Helen GarnerCritiques

Helen Garner is a novelist of impeccable skill whose works I rarely warm to, in spite of admiring the prose on every page. So I was glad to enjoy The Children's Bach so much. It's a very short, naturalistic novel, simple in structure and tone, but layering a number of complex, ethically dubious lives on top of one another.

I can understand some of the negative reviews based on the context. Some people are ideological readers, and unable to separate their own ethics from those of characters. It's a condition especially prominent here in the early 21st century, in the age of auto-fiction, with many readers seeking novels that define their own ideology, seeing literature as a truth/lie binary rather than a mirror of non-truths reflecting our world. Such readers have their virtues, but are prone to assuming that the author shares the views of their characters unless the novel explicitly states otherwise. As I am stubbornly in the other category, I'm happy to follow Garner down this murky ethical rabbit hole. Prying into the lives of others will (hopefully) never go out of style.

This is a brilliantly clever piece of literary fiction by Australian author Helen Garner which I read for our July Book Club read. It is a short, pithy story set in 1980s suburban Melbourne that examines the grittier side of urban family life.

Dexter and Athena Fox are a fairly ordinary couple, Dexter gregarious and optimistic, Athena a down-to-earth almost grim housewife and mother. An old friend of Dexter’s, the glamorous, independent Elizabeth (Morty) and her teenage sister Vicki enter their lives and the family dynamic shifts. The story presents a fairly nihilistic, desolate view of suburban life that investigates the selfishness and brutality of the characters. The hardest thing to read was Athena’s feelings towards their disabled, possibly autistic son, Billy, who she views as a lost cause with 'no one in there' and dreams of throwing under a bus.

A well-written but not overly cheery story that I’m sure will spark some great Book Club chats. 3.5 stars.½

Smack habit, love habit–what’s the difference? They can both kill you.
from Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

I was totally inoculated from the social turbulence of the 1970s, married to a seminary student and then pastor, completing my education while working ten or twenty hours a week in church youth programs. I didn’t even drink until I was twenty-eight and had a glass of wine. No sexual liberation or experimentation with drugs for me.

A college professor told our class that he predicted a new Victorian Age was going to come after this age of freedom, that the pendulum always swings back and forth. He was surely correct. For the Seventies also saw the birth of evangelical Christianity, and I knew people who only listened to the Christian radio stations and shopped with Christian businesses.

Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, drawn from her diary entries, illuminates the Seventies counterculture world of sexual freedom, women’s liberation, and drugs. Her Nora is compelled to break from the old paradigm where women used their wiles to snag a husband. She sleeps with numerous men, giving or responding to casual invitations. And yet she and her female friends struggle with jealousy and desire a deep bond with the men they love.

Nora loves Javo, an actor who becomes addicted to cocaine. Even when drugs ruin his looks and comes between them, she can’t find the same connection with other men. Javo leaves and returns. He bonds and closes off. He steals and returns to be healed. Nora can’t sever her feelings for him.

Nora has a daughter who sees and knows too much, who Nora loves but will happily send off with acquaintances for a bit of freedom. Every time Gracie sees Javo with a needle, she cries out a warning, a child too wise for her age. It is shattering.

The women in the story share camaraderie, even when sharing lovers, clucking at the feckless men while acknowledging their necessity to their happiness. Nora sweeps and prepares food, ministers to Javo when he is withdrawing or ill. In many ways, she is still stuck in the traditional role of wife and helpmate, her freedom limited, while Javo and the other men come and go and take without commitment.

Nora tells her story with directness, without sentiment. Characters float in and out, often without context and without back story. Her bohemian lifestyle does not bring joy, but loneliness.

The air is deep, deep blue, one star. I feel a hot day coming when this night is over. I’m full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly–my head is racing wit ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I’m left out.
from Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

As foreign as Nora’s life is to me, as a character I relate to her. Her searching, her desire for connection, for meaning. Her addiction to love and her need for autonomy. Social mores and conventions flux and flow, but human nature remains the same.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

I like a good sentence and love a writer that cares about sentences. The highs and lows in this cleverly arranged collection of essays felt like a beautiful landscape. The low points being a kind of lowland swamp of monotone jottings in the central part of the book. Rising out of this swamp, in a rapid ascent to the court room, where it's as though Helen Garner finds her natural stride as we traverse insightful delights. In Part 4 On Darkness

But everybody knows that love is brutal. A thousand songs tell the story. Love tears right through the centre of us, into our secret self, it lays it wide open. Surely Sigmund Freud was right when he said, 'We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.' p.146

When I finished these essays, I felt grateful to have Helen Garner as a commentator and intellectual guide on so much that is familiar to me. Not only with inner Melbourne (and Sydney) but also with the films and books she writes so eloquently about. That said, I'm certainly going to find a copy of Janet Malcolm’s [b:Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers|16059462|Forty-One False Starts Essays on Artists and Writers|Janet Malcolm|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1376835501l/16059462._SX50_.jpg|21858277]

You feel the intense pleasure she gets from thinking. She keeps coming at things from the most unexpected angles, undercutting the certainty she has just reasoned you into accepting, and dropping you through the floor into a realm of fruitful astonishment, and sometimes laughter. p.182

...in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps that is what dreaming, and art, are for. p. 152

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The novel that launched the career of one of Australia’s greatest writers, following the doomed infatuations of a young, single mother, enthralled by the excesses of Melbourne's late-70s counterculture

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life, often drawn from the pages of her own journals and diaries. Now, in a newly available US edition, comes the disruptive debut that established Garner's masterful and quietly radical literary voice.

Set in Australia in the late 1970s, Monkey Grip follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne’s bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of his addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to wean herself off a love that feels impossible to live without.

When it first published in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod. While some critics praised the upstart Garner for her craft, many scorned her gritty depictions of the human body and all its muck, her frankness about sex and drugs and the mess of motherhood, and her unabashed use of her own life as inspiration. Today, such criticism feels old-fashioned and glaringly gendered, and Monkey Grip is considered a modern masterpiece.

A seminal novel of Australia’s turbulent 1970s and all it entailed—communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex— Monkey Grip now makes its long-overdue American debut.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Novels belong to times and places. This novel is absolutely a product of its time...the 1970s...and place, settler-colonial Australia. Now we are fifty years (close enough) on from that time, we see it very differently. The term "settler colonial" as an example had not been articulated in any but the most ardently leftist circles and is now much more a part of the cultural conversation. What Garner has to say about a liberated woman of the 1970s hits very differently now than it did then. Nora’s descent into sexual obsession and drug abuse was transgressive in a different way. Now, in a conservative social landscape developed in reaction to that bright bohemian moment, Nora seems appallingly neglectful, pretty much criminally culpable for her treatment of Gracie as an expendable accessory to her own life. We think that differently about children and their needs. Thank goodness.

A point that was clear then that we of the 2020s often seem to ignore is that Gracie...of necessity...has a dad. Nora is living her own life without so much as a thought for Gracie. And so, I remind is all in our desire to tut over this, is Gracie’s dad. In the 1970s that was so ordinary an outcome that nothing whatever is made of it, nor is Javo’s hostile indifference to anyone’s needs except his own. He is, after all, A Man. Nora, by the end of the tale, is the only sufferer for her actions. Her resentful neglect of Gracie, product of an unhappy stab at marriage, really stood out for me as she simultaneously pined after the job of riding herd on Javo of the wild blue eyes and the clearly terminal smack (heroin, for the youths who might read this) addiction. As always, the inconvenient thing about children is that they need meals, clothes, baths, every day. Junkies like the adult-but-younger Javo, in contrast, can be left in their own mess, and no one does a double-take.

The reason this book sprang out at people back in the day was that it was still very much Not Done for a woman to write about women’s desires for sex, and about the bright shining fact that the reason drug culture took hold was that taking drugs feels really good. It gets a user out of their doubtless boring and routine life. That it also takes them over and ruins that boring tedious necessary engagement with living one’s life slowly emerges as Nora stays focused on herself and her addictions to sex and drugs. The shock value of this, then, was that it was a woman writing about it without stuffy moralizing and overt message-making. Yes, she has been in this out-of-control relaationship but she does come to know it must, and is at the, end. Nora does not ever think about the impact of any of this on Gracie.

I do not pretend to like Nora, or to think I would voluntarily pick up a book about her. I’m glad that I read Monkey Grip because the prose is terrific...elliptical, imprecise, and poetic...and the fact that this is based off Garner’s own life is much better known now. This adds a depth of field to my reading of the nearly plotless events that occur. The fact that Garner spent her energy in this difficult-to-sell way, then transmuted that sort-of wasted life into a work of very loud art in a very beige cultural landscape, made me admire her for her honesty, and for her clarity of purpose in writing it as a novel. She could have written a mea-culpa memoir, and been forgotten in a year.

What we get instead is a book that, for its story and its storyteller, was a loud BANG! of brightly-colored paint in that very beige cultural landscape. It would take over a decade for Australian writers to follow Helen Garner into the Fitzroy Baths and soak some of the settler-colonial stiffness out of their storytelling muscles.

I felt the raw and conflicting emotions as if I was Helen. The ending sentences are so sparse but heavy with the finality of saying goodbye. I also felt the description of being close but not the closest friend was deftly conveyed.½

I have always found Helen Garner to write exceptionally well, and this story didn't disappoint in its candour and insight, yet sympathy. A horrible story well told.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: from Netgalley
Set in suburban Melbourne in the early 1980s, The Children’s Bach centers on Dexter and Athena Fox, their two sons, and the insulated world they’ve built together. Despite the routine challenges of domestic life, they are largely happy. But when a friend from Dexter’s past resurfaces and introduces the couple to the city’s bohemian underground—unbound by routine and driven by desire—Athena begins to wonder if life might hold more for her, and the tenuous bonds that tie the Foxes together start to fray.

A literary institution in Australia, Helen Garner’s perfectly formed novels embody the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. Drawn on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, The Children’s Bach is “a jewel” (Ben Lerner) within Garner’s revered catalogue, a beloved work that solidified her place among the masters of modern letters, a finely etched masterpiece that weighs the burdens of commitment against the costs of liberation.

from Goodreads
Helen Garner has been a literary institution in Australia for decades. Her perfectly formed novels embodied Australia’s tumultuous 70s and 80s, and her incisive nonfiction evokes the keen eye of the New Journalists. Dubbed “the Joan Didion of Australia.” Now, the beloved work that solidified her place among the masters of modern international letters, is available in a new US edition.

The Children's Bach follows Dexter and Athena Fox, a husband and wife who live with their two sons in the inner suburbs of early-1980s Melbourne. Dexter is gregarious, opinionated, and old fashioned. Athena is a dutiful wife and mother, stoic yet underestimated. Though their son’s disability strains the family at times, they appear to lead otherwise happy lives.

But when a friend from Dexter’s past resurfaces, she and her cast of beguiling companions reveal another world to Dexter and Athena: a bohemian underground, unbound by routine and driven by desire, where choice seems to exist independent of consequence. And as Athena delves deeper into this other kind of life, the tenuous bonds that hold the Fox family together begin to fray.

Painted on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, is “a jewel” among Garner’s revered catalog (Ben Lerner), a finely etched masterpiece that weighs the burdens of commitment against the costs of liberation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How times have changed in forty years! Athena's bald, bold statement, referring to her "retarded" son, "'I’ve abandoned him, in my heart,' said Athena. 'It’s work. I’m just hanging on till we can get rid of him.'" is so very, very out of step with modern sensibilities that I suspect it will cause some readers to bail out on the read.

I think that's a pity. The writing of this polyvocal récit (yes yes yes, Gotcha Gang, I know so please just put a sock in it) is as modern as Modernism itself, is as pure and imagined with such honesty that it should not be ignored over some nasty, unkind thoughts by a mother about her child.

It WILL bother you. I suspect, without proof, that it's meant to. I know no one in this story is meant to be a comfy PoV character like you fans of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge like to have. The Children's Bach is certainly in that domestic story genre. The characters are married, the events of the tale are within the marriage, the tone and tenor take little to no notice of anything outside the interests of the married partners. The others who appear in story are not interested in things outside Athena and Dexter's purview. It's a very closed world.

It doesn't exactly narrate itself to you, either. It's like song lyrics are, or some of the less-unbearable poetry is: Elliptical in the way it leaves you to go on the ride then build the tracks afterward. I really enjoy that in a read, though not in a LONG one, which makes this under-200-page story of domestic reality exactly the best length for the technique to be interesting and involving without overstaying its welcome.

What appeals to me the most about the read is the very unlikeability of Athena and Dexter. I know where I realized, like Rumaan Alam says in her Foreword, that I remember always where I was when I read, "She washed, she washed, she washed," though her moment was different from mine; but this is, like other Helen Garner books, the kind where the quotidian and the internal are polished well past the point of brummagem shininess into the glint of the knife that flenses you.

No, they aren't nice; they aren't pleasant; they aren't, by my standards anyway, good people. They're interesting, they're unbearably shallow and pretentious. Everyone in this story fails as a person in catalogable ways. This is proof if one needs it that the dismissive, condescending label "domestic fiction" is toothless in the face of Helen Garner's violent assault on domesticity, her ramming-into of the delimiting front door od The Family Home with her well-aimed ute/pickup truck.

But what a glorious car-crash it is.½

Really adores Helen Garner's style, and the way she interracts with the world. Adored her essay about her teacher, ''Dear Mrs Dunkley'' and about the dog who attacked her ''Red Dog: A Mutiny." She seems to see herself and the world pretty clearly, and she's very observant. Lots of good advice about aging too (indirectly, she'd never give advice).

This is a story about how life happens to all of us.
Rumann Alam in the Forward to The Children’s Bach

The Forward by Rumann Alam in The Children’s Bach is fantastic. Alam notes the “exhilarating feeling” of reading this book, even if keeping the characters straight was an issue. “Sometimes fiction shows us reality with utter clarity,” Alam writes.

I read this short book in an evening.

Years after graduating from college, old friends Dexter and Elizabeth run into each other and learn they live close to each other in Melborune.

Dexter is an optimist, sociable, upbeat. His wife Athena appears to be a happy wife and mother. They have two sons, one with a developmental disability.

Elizabeth has a career and tolerates her lover’s frequent infidelity. He has a daughter, Poppy. Elizabeth also has a younger sister, Vicki, who comes to stay with her in her sparsely furnished warehouse apartment.

“Elizabeth disliked the past,” we are told, while Dexter was “mad about the past.” Athena is learning to play the piano. She has a music book, The Children’s Bach. Elizabeth dismisses the idea: Bach is never simple, she proclaims.

Athena imagines a home separate from the family and the chaos of her disabled son, a place where order rules. But to Vicki, Athena “seemed contained, without needs, never restless.” Vicki moves in with Dexter and Athena, helping with the children. She loves the garden and the homey environment.

The story of these people spins out in complicated ways, revealing underlying and unspoken issues that impact all their lives.

And when the crisis is over, they go on.

The novel reflects a truth that many will recognize. The secrets, the rash acts, the acceptance, the capitulation to suppressing needs.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

* I would like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book *

One of Australia's premier writers of novels and of non-fiction, Helen Garner turns her hand here to the short story form. This is a collection that captures the vulnerability and doubts of a series of protagonists at key times in their lives.

Some of the stories are linked by recurring characters. A woman and her lover, Philip, have had a complex relationship over time. These stories, told from the woman's point of view, suggest the Philip ended their relationship and that she has not dealt with the issue, although she has brought herself to forgive him. This relationship first appears in the story Postcards from Surfers and is revisited in other stories.

Garner is at her best when writing in this fashion. Her occasional attempt to write from a man's point of view is much less successful. I found the story All Those Bloody Young Catholics to be crude and grating. But, apart from those occasional mis-steps, this is a very good collection.

It should be noted that quite a few of these stories were published in an early collection called Postcards From Surfers and readers familiar with that book may not find much new here.

amazing grace - see Diana Athill's blurb
also see Oct 2023 article NYr by Helen Sullivan who interviewed Garner in Melbourne

I think Garner's message went over my head. The stories are quite easy to read, but have an air of unreality that I didn't understand.

One of the most emotionally true stories I've read about illness, caregiving, and friendship. #aww2013

A woman cares for her friend as she is dying and denying that she is dying from cancer.½

I like Garner's fiction, and it was good to hear more about how she sees the world.½

Sad, despairing, desperate final years of her marriage, glorious independence and evolution into the next phase of her writing. I think there was only 3 books in this series, but really hope there's more.

This was honestly an excrutiating read through no fault of the author. Helen Garner's exquisite writing was the only saving grace but it wasn't enough to carry this case of unlikable characters and incredibly dull court processes. The book is about the murder trial of Robert Farquharson who drowned his 3 sons in 2005. It highlighted everything I loathe about the legal system - its punitive and performative nature and exploitation of grief and trauma. Read this if you are interested in how the court system in Australia works from a layperson's view. If you want a much much better true crime book by Helen Garner, read Joe Cinque's Consolation instead.

This is an Australian work of True Crime that some have compared to In Cold Blood, though I would not go that far. Robert and Cindy married young and quickly had 3 children. They separated, at Cindy's insistence, when the youngest was not yet two. Cindy was ready to move on, and had a new boyfriend. Robert was not ready to let Cindy go.

On Father's Day 2005, Robert spent the day with the three children, ages 10,7,and 2, doing the usual things, lunch at a fast food place, a stop in a store to buy a Father's Day present. In the early evening, as Robert is driving the kids home to Cindy, his car plunges off the road into a dam. Robert escapes from the car, but the three children drown. After an investigation, Robert is charged with the murder of the three children, the allegation being that Robert drove the car off the road deliberately to punish Cindy. Overall, the question presented was whether this was a suicided attempt, an attempt to punish Cindy, or a tragic accident.

Helen Garner, a novelist and a journalist, attended the trial(s), interviewed some of those involved, and ponders these questions, as she tries to come to grips with what happened. Can there ever be any explanation of whether or why a father, who seemed to truly love his children, would murder them?

3 stars

An interesting set up, but a number of the characters are repellant, which limited my enjoyment in reading this novella. I love Helen Garner's books generally, but not sure I would have hung in on this one if it was a novel.

I picked this up at 2:30 and finished it by 7:00 the same day. I thought it was extraordinary. It is the story of two 60-something friends, Helen and Nicola. Nicola who has advanced cancer asks Helen if she can come and stay with her in Melbourne while she undergoes a three-week experimental, shysterish treatment. Both women were and are bohemians, although Nicola is the one more entranced by alternative-whatever.
It is amazing the economy, in under 200 pages, with which Garner deals with a number of minor characters and a tightly composed plot that manages to touch on a variety of topics including friendship, death, medicine, family. What stood out to me most was the conflict between carer Helen and patient Nicola: the denial, the fear and anger, the urge to do the right thing versus the things that are not clearly in Nicola’s best interest, the ambiguities threaded throughout.
The book is sad and funny. It did remind me of my mother’s death and the conflict, denial, love, fear, helplessness it entailed. I still don’t understand it but the novel treats of these very issues. Both main characters were appealing and their bond believable. Very well written with more obscure Australia-isms than I knew existed—tinnie, dobbing, manchester, doona, being a few.

er intended suicide and to acquire the heroin and Rohypnol used to end Mr Cinque's life. Garner's coverage of the impact of the murder and subsequent trials on the Cinque and Singh family is both precise and factual but delivered with an empathetic and compassionate hand. Garner was clearly deeply affected by the murder and the trial and this is reflected in her writing. A measured, human and very relatable examination of an awful event.

Helen Garner tells the account of the trials of Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao for their involvement in the death of Joe Cinque. But it is more than just a true crime narrative. It is also the exploration of how a writer grapples with how to tell the story, and also her personal response to the issues of mental health and criminality, whether justice is possible, and how the victims of crime are inadequately supported by the legal system in Australia.

Extremely and unusually weird. Pretty enjoyable nonetheless.

Helen accepts Nicola into her home, while Nicola undergoes treatment for her cancer. Helen finds that the treatment is questionable, but Nicola is set on continuing. The relationship between the two women grows strained, and Helen struggles to care for her friend. This book explores the emotions and ethics surrounding a patient and their care, when the choices made by the patient impact their friends and family.