There’s a sad moment in Helen Garner’s exquisite The Spare Room when the cancer-ridden but ever-smiling Nicola admits that what she regards as her life’s failures (e.g. childlessness, being a singleton, and lack of persistence) is compelling her to fight her illness in any way she can.
Unfortunately for her friend Helen, a writer who lets the ailing woman reside with her for three weeks out of what appears to be a mixture of altruism, love, and ego, this fight takes the form of daily visits to a dodgy clinic located in the CBD.
After finding Garner an intrusive and maddening presence in journalistic efforts such as Joe Cinque’s Consolation, it’s a relief to discover that “fictional” Helen, with all her flaws, fury and brutal honesty, is on the side of the good guys.
Right from the start of the book the disparate worldviews of the two main characters are detailed, with Helen’s sister declaring during a telephone conversation that Nicola shouldn’t be told about the mirror that shattered in the room she’s to sleep in during her Melbourne stay.
While neither western medicine nor nutty Vitamin C therapy can save Nicola, whose cancer has progressed to stage four, it’s the conventional medicos who know what they’re doing and don’t peddle false hope.
There’s a time, The Spare Room argues, to accept your fate.
Accounts of impending death often represent carers as endlessly patient and kind, but Helen’s irritation at having her life disturbed, and Nicola’s inability to face the reality of her situation or the impact she’s having on others, feels more honest than any depiction of a selfless saint.
In The Australian’s Review section (29-30 March 2008), Geoffrey Lehmann maintained that “(this novel) is truer than nonfiction”.
Alas, although Helen’s granddaughter serves as a useful contrast to a life nearly complete, as well being a reminder of what Helen is missing out on with Nicola’s presence, the child comes across as annoying.
It’s also the case that when Helen thinks back to visits she’s made to the dying woman in the past, the “pragmatic” Nicola we meet conflicts greatly with the gullible creature who praises the Theodore Institute’s money-grubbing charlatans.
Of course, responses to illnesses are many and varied, and most people have several, often conflicting, traits.
Incidentally, Helen’s response to Nicola’s claims of being a failure due to, among other things, never having been married (for a “bohemian” Nicola is in some ways as traditional as Helen’s friend who thinks the sick should be cared for by their family) is at first amusing and then heart-rending.
Helen describes her three marriages as “train wrecks”, and later engages in the following conversation with Nicola and Nicola’s niece Iris:
‘You think your life’s been wasted,’ I said.
‘It has.’
‘I would like to dispute that.’
‘So would I,’ said Iris.
‘Why do people love you?’ I said.
Nicola stood in the patch of light, wearing an almost comical expression of surprise.
‘You don’t suppose it could be because of your character?’ I said. ‘Like for example what a faithful friend you are? Who has never been known to bear a grudge?’
She took a breath to make little of it, but I spoke over her.
‘Or your bottomless generosity? The way everything you touch becomes beautiful?’
‘What about how funny you are?’ said Iris, warming to it.
‘And those play-readings we used to have, that were your idea? When we did She Stoops to Conquer and The Seagull?’
‘All the work you do for people and never ask for payment? Reading their novels – draft after draft? Rewriting whole plays?’
‘Yes, and the way you listen when people talk? You even remember the details. When people are with you they feel free. Don’t you know that. You think this is a waste?
I’ve been disappointed so far by most of the MSM reviews of this book, some of which have little more than plot summaries, platitudes, and/or fairly tedious recycled stuff about Garner. Some of the issues the book raises are too complicated to get into in a standard-length book review, but the reviews have still been oddly anaemic. (I’m not talking about whether the reviewers think it’s a good book, but rather how well they’ve addressed the many issues, technical and other, that it raises. I hope James Ley reviews it somewhere, and then we will see some actual ideas.)
The one exception so far is Robert Dessaix’s review in the current issue of The Monthly, which is mixed, in an interesting way, and manages to be both waspish and respectful at the same time. The Monthly is good about giving book reviewers more space, so there’s actually room there for Dessaix to develop a line of argument and address some of the more complex stuff.
I’m looking forward to reading this. I actually like Helen’s presence in her journalism. She maybe unfair to some characters, but you know where she’s coming from.
I haven’t read this book yet, but I’m sure it will touch a few triggers. I travelled interstate in 2000 to spend a few days with a friend who was dying of stage four cancer. In that scenario, I was the one in the spare room. People who are dying don’t often bother with the niceties of polite conversation, but my friend was always one to tell it like it is and she was always intolerant of bullshit in any form, despite liking to lead a fairly alternative lifestyle. Therefore, I - well you wouldn’t say enjoyed, because I’m watching one of my best friends close to death - valued greatly that last time spent with her.
I spent time doing multiple loads of washing, making kids lunches (Kids 9 and 4, poor loves), gritting my teeth as they “acted out” and ferrying friend to various errands she wanted to do. One of them was to an asian grocery to buy a stack of Malaysian stuff so she could cook a large dinner with lots of coconut and Ikan Bilis and other treats - something she loved, even though she could hardly eat herself.
The charlatan theme popped up as well, because she let drop that she was anti-immunisation. I choked on my cuppa, but said nothing. It wasn’t my place and it wasn’t the time to start that discussion. I hope her hub changed that policy. It surprised me, because she wasn’t normally the credulous type.
That’s true, Fine. I suspect we’d all be unfair in such a way, although perhaps to different people.
Well, there’s a ton of issues raised in the book. Perhaps you could write something extensive PC. Things like the fact that Helen didn’t necessarily know her friend that well and that there are always charlatans hanging around waiting to profit from the desperate interested me. This book is my book club book so I intend having another look at it before the club meeting in a few weeks.
Thanks for that, Helen. That’s interesting. To be with someone in the last stages of life must be a difficult but potentially rewarding time. It must change everything, as well as heighten everything. What a confusing time it must have been for her kids.
Yep, Darlene, I read the book in two hits on Saturday and am working on a post about it chez moi, but this is a really really heavy work week so it’s going to have to wait a bit. Which is annoying, because I have a fair bit to say!
I’ve always really liked Helen Garner’s work - a journalist’s skills with concision and good storytelling, combined with intelligence, insight, humanity, honesty. But I didn’t think much of this - if I were her editor I would probably have said “you don’t really have a book here, Helen - maybe an essay or a magazine article”.
Characterisation is poor, apart from the character ‘Helen’ - but then we all know Helen well enough by now. There’s only one other main character, Nicola, and Darlene quotes the climatic scene where we’re told that Nicola is generous and creative and funny … but it would have been better if we had known/learned this about the character. And after this scene the book kind of collapses into a quick end which looks like bits from Garner’s diary: “the guy from the Health Commission called and recorded my stuff but never heard anything further” etc
One of the challenges in choosing this topic - a friend dying of cancer - is that many of Garner’s (middle-aged?) readers will have had this experience, and it’s a very profound experience. So unless Garner has something important to add, the book doesn’t offer any new experience or insight. Garner seems to be exploring her own limitations (Helen Garner isn’t Mother Theresa, so what?), but it would have been more interesting, for me, if she had gone deeper with what Nicola was saying about the meaninglessness of her life sans partner and children - it seemed like something that Garner couldn’t understand.
That’s a very good point. One of the traps of writing fiction based so firmly on things that really happened is that so much micro-shaping of the material is required. Garner is usually a master (mistress) of that kind of structuring, but I agree that this bit, now that you mention it, doesn’t read like fiction and is a bit of clunky dead end of the kind that no film editor, say, would have let through.
The topic of partner/no partner and children/no children is something Garner’s been writing about ever since her first book — I don’t think it’s so much that she can’t understand it, just that, after all these years, she’s still got an open mind about it. But (speaking as a childless woman who doesn’t regard her life as in any way meaningless, thanks) I liked what Robert Dessaix said in his review in The Monthly, waspish though it be:
Ouch. His next sentence, true and bleak: ‘We all know that a family guarantees nothing.’
Russell, while I see what you mean when you say the book doesn’t offer any new experience (surely very few books do?), I think what it does offer is new insight into an experience that becomes more and more common as one ages. I’ve never seen anyone write before at any length about the helpless rage one can get into with sick people whom one is supposed to be looking after, if they behave badly as they so often do, and the guilt one feels about that helpless rage. I’ve found myself in the role of (temporary, thank God) carer several times in the last couple of years, both times with imperious and wilful women I’m close to (sister; best mate), and have wanted to strangle them about once every five minutes all the time I was supposed to be being the sainted Florence Nightingale. Like Helen in the book, I was also doing a lot of suppressed fretting about the work that was piling up while I took time out to do my nursey thing.
It’s a terrible conflict, I think in particular for women because we are expected (and we expect ourselves) to fill this nursing role easily and naturally, whereas while most of us will indeed gladly do the 3 am sheet-changing and disgusting-bucket-emptying and so on, the conflicts of will and temper are something quite other. I think an awful lot of readers who’ve had similar experiences will be glad to see someone else exploring them in fiction. I certainly was.
PC wrote: “I think what it does offer is new insight into an experience that becomes more and more common as one ages. I’ve never seen anyone write before at any length about the helpless rage one can get into with sick people whom one is supposed to be looking after, if they behave badly as they so often do, and the guilt one feels about that helpless rage”
I haven’t read Garner’s novel yet, but I wonder how it would compare to Kate Jennings’ Moral Hazard, especially in terms of the sorts of insight that Jennings brings to living with and ultimately euthanasing her narrator’s husband, who is suffering from an accelerating Alzheimer’s condition?
PC: “Russell, while I see what you mean when you say the book doesn’t offer any new experience (surely very few books do?), I think what it does offer is new insight into an experience that becomes more and more common as one ages”
Well, maybe it’s new in literature, but I hardly know any contemporaries who haven’t had this experience in some form or other, and Garner doesn’t add any extra dimension to what is now, a common experience.
Do you think very few books offer new experience? Perhaps it seems more so as one grows older: as a 17 year-old reader, Hardy, Eliot, Conrad etc through to writers like Joyce Cary, Golding etc and on to Tennessee Williams or Kerouac .. even Carlos Castanada et al. - all offered tremendously new experiences. So did the movies - Midnight Cowboy, Doctor zhivago - you came out reeling. Such books and films are still being produced - I couldn’t get up for a month after reading Disgrace.
I don’t have an academic approach to literature (I had to go down to the local convent school for Eng Lit since it was a girl’s subject - the girls studying maths had to come up to our school - and all I learned from Sister Helen was that literary analysis consisted of working out who were the ‘good’ characters, and who were the ‘bad’). So while I’ll enjoy books that are witty, informative, engaging - when it comes to a subject like the meaning of life, I’d like a little more of an ‘experience’ out of it!
In the anonymity of the blogosphere I can admit to the guilty pleasure of likeing Anne Tyler’s books - clearly novels. Tyler does what Garner hasn’t in The Spare Room - takes ordinary characters in the midst of their lives and lets you imaginatively ride along while they experience and learn something new about themselves, about life.
John Leonard reviews The Accidential Matriarch in the NYT and says of Tyler’s work “there is always an epiphany”; and quotes Poppy to Rebecca, who thinks she may have missed out on what should have been her life ”Face it. There is no true life. Your true life is the one you end up with, whatever it may be. You just do the best you can with what you’ve got.” By that stage you’ve been through a lot with Rebecca - thought along with her, shared the experience of her life, gone along on a little imaginative journey … and it feels worth it, you have been fully engaged and gained a perspective you didn’t have before.
From The Spare Room I learned nothing, I was unmoved - perhaps younger readers will, if they can bother to engage with the not very engaging characters.
As I say, Garner’s treatment of the theme was new for me (first person I’ve ever seen explore the carer/anger/guilt nexus from that angle in fiction), even if not for you. Sorry, when you said ‘new experience’ I thought you meant ‘new to humanity at large’; obviously whether something is new to the reader is going to depend on the reader, not the writer.
PC: ‘first person I’ve ever seen explore the carer/anger/guilt nexus from that angle in fiction”
well, that’s my other complaint - if it’s fiction, it’s very limited fiction. I could re-write The Spare Room into a magazine article (”I recently nursed a friend dying of cancer and was frustrated at how we could never discuss it freely, and my own impatience at being taken aaway from my normal life” blah, blah, blah) and practically nothing would be lost.
But if I retell the plot of Tyler’s novel, it’s nothing like reading the novel. By writing fiction (a certain point of view about writing, a different use of language, engaging characters, invented incidents which lead the reader to a concentrated awareness etc) Tyler has created a rich experience for the reader - an epiphany. Garner’s book is a perfectly realistic: “She said …” “and I said …” but it really isn’t much as fiction.
“all I learned from Sister Helen was that literary analysis consisted of working out who were the ‘good’ characters, and who were the ‘bad’”
MISS PRISM: The good end happily, and the bad end unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Perfect Laura - sadly Sister Helen didn’t have much of a sense of humour, that we ever saw, and would have had conniptions at the thought of her pupils becoming acquainted with Oscar wilde (despite the deathbed conversion). She had to choose carefully from the state syllabus to find only Catholic authors. When I got to uni everybody else knew about Holden Caulfield et al. - I didn’t have a clue. It was a different world.
Russell #9 (Knotted paths? or another Russell?) Great comment. Wish I had time to bounce a blog post off it…
takes ordinary characters in the midst of their lives and lets you imaginatively ride along while they experience
Yes, that’s a good answer to “what is fiction good for”.
I think Helen Garner is one of Australia’s best writers of both creative non fiction and fiction.
She consistently brings to life a very realistic viewpoint of the many issues - both difficult and often ‘not PC’ - affecting our society. I also read the Spare Room in one sitting and as someone working in Communications for a Cancer Charity I was both touched and astounded at the very real images she captured in this work.
This is not about ‘good guys’ vs ‘bad guys’ as one person in this discussion forum notes - it’s about capturing the human spirit in the many facets of life experience. Which Helen does superbly.
i listened to helen being interviewed by romona kaval about this book and was suitably impressed, actually facinated, especially how helen loads herself up in the book sideways with great insights into death and dying, fear and disloyalty to oneself, we all will know this, one day, one momment
The book is absolutely about being human as opposed to good guys and bad guys (this is something that is lacking in Garner’s non-fiction work).
Missed that interview, freddy frog. I remember seeing Garner interviewed on TV after the break-up of one of her marriages (train wrecks?). She was so emotional, it was uncomfortable.
Do you think? I think the only nonfiction of Garner’s of which that is indisputably true is Joe Cinque’s Consolation — which is, after all, about someone who deliberately killed someone else. The First Stone is much more complicated than merely good guys and bad guys. But I think Garner’s best nonfiction work by far (and indeed some of her best work, period) is in the two collections of essays, True Stories and The Feel of Steel — there’s very little of the bad guy / good guy stuff in those.
The Catholic Church did have a dreadful habit of sheltering us from ‘bad’literature - all I knew about Zola nand Balzac til about age 17 was rhey were ‘dirty’ novels written by Frenchmen -something of a misinterpreatation. And I’ve never been able to work out how the De La Salle brothers managed to teach the entire Reformation on the basis that Henry VIII was a bad Catholic and Martin Luther was a monk who broke his vows of celibacy, without mentioning any other Reformation figures.
I nowhere implied Helen Garner writes about ‘good guys and bad guys’ - I really was taught Eng Lit by a nun called Sister Helen and it was her way of viewing literature! I’ve liked everything else of Garner’s - particularly the ones PC cites, and The First Stone. If The Spare Room is a novel, I think she could have made better use of a novelist’s tools, and that to her (middle-aged) readers, the experience she describes will be nothing new.
Yes, Catholic schooling - it’s said that when girls from Catholic schools hit university they got straight into sex; I got straight into the library, and browsing the shelves, found Henry Miller.