Love
letter to geekdom
Anna Goldsworthy
Alice
Garner
The Student Chronicles
Miegunyah,
$24.95 hb, 167 pp, 0522852785
Despite
its rather grandiose title, Alice Garner’s The Student
Chronicles is a friendly, unpretentious book. It is a coming-of-age
story, set mostly in libraries – an anti-Monkey Grip,
or a love letter to geekdom. The only sex happens behind closed
doors; the real romance is with the library. ‘I loved the
Baillieu Library so much I wrote a really bad poem about it,’
Garner confesses, with characteristic self-deprecation. Occasionally,
she takes her reader by the hand – like a less precious Alain
de Botton – and guides them towards the classics. Thus she
introduces Montaigne, a partial model for this book, as a writer
of ‘disarming modesty and honesty’, two qualities that
the author herself possesses.
The Student Chronicles charts Garner’s awakening as
an historian and her attempt to find a foothold somewhere in academia.
She skewers her early flirtations with post-modernism, and delivers
a neat delineation of modernism versus postmodernism:
I think
the difference turned on whether you made fun of Originality and
Inspiration and High Art etc in a spirit of pessimism and disappointment
(modernism), or with undisguised pleasure, revelling in the meaninglessness
of things (post-modernism).
The
italicised ‘think’ is typical of Garner’s style:
despite her large credentials, she refuses to be drawn into the
grand statement. Instead, over the course of the book, she discovers
a taste for the particular, for history’s ‘little eddies,
the colour of the stones through the water, the insects buzzing
on the surface’. Surrealism bothers her, unsurprisingly:
she is a literalist, and seeks comfort in facts. And after much
time sifting through other people’s facts, she turns to her
own:
I
began to see that there were treasures to be found in the streets
and people who lived around me, in Melbourne, and to realise that
I might eventually attach the same kind of weight to my own family
and community history that my French acquaintances attached to
theirs.
Garner
brings a warm authorial voice to this alternative history, and
it is a voice that is not entirely unfamiliar. I hesitate to invite
the family along to the party, but Helen Garner has really been
invited already. She is a frequent presence in the book, stroking
the writer’s face with a folded-up piece of paper and sending
her emphatic, capitalised missives (reassuring her, for instance,
that encyclopedias and libraries can be ‘EROTIC’). And
despite their very different material, the voices of these two
women resonate. This is not necessarily the work of influence:
the two of them might just think similarly and talk similarly,
as relatives are apt to do. Like her mother, Alice Garner has
an appealing, conversational style. She is deft at the pencil
sketch and at the disarming self-revelation. Helen Garner’s
plain-speaking intelligence can read like affectation in the hands
of its imitators, but Alice’s similar voice feels both earned
and lived in.
Garner’s narrative ease, however, is not always enough to
rescue her from her own diligence as an historian. She describes
herself as an ‘archivist-hoarder’; in its slacker moments,
the book reads too much as an archivist’s hoard. ‘Ah,
the allocation of rooms. That was a tough one,’ she writes,
and devotes more than a page to an explication of room allocation
in her share house. None of this is far enough removed in time
to be quaint, or to afford that shuddering recognition, ‘they
were just like us’. Of course they were just like us: they
were living across the road, just a decade ago. Similarly, there
is too much self-quotation. I understand the historian’s
attraction to the primary source, but there are numerous lines,
such as ‘I should buy a packet of those Tip-ex things’,
that scarcely warrant inclusion in a letter in the first place,
let alone resurrection in a book sixteen years later. Garner recognises
this in herself: ‘The hard part at uni was rising above the
mess of detail, of “facts” and competing interpretations
of them, to arrive at some kind of conclusion, an over-arching
statement about it all; this is something I still struggle with.’
The real struggle in this book might in fact be with the subject
matter. Garner has had a fascinating life – child-hood households
of early dirty realism, prepubescent hitch-hiking around Australia,
parties on Al Pacino’s yacht – but she has chosen not
to write about any of this. Instead, she addresses herself to
the relatively uneventful years she spent in libraries. As rich
as these years must have been for her, where is the story? Study
is one of those things that does not translate well into anecdote;
you really have to be there.
It is a foolish reviewer who faults a book for not being a different
book entirely, but I do hope Garner will write a different book
next. I would like that warm and searching voice to turn to other
things: her work with refugees, perhaps, or her experience as
an actor. Or to that ‘chaotic’ childhood – even
if that particular terrain has been worked over already by someone
so very close to home.
Anna
Goldsworthy is a Melbourne-based pianist
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