Australia has been waiting for a book which looks into the face of travel and sees it for all the illusions and traps and shallowness and, sometimes, life-changing meaning that it offers or withholds.

The world now travels a lot but while Australians seem to be very confident in our travelling there is still a degree of uncertainty about why we do it, yet, it seems to me, we do it with a stoic handling of all the stresses and strains of it because of some great promise it offers.

Michelle de Kretser's book is named – with cruel precision as it turns out – Questions of Travel. The title is homage to Elizabeth Bishop's poem of the same name which De Kretser quotes as one of two epigraphs, the second being from E M Forster's Howard's End. The epigraphs lightly duel with each other.

The Forster quote, which comes first, is, "Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle…"

Foster was using cosmopolitan to mean a personality style or a future intellectual type into which we will ultimately all be shaped as we abandon nationality and become global or, as the Oxford defines it – being free from national limitations or attachments.

In the 1950s Stalin gave the word, kosmopolity, together with the word cosmopolite, a derogatory sense, so as to strengthen the national spirit of Russia or the Soviet Man and it became a crime to be influenced by "Western" thinking, arts, or fashions. He later shifted its meaning to include Jews and it took on an anti-Semitic meaning. He didn't seem to mind borrowing the word from the Greek or more likely the French language.

The Bishop poem is quite long. The lines used by De Kretser are: "But surely it would have been a pity/ not to have seen the trees along this road,/ really exaggerated in their beauty/." The theatrical exaggeration of the travel experience (especially when we return to tell travellers' tales).

I will quote another couplet from the poem because of its fine, witty imagery: "And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?" But De Kretser's wit is equal to if not finer than Bishop's.

The novel twines structurally – Laura and Ravi who each have near alternating chapters through 40 years of separate travels, restlessness, and movement. As travel can be, the book is a cavalcade of mores and fashions.

This book has a slow narrative full of sharpness and uses that searching gaze which travel – the displacement from our familiar lives – gives to us. She goes lightly and sometimes aching into what the changing of continent, country, or city, does to our "self".

And then the dreaded identity slur of saying someone, or even a nation, is parochial? "Was Sydney really up to literature, even of the Australian kind?" asks one of De Kretser's characters. Another says: "Pray for them, child. Going here and there, far from home."

And the horrors of our national stereotypes which we have pinned to us like a donkey's tail when we leave Australia. One character in the book says: "How many Balinese come to Australia to vomit on the street?" Actually, I am sure quite a few Balinese youths would come to Australia to gain the privilege of vomiting on the street – along with all the other silly privileges of wasteful excess.

De Kretser also touches on the unhonoured promises made while travelling. Reading her book I was forced to face the guilt of having made one such promise. I remember saying to an Egyptian boy who had acted as my translator after my car broke down in the desert: "I will send you a Swiss Army knife when I get home". I didn't. De Kretser's character Laura shrugs off her own failure to honour a promise – the book tells us that the recipient went to the post office for months looking for the parcel from the rich Australian which never arrives. Recently I fulfilled a travel promise – a year late.

But I am unfairly highlighting the discourse on travel which, in fact, is beautifully buried in the rich cake of the narrative, and at no time seems to be unduly introduced in a consciousness, and in no way disrupts the stories or intrudes into the transit lounge of the lives we share in the novel.

Australians do travel, perhaps, to become cosmopolites, but De Kretser stunningly hits on the head one of the existential Australian travellers' wisdoms – that Australia is the best place on Earth to bring up kids. The expression condenses deeper meanings – it carries a heartfelt gratitude for our good fortune at this time in history, what constitutes a good childhood, the good life – and it contains a national pride in the way this country has managed itself in the past 50 years.

Recently, while having a drink with the playwright Alana Valentine, in an airport lounge (of course), Valentine reported that she'd just come from a session at the Tasmanian Literary Festival, where De Kretser was discussing life and letters with Robert Dessaix. "I found her marvellously provocative and quite willing to disagree openly with Robert Dessaix about multiculturalism versus cosmopolitanism," said Valentine. She was just fantastically lucid and utterly intellectually rigorous and she certainly wasn't going to let Dessaix get away with generalisations she disagreed with. But she was also not at all disrespectful or grudging… it was perfectly clear that she simply enjoyed a vigorous exchange.'

I then spotted De Kretser, and pointed her out to Valentine, sitting at the other end of the lounge, reading, travelling. And I said to Alana that her description of Michelle was also a good description of the writerly tone of the novel.

Frank Moorhouse has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays and edited many collections of writing. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award. Cold Light, the final book in the trilogy, was shortlisted for the 2012 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Frank has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.

These reviews of the Miles Franklin shortlist – of which this is the fourth – were commissioned by Griffith REVIEW with funding from CAL's Cultural Fund, for The Trust Company, which administers the Miles Franklin Award. You can read reviews of the longlist at the Miles of Reading Challenge