The Spare Room | Helen Garner #AWW

I find reading Helen Garner a curious affair. There's a real push me/pull me effect, that intrigues me and wow's me, then repels me all in the same sentence.

I'm intrigued and wowed by her writing, the turn of phrase that captures a moment brilliantly. There's a candour and earthiness that seems grounded in her strong sense of self. Then there's the confronting intimacy about herself and her friends and family. Such awkward, uncomfortable personal details that make me flinch with their rawness, that seem to suggest someone not so sure of their place in the world.

Over the years, I've been impressed with Garner's habit of tackling difficult topics, especially in her non-fiction, like a father killing his own children after an access visit in This House of Grief. These books seem to suggest, that like me, she is on a constant journey to understand human nature. Why do human beings do the things they do? What are our motivations? What stories do we tell ourselves to make the truth, the hard facts palatable? How do we live with ourselves when we do something bad? Questions to make us confront our own biases and preconceptions.

Last year, I attempted to read her Diaries Vol I, but I had to stop. It felt too voyeuristic, like I was trespassing where I didn't belong. I didn't understand Garner's purpose in revealing such private details. Yes, the names were disguised with initials, but if that letter happened to belong to you, it would be easy to feel betrayed and exposed.

I am friendly with someone who will be an initial in Vol II of Garner's Diaries. She said enough water had passed under the bridge since then, but she does not feel the need to revisit the pain by reading about it. I'm beginning to understand why Garner writes so often of falling out with friends. One person's open frankness is often another persons hurtful loss of trust wrapped up in a sense of disloyalty.

Which brings me to The Spare Room. 

I've been hearing about this novella for quite some time now, and it has been lingering on my TBR pile for almost as long. I assumed it was a memoir from everything I had heard - Helen writing about the three weeks she nursed a dying friend from Sydney, who had decided to try some alternative treatments that had no scientific backing whatsoever in Melbourne.

Yet, The Spare Room is clearly and determinedly classified as a novel (or a novella). The name of the dying friend has been changed and no doubt, the timeline of events has been fictionalised to fit the constraints of the size of the book, but she is still Helen, living next door to her daughter's family in Melbourne. 

I read another fictionalised memoir earlier in the year, Homeland Elegies. I got completely caught up in trying to work out what was fact and what was fiction. I quickly established that a number of the details had been significantly changed from the author's wikipedia bio, but it became too difficult for me to tease it all out. In the end, I stopped worrying about it and sat back to enjoy the story for what it was.

I found myself applying the same approach to The Spare Room.

As a novella, it ticked all of the boxes. It was under 200 pages - just. There was one central theme or conflict with just one, Helen's, point of view. There was very little backstory, and a continuous timeline. The majority of the book was set in Melbourne, with a brief trip to Sydney at the very end. It would be possible to read this is one sitting, if one had 2-3 hrs in which to do so. But thanks to the subject matter, I was happier reading it over three nights, to fully digest the story and absorb the emotional impact.

The Spare Room is one of the books discussed in The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud & Susan Elderkin. Under 'cancer, caring for someone with', this book is discussed along with Alberto Barrera Tyszka's The Sickness and A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. They talk about the carer's agonising and the patient's denial. The rage that escalates to self-hatred and the 'bitter humour' that evolves. They finish by saying that this is,

a novel for those inclined to beat themselves up when they struggle to care for their patient 24/7....It's also a reminder that, however serious things are, it helps to laugh.

I came away from the story with a deep disgust for those people who work away in their shoddy rooms, milking sick and dying people of their money, with their bizarre, unverified treatments. 

Epigraph:

'It is a privilege to prepare the place where someone else will sleep.' Elizabeth Jolley

First Lines:

First, in my spare room, I swivelled the bed on to a north-south axis. Isn't that supposed to align the sleeper with the planet's positive energy flow, or something? She would think so.

Favourite Quote:

'What am I supposed to do?'

He put his hand on the dog's head and drew back its ears so that its eyes turned to high slits. 'Maybe that's why she's coming to stay. Maybe she wants you to be the one.'

'What one?'

'The one to tell her she's going to die.'  

Facts:

• Winner, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction
• Winner, Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction
• Winner, Barbara Jefferis Award
• Shortlisted, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
• Shortlisted, Australian Literary Society Gold Medal
• Shortlisted, Colin Roderick Award
• Shortlisted, WA Premier’s Awards
• Shortlisted, NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction

More Reviews:

• Cathy @746 Books
• Bill @The Australian Legend
• Lisa @ANZLit Lovers

#AusReadingMonth2020

#NovellasinNovember

Homeland Elegies | Ayad Akhtar #USfiction

I had to remind myself of the exact definition of elegy as I was reading Ayad Akhtar's latest novel, Homeland Elegies: A Novel. In a promotional video on the Little Brown publishing page, he mentioned this book was not only about that longing for the home country that his parent's generation felt, but an elegiac response to the death of his mother and the decline of his father.

An elegy is a poem of serious reflection written, usually, as a lament for the dead. In more modern terms it can also be a lament for a tragic event, expressing mournfulness and sorrow. Or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge says in Specimens of the Table Talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol 2 (1835)

Elegy is a form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It may treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject for itself; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love became the principal themes of the elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone or absent and future.

Documenting the regrets and desires, sorrows and loves of Muslims in America over the past fifty years is the aim of Homeland Elegies, but most of the drama plays out in more recent times. Akhtar himself is our reference point, as he explores the changes in America post 9-11 and post-Trump, via the lens of his own family. His sense of being 'other' or an outsider informs his perspective. He explores the hope and eventual disillusionment of his parents generation as they struggle to be American, to belong and to be accepted.

The confusion I experienced when I started to read Homeland Elegies was a deliberate device used by Akhtar. It worked. I got very caught up in trying to work out what was real and was not, because the story reads like a memoir. Akhtar is our main character. He is a writer and playwright, who writes about the Muslim experience in America. He is a writer who needs to 'deform actual events enough to be able to see them more clearly.'

I found myself googling Akhtar and reading his wikibio to try to sort out the truth from the fiction. It wasn't easy. Again, it was the video linked above that revealed Akhtar's intent to play fast and loose with the facts, pushing the boundaries between reality and fiction. He wanted to write a story that collapsed real life into a tale. He wanted to confront our fascination with fake news; how a good story has become more important than the truth. Or more accurately, how a good story (or even a bad story) has become confused with the truth until no-one is certain where the truth lies anymore.

It was a discombobulating read.

It was also rather sad. The story revealed a family and a country in decline. It was an indictment on a country that claims to be proud of it's migrant history, accepting the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless and the tempest-tossed. But not really. Unless you happen to be uber-rich. Being non-white and non-Christian and not rich is a problem every single day for anyone who is different. Especially since 9-11. Especially since Trump.

Akhtar has written a fascinating, absorbing and heart-breaking story. 

Facts:

• Akhtar was born 28th October, 1970, Staten Island, New York
• Grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2013 for his play, Disgraced
• In 2017 he won the Steinberg Playwright Award
• Homeland Elegies is a September release with Little Brown.

Favourite Quotes:

• the treachery of an American society that abandoned the weak and monetized the unlucky.
• the incompetence - even malfeasance - so abundantly on display at the municipal level. It was startling to see in this picture of America a nation so much like the one my parents described in Pakistan, where cutting corners, taking bribes, selling perks - all this was just business as usual.
• justice is the will of the strong borne by the weak.
• We were a nation in thrall to our own stupidity.
• students' growing intolerance for difficult ideas....they slap you with moral rhetoric about why you're wrong to make them do something they don't want to do.
• College was now a consumer experience, not a pedagogical one.
• "I'm here because I was born and raised here. This is where I've lived my whole life. For better, for worse - and it's always a bit of both - I don't want to be anywhere else. I've never even thought about it. America is my home."

Book 8 of 20 Books of Summer Winter