In "The Sydney Morning Herald" Bruce Elder and Sacha Molitorisz debate whether Patrick White was ever worth reading.
Elder thinks not: "...while the personality of a writer should never intrude on his works, Paddy, as he was known to his one friend, was a vindictive, malicious, boorish, arrogant old sod who had such an inflated opinion of his inner and intellectual worth that he treated even those who loved him with disdain."
Molitorisz thinks so: "The Tree of Man is set in the Australian bush early last century, where Stan and Amy Parker are two stoic survivors. With a veracity peculiar to great fiction, White creates a mythic work that contains several decades of Australian history. All of which makes it sound important, but tedious. The opposite is true. To borrow from White, The Tree of Man has the simplicity of true grandeur."
