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).

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.

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.

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.

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”.

MISS PRISM: The good end happily, and the bad end unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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:

Lurking somewhere there, too, among the tales of Nicola’s misspent youth and failure to secure herself a husband, is the suggestion (perhaps not quite a theme) that if she had got herself a family, like Helen — that is to say, a proper Howardish family, with children and grandchildren you can go to Target with on Saturdays — it might never have come to this.

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.

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.

Perhaps you could write something extensive PC.

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!

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.

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.