Much of his myth, too, lies in a different sense of geographical limit. One could fill a room with a conversation about him, as Michael Hofmann once claimed you couldn’t with one about the German poet Gottfried Benn, but it would be a strange, speculative affair, arranged months in advance, and the room might as well be a table at a restaurant. In Australia he’s recognized as a singular, difficult, canonical writer in America it’s not that he’s a total point of obscurity as much as a quiet cult presence. Widely regarded as Australia’s greatest living writer, Murnane has long cultivated an air of myth and geographical limit. The sentence, epic in its inflation, boils down to a colloquial toss of the hand: “a fair average sample.” And behind the boast and the form, the inflation and shrug, lies a more fundamental question.

But with the next line the particularizing impulse turns into obscurantist comedy.

The sentence stretches and the stakes raise, a careful qualifying act that concretizes its claim. What is it about that sentence? The clear, comma-less symmetry, the softly elegant, hyphened centerpiece, the opening possessive that in itself becomes funnier the further the sentence extends, amounting to the absurd pride of the property owner, clearing the neighborhood from his lawn – but even more prominent is the unity of form and content, and its impish disunity in the following line. “The previous sentence is a fair average sample of my prose.” The next line, with a clarifying and comic, faux-generous flourish, doubled down on the first’s premise. There now seems no other way to begin a review of his work. “My sentences are the best-shaped of any sentences written by any writer of fiction in the English language during my lifetime,” Gerald Murnane wrote in a typewritten interview to 3:AM Magazine’s Tristan Foster.

The plains murnane