Ahead of her upcoming conversation with Helen Garner, The New Yorker’s Merve Emre sat down to talk to the Unterberg Poetry Center’s new director Sarah Chihaya about the great Australian novelist — Garner’s exquisite powers of description, her growing popularity in the US, the arc of her career, and more.
Helen Garner is well known in her native Australia, but not so widely read in this country. Did you first read her for your 2019 essay in the London Review of Books, or had you already been familiar with her? What was it like to first encounter her writing?
I will never forget the lunch during which my editor at the LRB, Deborah Friedell, slipped me the Australian edition of The Children’s Bach. It had this fantastically bold yellow cover and huge, spindly font that gave you no indication what the book was about. I started to read it on the train home -- it was a wet, gray afternoon — and I remember being jolted out of my melancholy by this sentence: “He came home at that hour when light is not yet anything more than the exaggerated whiteness of a shirt flung against a bookcase, a higher gloss on the back of a kitchen chair.” It’s a jarring sentence, for how Garner adjusts the quality of the light by using a complicated, slightly hazy negative phrase (“not yet anything more”) to frame a simple, stark image (“the exaggerated whiteness of a shirt”). But it is also a beautiful sentence, with a strong intuitive appeal. Anyone who has stayed out late and barely managed to drag herself home knows the light of “that hour” and knows too the dim shock of white clothing thrown on dark furniture. That sentence alone decided me.
Garner’s appearance at 92NY will celebrate the reissue of two of her early novels, but over nearly five decades, she has written long and short fiction, investigative journalism, essays, screenplays, and memoirs. As a critic and as a reader, how do you approach a writer who’s had such a long and varied career? Do you feel a responsibility to try and get to know her whole body of work?
Part of the delight and the interest of any particular piece of Garner’s writing comes from trying to understand why she chose the genre that she did to tell whatever story she wanted to tell. The investigative journalism in, for instance, This House of Grief has a different polish and a different restraint than Monkey Grip or The Children’s Bach, but all three are obviously products of the same acute and often anguished intelligence. The diaries are drier than the memoirs, but they exist on more or less the same continuum of tone. The novels fixate on some of the same gleaming details as the diaries, but their essentially modernist aesthetics — the rhythm and pacing of their narratives, how they represent the torque of consciousness through an agonized love affair — is, obviously, very different from the daily diary entries. The genres she writes in all orbit one another; each exerts a strange gravitational pull on the others.
Garner makes very rare appearances in America, and you’ve never gotten to speak to her before. Where do you want to start this conversation?
I’m most interested in the long arc of her career — how she has negotiated the shift from writing as a member of the Australian counterculture in the 1970s and 1980s, to her success marking her as a “traitor to her class” (as she describes in the first volume of her diaries), to her consecration, along with Gerald Murnane and increasingly, Alexis Wright, as one of the most globally visible and celebrated Australian writers of the contemporary era. The projects she’s taken on seem to have changed as she has moved through these different stages in her life and career; the well-wrought strangeness of the early novels has yielded to a more direct prose style to confront more desperate moral and existential questions. For instance, in This House of Grief: Under what circumstances might a man kill his own children? Or in The Spare Room: How much honesty does one owe a dying (and annoying) friend?
Where do you recommend curious readers begin with Garner?
I wish I could read The Children’s Bach again, as if for the first time, and be startled anew. Begin there.
Merve Emre will be in conversation with Helen Garner on Wednesday, October 11.