BRICKLAYING

By John Skow

Novelists reveal themselves as performers, or shamans, or unloved children, or observers of bugs through microscopes. The Australian writer Thomas Keneally is a builder, a gifted, painstaking maker of books. After 20 novels, including Schindler's List and A Victim of the Aurora, a reader imagines him rummaging through his barn for old beams and bricks stored years before and never used. Stories, perhaps, told by his grandparents, who were storekeepers in Australia's Macleay River Valley. He sorts the tales, considers which can still bear weight, begins to sketch a plan for A River Town (Doubleday; 324 pages; $24).

His hero will be a storekeeper, a young, energetic Irish immigrant in Australia at the turn of the century. Tim Shea is a good, intelligent man, the kind of big, decent fellow that men and women like. But he is thought to be dangerously political, no great admirer of the British Empire, and this during the Boer War, a time of obligatory super-patriotism. Give Shea some troubles; he's half a day's receipts from bank- ruptcy, supporting a raft of relatives, too kindly to press customers for payment. Too soft altogether; he is strangely affected by the death of an unknown young woman in a botched abortion. As was the practice at the time, a constable carries the dead woman's severed head in a bottle of preservative. He's looking for her identity, and for guilt, and the impressionable Shea is a suspect.

Keneally does more than bring the old stories to life, and Shea, a living, sweating man with clenched fists hanging out of his shirtsleeves, is the central figure of his own tumultuous life, not of some historical tableau. The author's use of language is a fresh breeze on a hot day. Shea's windbag of a father-in-law is a "self-important old streak of misery." And when Shea's sister-in-law is asked whether she loves a certain scamp and charmer, she replies, "What an idiot question! I could put the darling little fellow in my pocket and walk the earth's highways with him."