Gerald Murnane, the reclusive Australian “writers’ writer”, is having a cultural moment. First came the This American Life story, then the New York Times profile and now the rush to read the obscure writer who could win a Nobel prize for literature.

It’s perfect timing for the release of an unabridged version of his second novel, A Season on Earth, the first half of which was originally published as A Lifetime on Clouds, in 1976. The new novel, given it is also partly an old novel, is the perfect segue between Murnane’s own seasons as an author, beginning in the comic autobiographical style of Tamarisk Row, his 1974 debut, and arriving at the prose poetry about the Australian landscape that characterises The Plains (1982) and other works.

The protagonist of A Season on Earth is Adrian Sherd, a Catholic Melbourne schoolboy who frequently commits the “solitary sin”, spending the first of four sections dreaming of American beauties, usually Hollywood starlets, whom he regrets submit themselves to directors enacting the exact same depredations as he wishes for nightly.

In the second section Sherd replaces this preoccupation with an infatuation for a Catholic schoolgirl he spots on the train that leads, with few words actually exchanged with the object of his affection, to a long imaginary relationship and marriage.

If the novel were to end here – as it did in its originally published form – it would be a comedy about struggling not to commit sin, ending on a dark note as Sherd’s sexual frustration boils over. But it continues into the third section as Adrian takes up a calling as a priest – quitting only because his chosen order is insufficiently strict – before settling in the final quarter as a public servant writing rhapsodic poetry about the Australian landscape.

It’s the second – and previously unpublished – half that holds the key to Murnane’s later success, not because it exemplifies his best but rather because its didactic style tends to overexplain themes he will later return to in a more stripped-back, minimalistic style.

In Murnane’s third novel, The Plains, a documentary film-maker goes to the inner reaches of Australia to capture the aesthetic truths contained therein, and particularly to get a woman’s perspective from the wife and daughter of a plainsman who takes him in. You can feel the erotic longing and unnatural detachment as the wife is posed endlessly against the blank expanses of the plains, communicating with the protagonist only through her daily movements of the curtains to vary the light that filters into the library.

A Season on Earth has little of this subtlety. Sherd communicates with his crush by showing her his name on an exercise book. When he decides she is destined to be his wife, he speculates about how many children they will have by rolling dice and using similar devices of chance.

Later Murnane works have not much by way of narrative (“nothing happens” being the most common complaint for a certain type of reader) but A Season on Earth gives us too much exposition. Travelling by train between Melbourne and the seminary, the sight of a “peculiar cluster of vague golden hills, detached from all known continents” is enough for young Sherd to “[pour] out his seed into the toilet bowl”.

Sherd composes an epic poem about Ivan Velicki – also a “slave to the solitary sin” but this time from the steppes of Mongolia – who asks a young woman to recline for him on a grassy bank so that he can observe her body and “the distant prospect of steppes”. Velikci’s destination is the same as Sherd’s when observing the Australian landscape from the train. He likes landscapes, geddit?Murnane litters the prose with clues about his ultimate, or actual, subject. Sherd “assembled the fragments revealed to him and composed them into a pleasing whole”, he had “seen enough to prove that Australia could be rearranged into landscapes after his own heart”.

Again, there are echoes here of The Plains – which are only “a convenient source of metaphors for those who know that men invent their own meanings” – and its celebrated opening in which the narrator recalls “a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret”.

But Murnane hasn’t yet worked out that his great trick – or innovation – is not showing or telling, but subtracting.

For the power of saying less, it’s hard to walk past the narrator of The Plains waxing lyrical about a blank wall: the thickness of the variable cloud “effected, in the greenish wall before me, now an illusion of boundless depths and now the absence of anything approaching an horizon”.

Minimalism produces affect. Because the wall is blank, the narrator sees boundless depths. The emptier the plains the better.

Where The Plains leaves us guessing about the mysterious and elusive quality of space, the structure of A Season on Earth is altogether too transparent. The novel is a search through a catalogue of subjects (moving off the Hollywood starlets to, in turn, a Catholic schoolgirl, religious devotion, and poetry about landscapes) in hope of one lofty enough to help the protagonist sublimate his sexual desire.

But how to illustrate this search? With smaller, more literal ones. In one section Sherd mentally tests images of four female saints to determine which inspires greater feelings of Catholic devotion. In another he searches through an encyclopaedia of poets hoping to find inspiration and explaining why he finds each lacking.

Back on the train, Sherd discovers a scratch in the frosted glass that coats the bathroom window and “through this private window he saw a new country” composed of images like “a sweep of grass beyond a blur of foliage, a steep slope that might have led down to a rive valley, a mass of coppery-green treetops below the level of his eye”.

That’s what the novel lacks, and what later works will find: the scratch that helps to isolate the subject.

It is the frame of one’s own experience that is the proper subject of Murnane’s work, the exultation of subjectivity even when looking at a blank wall or field, things that can only be guessed at if the reader is given less, less, less.

• A Season on Earth by Gerald Murnane is out now through Text