Discontinuous Connections

This November marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Frank Moorhouse’s third book, The Electrical Experience. It was a moment in 1974 shared also with the release of Frank’s first feature film, Between Wars, and the High Court of Australia’s sitting to hear the appeals on a court case that contributed to the establishment of the Copyright Agency Ltd. I conclude Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths, the first in a projected two-volume cultural biography, with these moments, arguing that it was the culminating point in a twenty-five-year writing apprenticeship which finally saw a thirty-five-year-old Frank breaking into – and arguably breaking up – the literary establishment.  

Together with his generation of writers, Frank was, after all, trying to do something new, something that went against literary convention. His readership had grown steadily with his first two books, Futility and Other Animals (1969) and The Americans, Baby (1972), but the critical acclaim came more slowly, begrudgingly, even if it was never entirely absent. Only with his third book did critical appreciation and the opinion of general readers finally coincide. It is worth reflecting why this was the case fifty years ago – and why we should still be reading The Electrical Experience today.  

Strange Paths considers The Electrical Experience as an apogee, but it was also a starting point for Frank – the full consequences of which I’ll present in the biography’s second volume. For example, it was during the archival research Frank undertook in the early 1970s, while writing the stories for his third book, as well as for the screenplay for Between Wars, that he began thinking seriously about the League of Nations. By the early 1980s, Frank’s obsession with the League had grown, and had by then become the focus of a proposed work of fiction. In the initial grant application and later book proposals, he explicitly modelled this project on The Electrical Experience. ‘I intend to write a book length cycle of stories dramatising Australia’s (and the world’s) investment of hope and faith in the League of Nations between the two world wars and the disintegration of the League in the years up to World War 2,’ he wrote in a 1983 grant application for a fellowship at the National Library of Australia: ‘The stories will be developed with the same method used by me in the book The Electrical Experience […] – a book set in a small country town between the wars.’  

It would be another decade before Grand Days (1993) would be published, with Dark Palace following in 2000, bringing the initial project to a close. Nowadays, most people who read those books tend to focus more on its protagonist, the indomitable Edith Campbell Berry, whose outsized personality required an additional book, Cold Light (2011). But it is important to note that in all of Frank’s fiction, his attempts to create fictional characters with unique, individual lives coincided with the broader purpose of providing a critical perspective on particular historical, social, and cultural concerns. Character and concern: gestalten of figure and ground. The figure, Edith, who gives form to various underlying matters, only emerged in the mid-1980s, in a story, ‘The Delegate’, later included in Forty-Seventeen (1988). But Frank’s concerns, relating to the League of Nations and the interwar cultural scene, pre-date this by more than a decade. Long before Edith Campbell Berry, there was T. George McDowell, the protagonist of The Electrical Experience, who also appeared peripherally in the Edith Trilogy, as her childhood friend from the NSW South Coast, and later as confidant. The keys to those later books, in other words, are to be found in this earlier book. 

There are several reasons why critics in the early 1970s did not initially accept the new writing of Frank’s milieu. Young writers struggled to get published, especially in establishment quarterlies, such as Meanjin or Southerly. Until the mid-1970s, Frank had only limited success in such journals. He was mainly published in men’s magazines or political journals, some so short-lived as not to survive past their first issue. When Frank did manage to get a story into a mainstream literary journal – such as the story published in Westerly in 1964 – his work was censored to mitigate the charge of obscenity. This charge was also used to justify rejecting his other work outright.   

This threat of obscenity, and fear of giving offence, restricted the range of subject matter and the scope of permissible language used in Australian writing at the time. Much couldn’t be spoken about, even less shown. Frank’s generation ignored these rules (at their own legal and professional peril) and began to use swearing and address forbidden topics such as sex – at times even describing people having sex. Frank pushed this further than most by also writing about homoerotic desire at a time when homosexuality was also illegal. Every review of Frank’s first book, Futility and Other Animals (1969), referred to a perceived overuse of ‘four-letter words’. In this way, the literary merit of the stories could be bypassed altogether, by drawing attention to objectionable content and dismissing questions of form. (Though, of course, form constitutes content; new forms open up possibilities for new content to enter our literature.) In the story censored by the editors of Westerly, for example, the repeated use of ‘bullshit’ had been curtailed, even though Frank had consciously chosen the word as a refrain (with the accent on the ‘shit’) punctuating the rhythm of the narrator’s monologic prose. He did not choose ‘bullshit’ simply to shock the reader, but rather to communicate a particular experience: the agonies of an adolescent entering adulthood.  

Outside the charge of obscenity, Frank also noted a more subtle opprobrium attached to the use of brand names or anything that drew attention to the encroachment of commercial jargon or popular culture into literature. It was not just that traditional stories in Australia contained characters who didn’t have sex, but they also didn’t seem to live in any recognisable economic reality. Frank’s characters had both, allowing for a more accurate and honest inquiry into the social and cultural matters of his day.  

In his first book, Futility and Other Animals (1969), Frank explored themes of sex and reproduction, but also their politics, particularly the renegotiation of gender roles and the choices provided by the availability of contraception. In The Americans, Baby (1972) – a book inspired by American writer, Donald Barthelme – Frank started using commercial brand names to introduce a critique of an increasingly globalised market and a new consumer culture into his stories. These concerns not only led to the creation of characters such as the American, Becker, emblematic of U.S. economic imperialism in stories like ‘The Coca Cola Kid’, but also pointed to the dark side of celebrity culture, as in the story ‘Letters to Twiggy’, referring to the famous British model, actor, and singer. 

The Electrical Experience took these concerns further – or rather, deeper – as Frank began turning back, historically and culturally, to the conditions that prefigured his contemporary social world. Set mainly in the 1920s and 1930s, The Electrical Experience explores the consequences of electrification and technological development on Australian culture, through a character study of T. George McDowell, his family and business life in regional Australia. It examines the local production of soft drink before the importation of commercially dominant American brands. McDowell’s conduct is oriented by the principles of Rotary, a community service organisation that promotes international goodwill and understanding through the fellowship of business and community leaders. For Frank, this organisation – which his own family remained deeply involved in – provided a model of international co-operation that, transposed into politics, would underpin his later thinking about the League of Nations. In those later books, McDowell appears as an advocate for the partnership between Rotary and the League of Nations. 

But to address these concerns required developing new literary forms at a time when critical standards were still oriented toward writers from the previous generation, and their more traditional narrative structures. Charges of obscenity and restrictions on subject matter and language were simply a way of defending these conventional literary forms. This meant that before Frank’s work could be accepted, new critical standards needed to be established, a space created to accommodate formal change. Much of this heavy lifting was done by a new generation of critics, such as Brian Kiernan and Don Anderson. Michael Wilding is unique in that he was both a critic and a writer of fiction, practicing and theorising this new writing. 

Frank rarely wrote book reviews, preferring to focus on writing fiction. But in one exception, for The Bulletin in 1970, he outlined some of these new critical standards. The book under review was Hal Porter’s Mr Butterfly and Other Tales of New Japan (1970). Porter, aged sixty, very much represented the Literary Establishment. He had by that stage published fourteen works, including novels and plays, collections of poetry and short stories, and memoir. Porter’s stories exemplified the traditional Australian short story form, characterised, as Frank saw it, by static description of setting, décor, and physical descriptions of characters, and by an omniscient narrator imposing a moralistic framework.    

In contrast, Frank argued for a more dynamic kind of description based on suggestion and less focus on setting or physical appearance, with more emphasis on relationships, mood, and dialogue. Whereas ‘the conclusive patterns’ of Porter’s stories ‘provid[ed] the gratification of […] clock patience’, an alternative narrative art might evoke ‘the grimness of the Tarot cards’ and revolve around ‘mysteries, irony, or existential puzzles, absurdity, or chill’. Frank preferred characters who were more individualised; figures who struggled against rather than conformed to fixed types. He called for a questioning of conventional moral frameworks. Ultimately, what Frank saw in the traditional story was mistrust in readers’ capacities, with authors feeling they needed to spell everything out, including how the reader ought to respond to the story. Frank preferred stories that were more implicit and open-ended, that generously afforded greater trust and responsibility to the reader. He wanted to offer opportunities for ongoing interpretation and engagement.  

This is what Frank had been attempting in his own writing throughout the 1960s. Measured against the rigidity of the older forms, this new writing seemed looser – leading mistakenly to the impression among critics that it displayed less craft, less talent. But, in many respects, the new forms required greater discipline on the part of the writer, more art. As Michael Wilding once said of the subtlety of Frank’s early writing (as compared to ‘the mannered rhythms of White, or the rich emotions and ornamentation of Porter and Keneally’): ‘the labour of the art has classically all been to conceal the art.’ This can be seen in the stories of Frank’s first two books, for example, but it was with The Electrical Experience that he felt he had achieved greater competence and confidence in his chosen style. It was also the book where critics, having become more acclimatised to these new ways of writing fiction, began to appreciate its craft and literary value.     

But even as that new generation of writers broke with traditional forms, they did not all break in the same direction. The diversity of the ensuing experiments marks the value of this period in our literary history. For Frank, it was the ‘discontinuous narrative’. In 1967, in his first private statement regarding this developing form, Frank said that ‘discontinuous narrative’ referred to the way that short stories could be inter-related, with a common cast of characters living in a shared environment. But this new form was more than just what had been accomplished in, say, Henry Lawson’s Joe Wilson stories, or Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. For Frank, although each story is concerned with certain moments or incidents from its characters’ lives and interactions with one another, the ‘discontinuous narrative’ form depends on reading these particular stories together; it operates through a cumulative effect, activating the imagination to consider the spaces between these stories, the gaps in what readers know – or what we fancy we know – about these characters, and the precarious footings upon which our judgements of them rest.   

Each ‘discontinuous narrative’ is told in either first- or third-person – but always focalised through one of the characters in the story. Characters may return from previous stories to provide the narratorial perspective, sometimes offering their own version of an already narrated incident. They thus shift between figure and ground – at times protagonists or antagonists, at others peripheral. A figure like T. George McDowell, for instance, moves from the periphery of The Americans, Baby into the spotlight of The Electrical Experience before receding once more into the background of Grand Days. In doing this, Frank forgoes both overarching narrative continuity and any omniscient narrator who might adjudicate between competing versions of what is ostensibly the same story ‘content’.  

While initially used to describe the structure of a book-length work, the ‘discontinuous narrative’ came over time to refer also to the relationship between Frank’s various books. It was only with the publication of The Electrical Experience, for example, that the scope of these interconnections between his first three books was finally appreciated. Frank would even encourage this by reprinting a story from one book in the following book, to act as a bridge. ‘The First Story of Nature’ (from Futility) was reprinted, with slight revision, in The Americans, Baby (as ‘The Story of Nature’), just as ‘The St Louis Rotary Convention, Recalled’ (in which readers are first introduced to McDowell) appears in both The Americans, Baby and The Electrical Experience. For Frank, this approach to writing fiction proved fecund: stories over-lapped and interlocked, while still retaining the sense of being but a fragment of an otherwise open and mysterious world, always calling for further exploration. The resonance of each of the short stories in Frank’s books, amplified across his oeuvre, provides the reader with a greater role in thinking through, interpreting, and making sense of what they are reading. But with one caveat: whatever sense or meaning we find or endeavour to impose on this work – it is always provisional. 

Take, for example, a scene from Grand Days set in 1928. Soon after Edith begins using her full name on her business card – Edith A. Campbell Berry – she is visited by her old friend, George McDowell. He tells her: ‘I think using an initial in your name is a natty manoeuvre. Very American. I might do it one day myself but I’d be laughed at back home.’ Twenty years earlier, in The Electrical Experience, Frank wrote a story set in 1938, ‘George McDowell Changes Names’, in which McDowell decides to change his name to ‘T. George McDowell’, finally reclaiming, albeit in initial only, his first name, Terence – for ‘emphasis [...] It has more oomph’. He claims he has wanted to change his name since the St Louis Rotary Convention he attended in 1923. But what we as readers only discover in Grand Days is that it may have been Edith’s initiative that finally encouraged McDowell to change his own name later on. Such revisitations abound across all Frank’s books. It speaks to his belief that the process of writing is an ongoing act of excavating hidden facts, and that a writer never fully knows or understands their own work, or the characters they end up creating. 

One of Frank’s main concerns in The Electrical Experience was the relationship between technology and cultural change. This had been an abiding intellectual preoccupation ever since childhood, when he wrote an essay for a student newsletter surveying the history of writing and printing, from Ancient Greece to the Gutenberg press and the first newspapers. But here it was grounded in the more practical experience of growing up in a family of inventors and dairy-related machinery manufacturers. Frank transposed these experiences into an interest in media theory and a study of the sociology of communications technology that informed his career as a journalist and writer. While writing The Electrical Experience, Frank had also proposed to write a companion work of non-fiction: The Technological History of the South Coast. It was intended to trace the advances in technology and the dairy industry, and their impact upon local culture: the cream separators and the milking machines, the telegraph and the local newspapers, the moving picture shows and cinemas, ice factories, soft drink manufacturing, radio and telephones – up to, and including, the Moorhouse Dairy Boiler (which could boil ten gallons of water in ten minutes, to efficiently sterilise milking equipment). This was his father’s eponymous invention that helped found the family business.  

Although Frank completed much of the historical research, he never wrote this companion book. The material, however, and his reflections on technology, fed into the writing of The Electrical Experience, providing pointed detail to many of the stories. The opening story, for example, ‘A Black, Black Birth’, begins with McDowell in 1938 meditating on the problems created by the telephone, which replaced face-to-face communication and the trust this instilled: ‘Now you didn’t know if you were speaking to the managing director or the office cat. And people didn’t go out to see the problem for themselves, they simply “got on the telephone”.’ The book closes with the story, ‘Filming the Hatted Australian’, set in the 1970s, when a group of student documentary film makers descend upon the South Coast, exploiting the older generations’ ignorance of the techniques and possibilities of this new medium to trip them up and expose their biases and bigotry – while at the same time revealing their own hypocrisy and duplicity. The intervening stories reference ice factories, soft drink manufacturing, radio, and the lost art of letter writing.   

Many of these more critical reflections on technology emerged from Frank’s long intellectual engagement with media theory, especially the work of Marshall McLuhan. In 1967, Frank wrote an essay on McLuhan’s thought and the implications of the Canadian theorist’s central insight: that each new development in technology was a new mode of extending the human body into the world that fundamentally changed the shape and tenor of society. This had already happened in print culture, but what the latest innovations in electric media – especially television and early computers – were doing was effectively bypassing the earlier prosthetic processes and directly extending the human ‘nervous system’ into the world. The consequences of this included the formation of a ‘world tribal village’ where, as Frank summarised, ‘just about everything is known and felt when it happens’.  

Frank’s perspective on McLuhan was partly generational. McLuhan’s generation (coinciding with the generation of T. George McDowell) was purely ‘typographic’. The generation coming up under Frank, which McLuhan targeted, was largely ‘iconic’ – oriented by audio-visual media. But coming from the generation in between, Frank was more of a hybrid, somewhere between typographic and iconic. Though his focus was on writing and typographic culture, he felt somewhat excluded from that world. The more he dealt with his contemporaries, the more he realised how ill-suited they were to coping with contemporary (iconic) reality. He had used literary fiction as a form of imaginative inquiry, to engage more completely with the complexity of his social world. Increasingly, however, he was experimenting with how the medium of literary fiction could be used to incorporate social changes – precipitated by new technology – and reflect these critically back to his contemporaries. In other words, Frank was considering how to incorporate the iconic into the typographic. 

In part, this exploration of the visual and aural motivated Frank’s ironic involvement in writing for the screen, resulting in several short films and finally his first feature film, Between Wars (all of which, at this stage, Frank co-produced with director and friend, Michael Thornhill). But it was with The Electrical Experience that Frank was first able fully to attempt the merging of both the iconic and the typographic. This presented itself in the formal aspects of the published work (unfortunately, these appear only in the first edition). The design of the physical book is essential to the experience of reading its contents.  

The Electrical Experience contains fourteen stories, or ‘narratives’, accompanied by twenty-four ‘fragments’, listed separately. The fragments were drawn largely from the research Frank did for The Technological History of the South Coast, some historical, some lightly fictionalised. These archival fragments point to the shared context beneath the discontinuity of the narratives. Together, these present the typographic component of the book. But even here, iconic interests infiltrate the work. The ‘narratives’ were typeset conventionally, black text on a white background, but the ‘fragments’ inverted this, with white text on black background. This negative printing was also used on the main title-page, with the white text for ‘The Electrical Experience’ typeset with a 3D effect. Leon Cantrell, writing about the book in 1978, when such design was still startlingly fresh, pointed out how the title words stood out ‘as if they were, in fact, electrically lit’. We might even suggest that this prefigures the work as an ebook, its typography illuminated on a digital device. 

The iconic component of the book also includes the use of photographic images and advertising illustrations from the 1920s and 1930s, appropriately placed. For example, photographs from Zane Grey’s 1937 book, An American Angler in Australia, including a yellow fin tuna landed at Bermagui, NSW, accompanies the story, ‘The Secret of Endurance’ – where McDowell meets the famous American author and fisherman (alongside ‘Letters to Twigg’, these two stories read like a genealogy of celebrity culture, a call-and-response). A photograph that both opens and closes The Electrical Experience – of a man in a hat carrying a briefcase – is often taken to be a depiction of T. George McDowell himself (who, consistent with Frank’s criticism of Hal Porter a few years earlier, is not physically described), but is, in fact, a photograph of American writer and philosopher, Elbert Hubbard. In 1899, Hubbard published A Message to Garcia, a paean to individual initiative and industriousness that plays a central role in ‘George McDowell Delivers a Message to General Juan Garcia of the Cuban Army’. As McDowell says, after telling Dr. Trenbow about the protagonist of Hubbard’s book, charged by the U.S. President with delivering a message to the Cuban General: ‘It was initiative riding on tenacity.’ 

Cantrell wrote that ‘[i]t is a mistake to regard [the iconic aspects of the work] as subsidiary or even as supplementary to the remaining narrative’ and these aspects extend to the use of typefaces in The Electrical Experience. When Frank was a cadet journalist in the 1950s, he took a typography course, and in the 1960s when he started editing a journal, he paid close attention to typography as a way of modernising the publication. It was also his involvement with the off-set printing of underground newspapers, such as Thor, in the late 1960s, that informed this aspect of his iconic thinking. In The Electrical Experience, every story has its own title page, each with a different typeface. The story, ‘George McDowell Changes Names’, for example, uses a version of Broadway, which is very American, very ‘natty’. While the bold Caslon of ‘Tell Churchill that T. George McDowell is on his Feet’ reflects the dogged determination of McDowell to pull himself together after a psychic stumble. These visual aspects draw attention to the book as an artefact, merging the typographic and iconic, fictional and archival in a way that primes the reader for the mood and theme of each story. 

In The Electrical Experience, the link between character and concern may be found in the depiction of McDowell as an Entrepreneur – as businessman, inventor, innovator, and risk-taker – an individual set against a general economic order. But even as this is a sympathetic portrait, it is also a critical one. For Frank, genuine criticism must begin with understanding; its only end to increase the sum of our understanding. It’s in the cumulative effect of the discontinuous narrative form – in what is both said and unsaid – where this understanding and criticism take shape. In an early story, for example, ‘The End of Ice’, McDowell reflects on the fate of James Tutman, an ice-maker who refuses, when electricity first comes to town, to transition his business to household refrigerators. ‘It was not that men hate progress, but that they love inertia.’ McDowell, on the other hand, adapts with the times, and so becomes a successful businessman.  

But even he is not prepared for changes that the local production of Coca-Cola will end up having on his own soft-drink and cordial business. In a later story, ‘The Enterprising Spirit of the Anglo-Saxon Race’, McDowell, recently retired, takes Becker, a Coca-Cola representative, for a tour of the town, noting the points of historical significance and how they have altered over time. ‘That’s Progress,’ McDowell reflects to himself. ‘How you believe in something and it changes like a stick into a snake. Cherished beliefs turn and bite you. Competition. Good for the winners, bad for the losers. And always more losers than winners.’ He considers the unintended consequences of his earlier actions, and the negative impact upon his family life: ‘I remember thinking at the time that electricity power and its conveniences might equalise the country and the city and keep the young from leaving the town. We failed to keep our young.’ He also observes the decline of news media and its deleterious effect upon public discourse. ‘Local papers disappearing. Owned by people you never see. People you can’t argue with in the street, can’t put a case to.’ So when, in the end, he tries to rouse himself by declaring he would ‘start again from scratch’, it is not as convincing as when, in a previous story set during the war, he pulled himself together, declaring triumphantly: ‘You can tell Churchill that T. George McDowell is on his feet.’ A spectre of failure haunts ‘The Enterprising Spirit’ in the form of McDowell’s childhood friend, James Tutman, the ice-maker, who reappears from the earlier story, ‘The End of Ice’. That technological change precipitates Tutman’s suicide by cyanide remains unsaid in ‘The Enterprising Spirit’, but resounds nonetheless.            

In the early 1970s, when Frank was first thinking about the two books he wanted to write about technology and culture on the South Coast, he was also working on a film script. The central character was a printer. The story mapped changes in the printing industry that resulted from the introduction of offset printing and the deskilling of the workforce. The historical background he drew upon considered the role of printers and compositors in early industrial-relations disputes and strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More broadly, the script was concerned with how communications technology – especially the printing press – had created the cultural conditions for the growth of industry and education, a vernacular literature, and the Australian nation-state. The film was never produced, but the basic idea informed the subsequent writing of The Electrical Experience, which is very much, like the script, a meditation on McLuhan’s notion of obsolescence – one of the fundamental and abiding concerns of Frank’s intellectual life.  

When Grand Days was published in 1993, some critics expressed impatience with Frank’s minute descriptions of the League’s use of Roneo duplicating-machines and its attendant classification system known as the ‘Registry’ (Frank even included a non-fiction appendix for each of these topics in the book). Frank’s point in Grand Days was that the League of Nations would have been impossible, even inconceivable, without the invention of either duplicating-machines or the Registry. The failure to understand their importance was a failure to understand the extent to which our social worlds are shaped by the technologies we use; and how these technologies use us, in turn. Incidentally, a year after Frank’s account of the collapse of the interwar order in Dark Palace (2000), Edwin Black published IBM and the Holocaust (2001), which explains in excruciating detail how the rearmament of Nazi Germany during the 1930s and the industrial efficiency of the death camps in the Holocaust would have been impossible without the IBM tabulating machine – the precursor, and testing ground, for our modern digital technology, our home computers and mobile devices.  

It is no coincidence, then, that the writing of The Electrical Experience coincided with Frank’s involvement in the copyright court case. The Xerox machine – heir to the Roneo – had been used in the 1960s as a way to disrupt the imposition of federal censorship in Australia; it helped disseminate pirated copies of banned books from overseas and circulate local writing that traditional publishers refused to print due to obscenity fears. But the same machine was also being used – especially in educational and corporate settings – to violate authors’ copyright. Xerox had even placed a full-page advertisement in The Australian promoting the ease with which an entire book could be photocopied. Frank sued the University of New South Wales for authorising the copying of a short story from The Americans, Baby – and won. 

But if photocopy machines could duplicate whole books, by the new millennium digital technology would swallow entire libraries. Despite legal action, ‘Google and other search engines have begun scanning existing hard-copy libraries which include books which are in copyright,’ Frank warned in 2005. In 2021, a year before Frank died, the National Library of New Zealand donated around 400,000 books to the Internet Archive to digitise, without permission from copyright holders. Among the Frank Moorhouse books included was a 1972 edition of The Americans, Baby – the book at the heart of his landmark copyright case that had created the protections international tech companies are now wilfully shredding. The library’s collection, so unconscionably surrendered, also included a first edition of The Electrical Experience, a book written as a portent of this very fate. By foregrounding its own physical design, the book invites the reader to reflect upon itself as a cultural artefact under duress. It is in this context that the figure of McDowell becomes clear as, in part, a stand-in for the endangered Australian writer adapting to a changing technological environment that is simultaneously undermining and devaluing his craft. 

This informs a related concern Frank held even before he had published his first book. In the 1960s, McLuhan had predicted a ‘post-literate’ society, where, as Frank put it:  

Frank was even more explicit in a letter to Michael Wilding: ‘If we have only literature left as a stable factor – morality politics and other values under tremendous question – McLuhan gets at us more – writers as blacksmiths of this century.’ Here Frank is referencing the way that just as the Industrial Revolution rendered blacksmithing obsolete, so too more recent changes in communications media risked making writers and print culture outmoded. ‘No,’ Frank continued:

In such circumstances, the question for Frank was what form literature should take in order to address its own crisis, to resist its endangerment. And the form he proposed was the ‘discontinuous narrative’.    

All of Frank’s books, from Futility and Other Animals (1969) to Cold Light (2010) are connected in this way: across characters, across generations, across periods of Australian history. But it was only with The Electrical Experience that readers and critics first came to appreciate this fact, and came to understand that, due to this innovative form, Frank’s stories do not necessarily end – they are simply interrupted. They contain interstices and breaks in the lives of his characters, but not conclusions. This keeps the possibilities of each story, of each character, alive. It also keeps alive the possibilities of literature itself, and reading as an essential cultural activity.