Mate rituals

In Tim Winton's short story "Commission," Vic Lang reunites with his estranged father, who asks him what kind of law he practices. "Industrial relations," Vic answers. "On whose side?" dad asks. "The little bloke." All through his 20-year career, Winton himself has looked after the little bloke, and because he thankfully is a writer, not a lawyer, he makes us care, too.

"Commission" is one of the 17 loosely linked stories that make up Winton's latest book, The Turning, and Vic is one of their recurring characters. Sometimes he's a teenager, sometimes he's a grown man. He's the center of some of the tales; others focus on his relatives—though you may not realize this until the very end. "He just kept showing up like an uninvited guest—he was my wedding crasher," Winton, 45, says on the phone from his home in Western Australia, near Perth. "I'd write a story and halfway through I'd realize, Oh God, it's Vic again. I didn't expect it to be him, but he was creeping in."

The writer's empathy for his characters, relayed in a prose heavy on colorful Australian vernacular, has brought him extraordinary fame at home. In 2003, for instance, the Australian Society of Authors voted Winton's 1991 novel, Cloudstreet, the country's most popular book (2001's Dirt Music came in 4th and 1995's The Riders was 31st). While Winton is better known for novels, his fans will immediately be on familiar terrain with The Turning, whose stories are peopled with aging surfers and junkies looking for redemption, small-town cops and teenagers yearning for escape, violent workers and their defeated wives. Comparing his approach with that of Richard Russo, whom he professes to admire, Winton says his own books are "big and wide, but the wideness comes from digging deeper into smallness."

Turning to short stories, a style he hadn't practiced for 15 years, seemed like an obvious choice for someone so accustomed to zeroing in on details, but Winton quickly realized he had to do some homework. "After you've been writing novels for a long time, it's hard to find your way back to the craft of the short story," he explains. "In hindsight, the linking of the stories in The Turning is a novelizing influence. I could have gone one step further and written a novel, but to me it was a little more interesting to leave the links implicit or oblique."

The Turning actually marked Winton's return to writing after a couple of years spent agitating on behalf of a campaign to save Western Australia's Ningaloo Reef from developers. "Being a kind of piss-ant celebrity finally was useful, and it was a means by which we could interest the public and the media in the fight," he says. "It was a pain in the ass because it was hugely stressful and I couldn't write, but it was an education in civics and what people are capable of."

This involvement is consistent with the compassionate eye Winton has always cast on Australia's underdogs, but also with The Turning's keen awareness of what lurks behind a supposedly classless society. In "Big World," two friends journey to the outback after finishing high school, and it's clear that while the trip is a Kerouac-style adventure for the university-bound narrator, his friend Biggie knows very well he won't ever escape his working-class fate. In "On Her Knees," Vic helps his mom clean people's houses with a mix of rage and humiliation. Winton, the first from his family to get a university degree, remarks that "the traditional artist trajectory is somebody from the wealthy classes making themselves a pauper for their art. But I came from the working class, and I became a bourgeois from writing, of all damn things. I think everybody in my family finds it bitterly amusing, really."

What has not changed for him is his attachment to small-town living in his native state of Western Australia. He lives in Fremantle, 15 miles from Perth, and still supports his local Aussie Rules team—which is akin to being a Red Sox fan before 2004. "Being from the wrong side of the wrong country in the wrong hemisphere turned out to be an unexpected advantage," Winton says. "I was forced to make myself up as I went along. I guess I'm just stubborn about my provinciality."

The Turning ($25) is out now from Scribner.