BooksReviewDespite disparate themes and dated subjects, Garner’s new collection coheres as a volume, and reminds us again why she is one of the greats
Acqua Profonda is the title of the first chapter in Helen Garner’s debut book Monkey Grip (1977). The words are written up on a wall at the Fitzroy pool where the novel’s protagonist spends her summer afternoons lounging. It’s a warning for the Italian migrants that frequented the pool in the 50s (“deep water”), but now, almost 40 years after the novel was first published, it stands as a concise description of the emotional and psychological depths the author has plumbed in the decades since.
Earlier this month Garner became a beneficiary of the Windham-Campbell literary prize for her non-fiction work. The circumstances behind her learning of the award (the email had gone to a junk folder and she had initially suspected a scam) set off a flurry of clickbait-style headlines (“Woman accidentally discovers she won $150,000 by checking her junk email” went one), but the anecdote is actually in keeping with the character of her work: a genuine literary achievement pickled in a brine of intense self-reflection and self-doubt.
Her latest book is Everywhere I Look, an assemblage of essays, reviews and diary entries, some of which go back decades. Like many such volumes the collection suffers from variation, not in quality so much as relevance. It’s not obvious, for instance, why the reader ought now be interested in Garner’s 2006 review of British director Paul Greengrass’s 9/11 film United 93, other than that her writing on it is typically fine. (A true collection of her film criticism, which she has published intermittently since the early 90s, would probably be more illuminating than this random selection.)
This datedness isn’t always an obstacle, though. Hit Me, a deep dive into the filmography of Russell Crowe – written in 2005, at the height of Rusty’s phone-throwing international infamy – justifies its presence by providing an offhand lesson in how to write about performance.
Everywhere I Look, which is divided into six parts, each organised by theme, is at its best when it either strays from a particular cultural moment – as in the first part; a sequence of reflections on the subject of house and home – or revisits the true crime milieu of her major nonfiction work.
That work comprises three books – The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief, which last year won the Ned Kelly award for best true crime book – each of which finds Garner both reporting on a crime (or a series of legal proceedings) and tenaciously exposing her own reporting process. In The First Stone, which examines a sexual harassment case at a Melbourne University college, Garner learns that a dashed-off letter of support for the accused foreclosed any possibility of accessing the complainants, shutting down critical avenues for reporting – a knot she spends much of the book trying to untie.
That book, and the two that followed, have earned her comparisons with the American journalist Janet Malcolm. Both are equally adept at extracting human stories from the intricate formalism of legal disputes, and Garner herself refers to Malcolm, in a tribute collected here, as “the writer who has influenced and taught me more than any other”. So it must have been a fraught experience when Malcolm reviewed The First Stone in a July 1997 issue of the New Yorker, an appraisal that Garner remembers as a “scorching” (although, she adds, “I was so thrilled by the idea of her having read me that I felt no pain”).
Reading that review now, it’s not so clear that “scorching” is right. Malcolm is so effortlessly incisive a writer that any of her subjects is liable to feel cut, but she at least seems fascinated by the book’s deep contradictions – and she does call it “extraordinary”, although maybe not exactly in the laudatory sense of the word. The review hones right in on the tension that runs through all of Garner’s extended nonfiction work, between the ostensibly rational, objective journalistic project of providing a reported account of a crime, and the author’s own instinctual, subjective responses to this project as she pursues it.
She writes:
[The First Stone] is the story of the author’s thwarted attempt to write a ‘quiet, thoughtful account’ of a case of sexual harassment in Melbourne, Australia, and of the remarkable, almost vertiginously turbulent narrative she was forced by her frustration to produce instead … Although her purported goal is ‘balance’, it is as a very unbalanced person that she represents herself.
“Unbalanced” is not a particularly pleasant characterisation – you can see why Garner felt scorched – but Malcolm sort of does have her finger on the pulse there. In her work, Garner consistently avoids the calm assuredness of the typical journalistic persona. Instead she presents herself as though she is swept along by roaring currents, both within and without.
Here she is in Everywhere I Look’s first essay, Whisper and Hum, describing the collapse of a relationship as a kind of aftermath to her taking up the ukulele:
Somewhere in the background of all this, my marriage crashed and my daughter grew up and left home. Next time I looked around I was living in Sydney with a severe modernist to whom the presence of a ukulele in the house would have been an outrage.
This is plainly very funny (“next time I looked around” is just a super way to recall a serious life change), but it’s a little unsettling, too, with its tacit proposal that the author is a powerless agent within the flow of her own life.
And here she is again, in one of the book’s centrepiece essays, The Insults of Age, describing her furious reaction to the misbehaviour of a young girl on Swanston Street, Melbourne:
Something in me went berserk. In two strides I was behind the schoolgirl. I reached up, seized her ponytail at the roots and gave it a sharp downward yank. Her head snapped back. In a voice I didn’t recognise I snarled, ‘Give it a rest, darling’.
In her relationships and her emotions, Garner often presents herself as a passenger, not a driver.
Malcolm probably puts too fine a point on it in her review of The First Stone when she writes that Garner’s comportment “invite[s] comparison with the coded messages of patients in psychotherapy”. It would be a mistake to view Garner’s finely crafted expressions of her own contradictions as a series of Freudian slips; it takes a writer with a clear sense of purpose to expose herself so consistently.
And elegantly, too, since Garner’s prose is so very pleasant to read – dry, relaxed sentences that calmly reach out towards loveliness. That ukulele, whose private use comes to assume a sacramental air for Garner, gets a luscious description: “curvaceous waist and pretty metal frets and creamy tuning pegs. A faint perfume drifted out of its woody little body”. But she’s equally adept at capturing the essence of people, as with the tiresome conversation of a fellow health resort guest: “She contained the truth: she was a vessel filled to the brim with it; the lightest touch or tilt and out it poured – to her a precious nectar, to others a choking flood.”
That is a devastating observation, no matter how gracefully expressed, and it’s this kind of willingness to look at and truly see the failures of human behaviour, in herself no less than in others, that lends her work its power. And it’s why Everywhere I Look ultimately coheres as a volume, even as reflections on Rusty Crowe, and on the author’s long-standing friendship with Tim Winton, jostle against a deft portrait of Rosie Batty, and an unblinking look at a teenage girl who killed her newborn baby. Even as she pauses in the shallows, Garner is heading for the deep end.
- Everywhere I Look is released by Text Publishing on 23 March
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