Helen Garner’s novella first appeared in 1984, it's centred on the slightly-bohemian culture of her corner of Melbourne’s suburban middle-class. Her sense of place is superb but her focus is on people, in particular Dexter and Athena Fox, their sons and narrow circle of acquaintances. Dexter is desperate to “knit meaning into the mess of everything.” A process bound up with vague longings for an imagined past filled with certainty. This past, Dexter’s Eden, is manifested partly through a photograph of nineteenth-century poet Tennyson walking with his wife and their two sons. It’s a firmly Victorian presentation of family, with Tennyson the striding patriarch at its heart. What’s shocking about the image, we’re told - although it’s not entirely clear who’s doing the telling - is how bundled up in layers Tennyson and his family are. But what’s actually shocking, at least to me, is Tennyson’s “gaunt” obviously exhausted wife. The image itself, originally cut from a magazine and stuck to the kitchen wall by Dexter, is slowly falling apart, a hint of what’s to come.

Garner’s plot is slender, familiar, middle-aged Dexter and Athena’s apparently settled life is disrupted: first by the reappearance of Dexter’s old friend Elizabeth with her much younger sister Vicki, then by Elizabeth’s on-again, off-again lover Phillip and his daughter Poppy. Athena makes a Bovary-like attempt to run off with Phillip, Dexter does something rash with Vicki. But somehow the family resumes its old patterns. But Garner seems more interested in reactions than events; in exploring issues around communication, connection and disconnection, and the position of women – she’s writing in the wake of a surging feminist movement. Like a Victorian wife, Athena has been assigned the role of angel in the house, responsible for all things domestic: Dexter can’t cook, he can’t clean, he doesn’t even know how to work a washing machine or take out a bin. And, like Tennyson’s wife, Athena herself is overlooked, slowly fading away while everyone around her thrives.

Athena’s responsibilities include looking after her son Billy. Billy’s backstory, like everyone else’s here, is vague. But it’s evident he’s non-speaking, and requires support in every aspect of daily life. The episodes centred on Billy, especially the dehumanising attitudes of other characters, made for intensely uncomfortable reading. Although it’s never clear how far the characters’ words reflect their genuine feelings or what they have been taught to think. I think it’s significant that Billy’s first introduced by his grandfather, a doctor who labels Billy as less-than-human: it was still common in the late seventies/early 1980s for doctors to place children like Billy in remote institutions, often written out of their family’s history altogether. Lerner suggests Billy is essentially a plot device, highlighting the “ultimate inaccessibility” of others but I’m not entirely convinced. Garner based Billy on a friend’s child, and it’s possible she’s trying to highlight the extreme isolation of children like Billy, as well as the frustration and exhaustion of the mothers acting as primary carers. I noticed some readers have cast Athena as ‘bad mother’ and I could see why. But Athena is also depicted as a ‘good-enough’ mother at various points - there’re flashes of tenderness towards Billy that go beyond her words. I agree Athena’s not a desperately likeable figure but neither are any of the adults in Garner’s book.

Writer Ben Lerner considers Garner a “radically pared-down Virginia Woolf” and there are distinct echoes of Woolf in this. Garner’s storytelling is deliberately oblique, opaque even, abruptly shifting between points of view. There’s a precision to it, carefully constructed yet rooted in Garner’s everyday. Garner’s novella’s overflowing with arresting images and memorable lines – like Woolf she was a dedicated diarist, ruthlessly mining her own and her friends’ lives, transforming what she observed into “tiny bombs of meaning.” Reading this felt like eavesdropping on those lives, just as Garner’s characters routinely snoop on conversations, on buses, in shops, between neighbours. But just like snooping, Garner’s narrative frequently made me wonder if I’d missed a crucial part of the conversation. Like Rumaan Alam, another of Garner’s fans, I wasn’t sure what Garner was ultimately trying to say – some scenes were so slippery I scrabbled for a foothold.

Music is an important strand in Garner’s narrative, a number of the characters are musicians, and music often symbolises their individual predicaments: Athena is attempting to play simple pieces by Bach, Dexter likes to burst into song, Billy expresses himself through humming. But however much these performances overlap, the melodies never come together, the players are out of sync or simply clashing. Garner’s elements combine to form a bleak portrait of motherhood and family in a particular time and space. Her book’s undeniably striking and I really admired her general style, there were so many outstanding passages. But I wasn’t totally on board with her perspective, there was too much I found problematic or impossible to relate to.

This was an unusual style of novel but one which I really enjoyed.

Thanks to Netgalley for the chance to read this one.

The title intrigued me, the blurb did as well. Further than that I struggle to offer an opinion. Stream-of-conciousness style, the characters coming out with odd, pretend-cool or eccentric statements, but nothing really happens.
The scenes are prettily described: “Insects hung in the floods of late sun that came striped through the endless fence.” However, I could not picture the characters nor care for them and found them odd and pretentious. Not one for me, I’m afraid.