Editorial Content for Stories: The Collected Short Fiction

Though she published her first novel in 1977, Australian writer Helen Garner’s name is not one that’s well-known to American readers. That may change with the publication of STORIES: The Collected Short Fiction, but its arrival comes with a cautionary note. Those looking for conventional short stories with beginnings, middles and ends won’t find them here, and the pleasures of her writing will have to be derived from other aspects of this brief collection.

The 14 pieces in STORIES, several of which are as short as five pages, are spare and often enigmatic. Garner frequently drops the reader into a vaguely defined but intriguing setup, proceeds through scenes populated with obviously intelligent, verbally facile characters, and then simply allows the story to end. It’s left to the reader to extract meaning from this elliptical approach.

"The 14 pieces in STORIES, several of which are as short as five pages, are spare and often enigmatic.... Anyone who appreciates intelligent, well-crafted prose will find much to enjoy in this collection."

In “A Happy Story,” which opens the collection, the narrator purchases two tickets to a Talking Heads concert in Melbourne. She gives one to her teenage daughter and sells the other to her sister, but then she regrets her decision not to attend. That’s it. “The Dark, The Light” is related in a collective first-person voice and begins with the sentence “We heard he was back.” It continues with a series of speculations about “him” and “his” activities and culminates with a description of his wedding, concluding with a single artful sentence of more than 160 words. Most of “In Paris” consists of a man and woman arguing over what to serve for dinner given the contents of their refrigerator.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some more conventional stories here, and they’re typically ones that emit a sense of sexual tension. One is “La Chance Existe,” in which two Australians travel to London so that one of them can “meet this bloke she’d fallen in love with just before she left Australia.” It ends with a satisfying twist. “Postcards from Surfers” is an account of the narrator’s visit to Queensland with her parents, during which she dispatches a series of postcards to a former lover named Philip, one of which ends, “Dear Philip. I forgive you for everything.”

Philip surfaces again in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” where he meets a sometime lover in a hotel room. “Isn’t that why women and men make love?” she muses at one point during their encounter. “To bend the bars a little; to let the bars dissolve?” He makes a final appearance in “The Psychological Effect of Wearing Stripes,” a stream-of-consciousness narrative that unspools from the narrator’s observations of a photograph of himself. In it, he “looked straight into the lens, straight in, as if into the eyes of a lover from whom forgiveness was not yet required or judgment to be feared, and his features performed.”

Without doubt, Garner is a versatile, skilled writer, with a sure command of voice and a style that can’t be pigeonholed. There are individual sentences that are gems, like this one: “Love will not survive a channel crossing, I pointed out, let alone the thirty-six hours from Melbourne to London.” Or this: “He looked as if the words he spoke were made of soft, unresisting matter, as if he were chewing air.” And one more: “I must drag my ignorance around on my back like a wet coat.” In the story “A Thousand Miles from the Ocean,” she does a magnificent job of channeling the voice of Ernest Hemingway:

“They came out of the wood and walked along the road. The road ran beside a body of water. The road was lined with huge trees that touched far overhead. Wind off the water hissed through the trees. Behind them stood high, closed villas with shuttered windows and decorated wooden balconies.”

That is but one example of the chameleon-like quality of Garner’s writing. “All Those Bloody Young Catholics” is a roaring monologue delivered in a bar. The aforementioned “The Psychological Effect of Wearing Stripes” is a meditation on the subject of beauty that unspools in a single paragraph over 10 pages. Anyone who appreciates intelligent, well-crafted prose will find much to enjoy in this collection. Those who prefer more conventional storytelling will have to look elsewhere.