May 08 Rose review

Mortal ones

Peter Rose

Helen Garner
The Spare Room: A Novel
Text, $29.95 hb, 195 pp, 9781921351396

The Spare Room marks Helen Garner’s return to fiction after a long interval. Since Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), she has concentrated on non-fiction and journalism: newspaper columns and feature articles. She has speculated in public about her distance from fiction, while giving us The First Stone (1995) – an account of an incident at a Melbourne university and its bizarre aftermath – and the lancing, forensic Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004).

Why this new work is presented as fiction is not immediately obvious. Read as a long essay in a magazine, it would be convincing, perhaps more so than this novella. The subject, the sensibility, are very familiar by now. The narrator’s name is Helen (‘Hel’ to her friends); she is a writer and a journalist, in her mid-sixties; she lives in an inner suburb of Melbourne and rides a bicycle; she has a friend called Rosalba in Newcastle; her daughter lives next door; a ukulele is always at the ready; her marriages she describes as ‘train wrecks’.

Mortality haunts the book. Death, in a sense, pays a visit, in the debilitated form of a stricken friend of fifteen years. Preparing the spare room for Nicola’s arrival, Hel is capable, energetic, purposeful. She has been through this recently, with a dying sister. She hoovers ‘in cunning angled strokes’, the sort of winning phrase that only Garner could have coined. Nicola, once off the plane from Sydney, is a mess, but still intent on pursuing a radical and dubious, not to mention expensive, vitamin regimen in a dodgy Melbourne clinic.

Nicola – fey, stoic, sanguine, unreal – immediately dominates her friend’s life. The proposed length of her stay (three weeks) surprises Hel’s psychiatrist friend Leo; Rosalba is shocked that Nicola’s family is not looking after her. But Nicola has a dreamy sense of entitlement. A subtle class difference is soon established. Nicola – ‘the squatter’s daughter’ – has ‘the long, mobile upper lip of a patrician’. After a while people begin to resent this ‘ghastly smile’. Hel’s writing suffers. She postpones her professional work in order to ferry Nicola to the clinic, where they wait and wait for the bizarre, nauseating vitamin treatments. Hel, though sceptical, is patient at first, but eventually she confronts the specialists and reports the clinic to the authorities. Early on, as Nicola’s condition worsens and her denial hardens, there are signs that the visit will not be harmonious. Hel’s pride is easily stung. As long as she has practical tasks – beds to strip and change, ‘straightforward tasks of love and order’ – she is composed, but soon she is worn out, anxious, resentful. There is no acknowledgment of her literary obligations or of her solitary nature. Hel seems most alive when she is on her own. The best writing in the book depicts sentience in solitude. A violent thrill runs down her arms and ‘seethes’ in her fingertips. Night noises lull her: ‘Something tiptoed across the leaf mulch outside my open window and paused there, breathing: to groom itself.’

Hel is almost professionally observant. Like Isabel Archer, she is ‘constantly staring and wondering’. Nothing escapes her: the neurosurgeon’s fat, penile Mont Blanc pen; the sort of men who can crack their spine and ‘make it crackle all the way down’. Here, we recall Garner’s close attention to previous subjects: Mrs Cinque’s tears disappearing into the weave of her jumper; the judge’s report after Madhavi Rao’s trial, still warm when it is handed to Garner.

Relations between the two women are alternately brittle and affectionate. There is a kind of solidarity between them. In the city, of which Hel is civically proud, they avert their eyes from their reflections in shop windows. They sit at home and dissect ‘with cheerful meanness’ the escapades of one of Hel’s ex-husbands, to whom Nicola introduced her. Eventually, though, Hel can barely suppress her irritation. Disagreements and clinical absurdities excite a kind of livid language. She thinks she will kill anyone who hurts Nicola: tear them limb from limb. All the verbs are active, dangerous: she grabs the walnuts and cracks them in her palms, ‘grinding the hard shells against each other till they split’. Incensed by Nicola’s condescension, ‘clenching [her] teeth’, Hel attacks some roses with secateurs. She imagines crashing her car and killing Nicola. When the latter tells her that she was abused as a little girl, Hel offers to help her to find the culprit and ‘bash the shit out of him’.

Rage, in the end, is almost the central character in the book, and a slightly unmodulated one at that. The narrator, like some Nurse from Hel, is conscious of something violent sizzling inside her. At times it mystifies her (‘Where was this rage stored in me? It gushed up like nausea’). When she begins to despise a guinea pig, she wonders what’s happening to her. ‘I’m an angry person,’ she admits later. ‘Anger’s my default mode.’

This theme is not a new one for Helen Garner. Her interests have always been passionate, personal; they have determined many of her projects, as with The First Stone. This became more pronounced in Joe Cinque’s Consolation, at the beginning of which Garner describes herself as a woman at the end of her tether. Anu Singh raised her ‘girl-hackles in a bristle’; Garner speaks of the ‘vengeful, punitive force that was in me’.

But Hel is not entirely alone. When Nicola’s niece and her boyfriend pay a visit, the young woman is appalled by Nicola’s presumptuousness and her lengthy stay. Hel wants to sob with gratitude: ‘They were young, they were sane, and they were in my corner.’ While Nicola sleeps, the three of them laugh at her demands and swap stories about the inconvenience of it all. Not all readers – not all carers – will relish this Hobbesian pugilism.

As the anger hardens into something like contempt, Nicola – always loopy, abstract, remote – recedes even further. By now it is Hel’s drama, her turmoil – she is the mortal one. Seeking companionship, she dines with her sister, and the evening ends with a lame blessing in a laneway. Profoundly enervated by her rage, Hel feels everything strong and purposeful draining out of her. Quite sensibly, she wants her life back, wants to be on her own again, wants to write. She knows that unless she removes Nicola from her house she will slide into ‘a lime-pit of rage’. Nicola, very dignified, goes back to Sydney where, ‘enthroned on her sofa’, she gives orders to Hel’s successors. Hel’s watch is over, but this time there is no feeling of release, no sense of ‘the self-righteous anger seeping out of [her]’, as at end of Joe Cinque’s Consolation.