejects life whenever it impinges upon his work. White himself is an intensely private man who lives in Sydney with several dogs and a male housekeeper, and almost never grants interviews. (When he won the Nobel last November White remarked briefly to reporters, "I've been threatened with it for a year.") In granting White the prize the Nobel committee no doubt recognized that over the years he has attracted a small but dedicated following of readers who accept his dour outlook and who are absorbed by the ramifications of his cutting-keen artistic conscience. In choosing him in the year of The Eye of the Storm, his ninth novel, the panel also showed a sentiment in favor of the "old-fashioned" novel--that is, a carefully crafted fictional edifice with a full complement of realistic detail and psychological probing. His newest book certainly has alj, that, but it is a pallid creation that often makes the reader wish --respectfully but vehemently--that the storm would blow every bit of it away.

Grande Dame. Eye is about an old woman, Elizabeth Hunter, who is dying in her Sydney mansion, attended by a devoted staff of five. The old lady's mind wanders occasionally, but in general she is shrewd, wise and feisty. Now, that is. In long flashback sequences portraying her as a belle of society, wife of a rich man and mother of two bright children, she is made to seem dimmer.

What plot the novel has concerns the arrival of those two children--now the famous actor Sir Basil Hunter and the Princesse Dorothy de Lascabanes of Passy--to try to dismantle their mother's property, pen her up in a nursing home, thus reducing her expenses and increasing their inheritance. It is not an original scheme for a long novel, but then White has never been put off by unpromising material. He has also been accused of not liking his characters, and the criticism seems apt regarding the Hunter family and their satellites.

Sir Basil is afraid of his fame and is a near-alcoholic. Dorothy's French prince tired of her years ago. They are both acute, sensitive people, and as heartless as attack dogs. In Madame de Lascabanes, White seems to delight in lavishing attention on someone he truly loathes. She is shy, awkward and fastidious. There is a set-piece scene in which she eats lunch alone at an exclusive women's club and hears each lady chewing her food at nearby tables.

Dorothy registers every lapse of taste and grace, but she is consumed by greed, and her judgment of her mother's loving servants is unfailingly obtuse. When the solicitor consults her about the dis position of the jewels -- after the grande dame has at last died peacefully on her own commode -- Dorothy asks, "Are there any jewels left, after the nurses have taken their pick?"

The Eye of the Storm is conscientious about characterization, to the point of repetition. But stylistically it is self-indulgent. For example, White is very good at describing people performing homely tasks alone, but he does it so of ten that such sequences seem like extracts from a copy book. There is meticulous attention to scene setting, but action almost always happens offstage. Patrick White is king of his created world, but at the price of keeping it without spontaneity.

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