In the meagre press it originally received, reviews focused on its surface satire. Fortunately, Murnane is sturdy enough to survive that. The Plains is wonderful as a bone-dry send-up of the impossibility of getting published within the dead zone of modern Australia, finding unique angles on a land of fields and sand whose millennia-old culture is some combination of ignored and stamped out by the hundreds of years of brutal colonial rule. Out with the old and no new to speak of; it's ruthless if you need it to be. Interpretations eventually deepened into a more philosophical understanding of the impossibility of making the meaning you intuit in the world into a coherent object, an existence not just futile but beautifully static. What does it mean to 'make'? Who do you make for, and how do you make 'for' them? What does a life spent doing so look like? Is it satisfying, or, indeed, anything at all? Need it be? Is the simple fact of being enough? When I read it, though, I could see nothing but the country the plains so desperately asserted they were not. A literary representation of Australia, much the same culturally and geographically, a series of carefully orchestrated outside fringes, with the successful appearance of an interiority a wall disguising the hollowed-out inner. I can't help but wonder what this means to him, a man who, despite his relative obscurity, has so delicately and knowingly designed his reputation as a hermit-genius. Perhaps he sees all, even him, as outside bluster, the inner a brush we only pretend to paint with, the world he draws us as real as the one he sits within. Whatever the case may be, I can't help but be touched by the naked hope found in a world so empty:

"I seldom wondered what opinion of me predominated among the people who watched and smiled as I took my awkward grip on some antiquated camera and stared obligingly at some empty zone ahead of me. I was far more concerned with those who might one day examine the faulty prints in my patron's jumbled collection and see me as a man with my eyes fixed on something that mattered."

If the time finds, I'd like to put a proper 'for your consideration' letter together, pretending, of course, that the words heaped onto this site have any impact on such things, on why Murnane will be my pick to win the Nobel Prize every year he remains on this plain. Suffice it to say that any number of names could be dropped as worthy analogues for his talent (here are two; where Beckett is austere, Murnane floats, where Borges builds a model, he draws a map). One review of one book hardly represents anything; his words are a word unto themselves, his body of work a coherent chain of manifestorial magic, a world seen only through his eyes, conjured by his breath, a clarity of focus aimed in a one-of-a-kind direction. And hell, why can't I barrack for the home team a little? More to follow (eventually).