In 1919, Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg, Ohio, a tangle of vignettes preceded by a fable. The fable unravels from an old man's waking dream that "all of the men and women [he] ha[s] ever known ha[ve] become grotesques." Not that, the narrator hastily adds, the grotesques in the old man's dream are "all horrible. Some [are] amusing, some almost beautiful."

As for the fable itself, the old man writes it—"The Book of the Grotesque"—on rising from his bed. He begins by listing truths, and he catalogues so many that the narrator announces, "I will not try to tell you all of them," mentioning, instead, only a handful, from "the truth of virginity and the truth of passion" to the truths "of thrift and profligacy." Alongside the few truths that the narrator rattles off, though, "hundreds and hundreds" of others once littered the world—truths incommensurate and "all beautiful"—or so the old man's story goes. "And then the people came along," each "snatch[ing] up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatch[ing] up a dozen of them. It was the truths," the old man concludes, "that made the people grotesques. [… For] the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, […] the truth he embraced became a falsehood."

Only in dreams and fables, of course, do our certainties disfigure us so quickly. In life, we callus gradually, and those things that we favor (weak ankles, fierce prejudices) take years to warp us. The same principle generally holds in good novels. In few novels, however, are the characters so self-conscious about the slow deformity being wrought in them as those written into Murray Bail's The Pages.

Consider Erica Hazelhurst, an unmarried Australian philosopher of 43, who begins this book by worrying that her habit of intellectual rigor has metastasized into a general severity. Indeed, it is the matter of whether she has "become a cold-hearted, off-putting woman" that occupies Erica as she drives a rented car from Sydney to the country's interior, setting out to appraise the pages that lend the novel its name.

And the writer of the pages? He, Wesley Antill, is, like Erica, a philosopher, but a philosopher without credentials: patchily schooled, widely read. He resembles Erica, too, in his self-consciousness; he remains awake to what distorts him. That much emerges in the manuscript that he has left her, summoning Erica the long way around (he dies and leaves posthumous instructions that his work be published).

While alive, though, Wesley sought out his own distortion, believing reckless asceticism necessary to philosophical insight. Nonetheless, because his treatise lists toward memoir, we know that Wesley Antill hobbles under the remembered ballast of the affections that he has deliberately cast off. For instance, believing there is no way to love a woman without loving her to distraction, Wesley chooses philosophy over Rosie Stieg, whom he leaves in London. Likewise, having toured Europe and returned home, he clear-cuts the familiar thicket that his window frames. Suffice it to say, then, that Wesley Antill does grow hard, which disfigures him. So, however, does craning to catch sight of his abnegated past. Such behaviors—call them inconsistent or paradoxical, as you like—abound in The Pages, as in unscripted lives.

To wit: another of Bail's primary characters, Sophie, is too pliable, prone to shrugging at or shooing away difficulties, but also given to a desperate and tardy grasping after affection. Sophie tags along on her friend Erica's trip to Wesley Antill's ancestral home in order to slough off a failed affair with a married man, then telephones him a day on. Sophie, as Erica observes, can be summed up thus: she embraces the dictum "Spontaneity is Truth," which is what edges her toward becoming a grotesque.

It is Bail, however, who nudges her the rest of the way, as Hermione Lee noted in an otherwise positive review dating back to The Pages's debut in Australia and the UK in 2008; "Sophie," Lee wrote in The Guardian, "is given such silly things to say."

From her silly share in its dialogue on up, in fact, Sophie's character is this novel's one conspicuous flaw. Voluptuous and brightly inked, she is nevertheless flimsy. And the ironies that surround her—that she, a psychoanalyst and undiagnosed narcissist proves less self-aware than many of the novel's supporting cast; that she preens thoughtlessly while answering to a name that heralds wisdom—come across, given the rest of the book, as baubles preciously barbed, clever but hollow.

The rest of the book, after all, renders even its bystanders with charity, and a charity wise enough not to preclude wry amusement. Bail's prose reverences the "tired expressions" of the workers who "cut pizzas into bleeding triangles which drooped over plates, day and night, like Dalí watches." It pauses over a Hungarian who "takes photographs of every bird that lands on his back fence." It takes notice of "an unhappy, exceptionally neat, middle-aged woman" crying, unobtrusively and anonymously, on a public bench.

Bail's prose even reverses itself to correct a pitiless first impression that Wesley entertains about one of the book's bit players. Hendrik Sheldrake, originally described as "bald, except for a ring of yellowish hair, the way corn soup has overflowed a saucepan—as if his head could keep only a certain amount of information," becomes a man whose "ring of yellow hair" resembles instead a "fallen halo," the telltale sign of his clumsy martyrdom.

The Pages's plotting, meanwhile, permits Wesley Antill's sister Lindsey her private grief, despite the fact that she has a "rectangular face, a pink shoebox with worn edges," which makes her "therefore appea[r] to be a practical, sensible woman." Kindly circumspect, the novel relays to the reader only what little of her past Lindsey sketches for her houseguest Erica.

This solicitude for its seemingly minor figures, though, is only the uppermost part of The Pages's reverence, which trickles down to its least prop. "There is nothing ordinary about any thing" reads one of the pages that Wesley Antill has left on his desk. In the slatted light of the shed where he wrote those words, a bottle of tomato sauce fermenting on his desk turns into a sad relic, and the papers that the philosopher pinned gingerly to a string have taken on the sentimental shape of handkerchiefs.

Yet this philosopher could not have written that sentence—"There is nothing ordinary about any thing"—had he not shadowed a London postman on his route, listening once to a "soliloquy to the chair" lofty and earthy enough to pan from a woman's navel to a street fight. Lyell the mail carrier also smuggles other immutable images into The Pages. Take, for instance, his mention of "a copy of The Rainbow [retrieved from] a gutter."

Bail's narrator, in turn, mentions that Lyell, this prodigy of "single-handed delivery" and accidental profundity, spoke "what appeared to be aphorisms, […] imperfect, unpolished, incomplete," but were first "descriptions—of what he saw before him, ordinary objects." Lyell's descriptions of allegedly ordinary objects approach aphorism, of course, because they partake of the meticulous awe with which poets and infants answer the world. Indeed, the things that Lyell details are the things that William Carlos Williams must have had in mind when he insisted "no ideas but in things."

Wesley, however, returns to ridding himself of things shortly after he loses track of Lyell. (I would have read this novel just for the five long paragraphs that it keeps the mailman company.) The philosopher, impatient with the implacable "bric-a-brac" that ideas cannot scratch or dent, calls life "the intruder on thought." Eventually, he wittingly becomes a grotesque of renunciation.

The Pages neither mocks nor pities him for that; the novel is, rather, as Hermione Lee says, "cryptic" enough that the reader can hardly decide "whether Wesley Antill is meant to be a genius, a kind of Australian Wittgenstein, or a self-deluding, grandiose eccentric." Bail makes it difficult, too, to pass easy judgment on Erica, a woman with "hand-shaped hips" and a sharp tongue, a woman whose career in "banish[ing] woolly thinking" lands her on a sheep farm, in the disused shearing shed where Wesley wrote his philosophy. And if Bail issues verdicts with something like E. M. Forster's aplomb (e.g., "Hemmed-in countries produce all manner of limps and missing limbs in their men"), the edges of those loosely knit generalizations about region and nation fray as the novel's characters travel. Bail's typing of men and women, similarly, is no less malleable than the jointed flesh of human beings themselves.

Taken whole, then, The Pages is nearly as self-conscious as the characters it observes most carefully. Whatever the truth of self-consciousness—which must have appeared in Winesburg, Ohio's secret scripture, too—embraced in its most naïve form, it will turn one into a grotesque (as it does Sophie). Fictions that embrace self-consciousness in its crudest form, by the same token, craft themselves into parody. Bail's novel avoids that stylized deformity. Its self-consciousness, after all, almost always widens into an ampler solicitude, into an attentiveness to the people and things—never ordinary—that surround the self.

Jane Zwart teaches literature at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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