some thoughts about The Spare Room

I finished reading Helen Garner's The Spare Room a few days ago, and I read it pretty much in one sitting on a banana lounge in the sun. The Spare Room has all the hallmarks of a Garner read: it presents a finely wrought, almost deceptive 'still life' focus on the minutiae of the personal and domestic sphere underlaid with a strong sense of narrative propulsion. As in some of her previous fiction such as the novella Other People’s Children and Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room explores the dynamics of a female friendship within an enclosed domestic space (thankfully not a shared household). It poses a question often at the heart of Garner’s writing, this time against a more foreboding backdrop. If nothing is more certain or resilient in a woman’s life than female friendships, how does she face the necessary mortality of those bonds, and, by implication, her own mortality?

I won't rehearse the basic story-line of The Spare Room, (others such as Dr Cat give a far more comprehensive coverage of this and other aspects of the book), other than to say that it concerns a woman seeking to deal with her friend’s denial of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Thematic and narrative elements such as facing mortality and dealing with someone seemingly in denial of their imminent mortality and doing so within your own living space have already featured in Cosmo Cosmolino. Here they are given a more stark and confrontational rendering, not least perhaps because of Garner’s use of a semi-autobiographical mode (if it was the eighties, I’d insert a slash between ‘auto’ and ‘biographical’).

(Warning: long, rambling post over the fold, full of blogger's own strange preoccupations)

I am interested in Garner’s return to fiction and whether it is necessary, if that is the right word. Much has been made of the fact that The Spare Room is Garner’s first novel in fifteen years, during which time she produced two major literary non-fiction works, The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation. In The Spare Room, Garner teases us with the question of whether she has made the jump back into fiction so neatly by giving her protagonist the same first name as herself. This ploy might suggest a play on the early taunt that her fiction writing amounted to nothing more than the publication of her diaries. However, I doubt this gesture has much to do with more eighties-style debates about the metaphoricity of all writing. In his 29 March 2008 Australian review of The Spare Room, Lehman cites a comment from Garner in an essay in her 2001 volume, The Feel of Steel, which gives a similar rationale for her detour into literary non-fiction away from the novel as follows:

I think, that at least now there exists a developed awareness of something honourable to offer in (the novel's) place -- I mean the dangerous and exciting breakdown of the old boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and the ethical and technical problems that are exploding out of the resulting gap.

I suspect that Garner’s return to fiction is more about embracing the potential of fiction as a mode of writing, with maybe some attempt to avoid some of the more explosive ethical problems of non-fiction writing.

In this return to fiction, The Spare Room hints at, even toys with, an almost uncomfortable and disconcerting proximity to lived experience. Along with Garner’s use of her own first name for the main character, there are all sorts of ‘hooks with reality’ in The Spare Room to which other reviewers have drawn attention, such as her nursing of a terminally ill friend, the relative proximity of her daughter’s family, the fact that one of her sisters is religious like the fictional Helen’s sister Lucy, and so forth. Possibly a place such as the Theodore Institute exists (I googled but couldn’t find it) and has been under investigation, and even I can recall incidents from the 2006 Adelaide Writers Week that The Spare Room cites. Any attempts to unravel the skein of fiction and reality are in a sense pointless. But when so much verisimilitude has been so enticingly invoked, it begs the question: why the foray back into fiction? After all, fictional elements present in The Spare Room -- characterisation, dialogue, setting, narrative development, metaphor -- can as easily be found in contemporary works of literary non-fiction.

Lehman answers this question by suggesting that non-fiction lacks the psychological interiority available in a fictional mode:

Garner says her hostility to third-person narrative went up in smoke one day when she chanced on the following sentence from Thackeray's Vanity Fair in a bookshop: "In the carriage sat a discontented woman in a green mantle."

The discontented woman in the green mantle provides the clue to Garner's return to fiction. Only an omniscient author of fiction can write such a sentence: a recorder of real-world facts can say only that a woman in a green mantle was sitting in a carriage and any comment about her discontented state of mind is conjecture.

The briefest of glances at the body of literary non-fiction produced the past few decades show that this comment does not bear scrutiny. Omniscient narrators have been used in literary non-fiction (such as Capote’s ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood), as have shifting third-person intimate points of view (for example, in Le Blanc’s Random Family, the ‘Puerto Rican Middlemarch’). Conjectures have been solidified into statements about people’s internal and external realities, often on the back of extensive reportage and documentation. Even Garner has engaged in this venture to some degree, (for example, in the dramatisation of the murder scene in the opening of Joe Cinque’s Consolation).

Lehman’s comment is also rather strange given it is the first person narrator that Garner embraces wholeheartedly in The Spare Room (arguably performatively so, given her use of the name ‘Helen’). Lehman’s comment is even stranger in light of the tsunami of interiority unleashed through the upsurgeance of the first-person, frequently confessional memoir, the very publishing niche that according to some critics has overtaken the novel in popularity. (Garner also uses a first person narratorial presence in both her literary non-fiction works, although these are narrative journalism rather than memoir.)

Vivian Gornick suggests in The Situation and the Story that the novel has flagged as a form ironically because of an over-reliance on voice at the expense of story: ‘As the twentieth century wore on, and the sound of voice alone grew less compelling…the longing for narration rose up again.’ (p.90) The rise of the memoir is buttressed by the emergence of mass culture in the twentieth century, leading to a kind of democracy of voice and confession:

The age is characterized by a need to testify. Everywhere in the world women and men are rising up to tell their stories out of the now commonly held belief that one’s own life signifies. And everywhere, civil rights movements and the therapeutic culture at large have been hugely influential in feeding the belief.

While Gornick acknowledges that the memoir has spawned its own excesses, including over-literalism and confession-fatigue, she finds in it a more likely vehicle for the possibility of narration, and beyond that, metaphor: ‘Truth in a memoir is not achieved through a recital of actual events’, she observes in a comment more suggestive of the traditional perception of fiction. But whereas in fiction, the story’s drama is typically displaced onto its characters, Gornick suggests that, ‘[i]n nonfiction, the writer only has the singular self to work with.’ Thus, ‘[t]o see one’s own part in the situation -- that is, one’s own frightened or self-deceived part -- is to create the dynamic.’ (pp.35-6) She defines memoir as ‘a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom’ (p.91), a statement that could read like a description of The Spare Room.

If, as Gornick says, non-fiction is on the ascendancy and holds such similar possibilities to fiction, then why not write a memoir about dealing with a friend’s illness? In the interview 29 March 2008 Age interview with Jason Steger, Garner says that she chose to write a novel because of the contract implied with the reader:

By saying that something's a novel you are saying this is not supposed to be literally true. Even though it may be very close to real experience, I have taken the liberties I am allowed to take if I am writing fiction. And they may be big liberties or small liberties, but they are liberties and only a fool reads a novel thinking it's going to be the 'unvarnished truth'.

While Gornick’s vision of the memoirist lifting a tale from the raw material to deliver wisdom might suggest a similar process to fiction writing, the bowerbird mentality of fiction-writing implies less discretion for novelist. Garner states:

It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventable [sic], remembered from some other time or stolen from other people's stories . . . and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.

The paradox of this process is that: ‘you're describing, get[ting] as close to the truth as you can get and to have not passed off as true things that you only guess or speculate.’ In writing fiction, it is possible to cast a net over certain aspects of personal experience while avoiding some of the ethical questions of writing that might cut closer to the quick in a memoir. A looser contract is implied with the subjects of fiction (if they exist) as opposed to those of non-fiction. Yet practitioners of literary non-fiction often embrace similar arguments to fiction writers about capturing the ‘spirit’ or ‘emotional truth’ of subjects without encroaching on their privacy in the creation of composite characters -- and real-life friends and relatives of novelists have been known to express umbrage (erroneously or otherwise) about recognising themselves in fiction, unwarranted or otherwise. It does seem that Garner tends to write about people she knows intimately in a fictional mode and people from whom she is at some remove as a journalist in a non-fictional mode (although Joe Cinque’s mother quite possibly features in a cameo moment as ‘Rosalba’ in The Spare Room). Whether non-fiction’s supposed cloak of veracity or fiction’s imaginative mouldings might offer a writer’s subjects greater protection is debatable. Subjects’ responses to their re-creation (imagined or otherwise) in fiction or non-fiction are in any case notoriously unpredictable.

It would be somewhat limiting to suggest that these kind of considerations might provide the main rationale for Garner’s return to fiction. In the Steger interview, Garner suggests that fiction provides the reader with "a space opened up by the author where they can linger and compare their experiences, thoughts and emotions with those of the character". Again, I’m not entirely convinced that similar pleasures aren’t available through the memoir or that they are the sole province of fiction. Garner is, of course, under no obligation to continue to write non-fiction, and because of her existing literary profile, there is no need for her to seek a saleable genre like the memoir. But it seems curious that she makes such a point of returning to write fiction, and does so in an apparently semi-autobiographical mode with so provocative a use of her first name. The latter is a gesture that probably only someone with a strong profile attached to the author-function of their name can pull off. For example, if I sought to publish a first novel with a protagonist named ‘Eleanor’, it would perhaps seem obscure, misguided and maybe even a bit dated, and I’m not sure that it isn’t a little fatuous in Garner’s case.

 (So, I ran out of steam at this point…)

Comments

[Pavlov's Cat]

The name thing is odd, and I am still pondering it. It seemed sweet and intriguing in the 1985 story 'Little Helen's Sunday Afternoon', but there is something quite different going on here that I can't put my finger on. I'm guessing that to some extent, whatever other reasons there may be, Garner maybe simply decided it was fatuous to give a character so close to her 'real' persona a different name. I'm sure it helps to have so classic(al) a name -- my own, for example, would only work in a Barry Humphries-esque satire. If one were called Mary or Catherine or Julia, on the other hand, there wouldn't be a problem. Not that problem, anyway.

I really enjoyed reading this, especially the teased-out thoughts about the fiction/nonfiction issue, so much more knowledgeable and intelligent than anything I've read about it offline to date.

[Ampersand Duck]

I keep thinking how close 'Hel' is to 'Hell', and wondering if it's as simple as that...

[susos]

On the memoir, narrative, fiction thing, I recently read 'White Teeth' by Zadie Smith and it was very striking how non-memoir-y it was and what a story-teller she is - so unlike most other contemporary young women writers (and old women writers).

[Laura]

Great post El, I really enjoyed reading it.

Pav it's 'funny' that you say you could only use your name as a protagonist's name in a Barry Humphries-esque satire...you posted a comment at my place to the effect that the author I mentioned had a very Henry James-sounding name and that made me think it might be fun to do a meme about what writer would have a character with one's name in it.

[elsewhere]

I wondered about the 'hell' thing, AD.

PC - perhaps she was working from a journal and when the work started shaping into a novel, she couldn't be bothered to change the 'Helen' bit, tho she's done it before (I presume).

As for name meme -- sounds great, Laura, but my surname would let me down, tho it was part of a 70s television show title.

Susoz -- I guess White Teeth and other hysterical realist novels like The Corrections tend to have ensemble characters/multi-plotlines, which would make them different from most memoir at a structural level. (However, from what I understand, at least one character (name forgotten) is based on Smith herself -- she did have middle class liberal envy and yearnings to play the cello like said character.) Which is not to say that you couldn't do multiplot in literary non-fiction: Random Family has two major intertwined narratives.

I think it's an interesting thought, that while the novel had it roots in a biographical form, things have come full circle and memoir now outstrips the novel in sales (tho who knows what the comparative fluctuations have been and what they might mean).

Re: the subject of 'emotional truth' and different forms of writing: i read this in a letter to the editor of the NY by from a Prof of English, John Halperin:

'I have always thought that fiction is a much more reliable dispenser of truth about its author than history. The author of a novel usually tells the truth about what he thinks -- he doesn't attempt to hide. But in any sort of history-writing (including autobiography), there will be some holding back, some obfuscation of facts that don't think the writer's ideas about his subject. He can refer to what supports his view and leave out the rest. But fiction is more likely to produce a personal truth because it tends to reveal the writer more completely.'

I don't know that I agree entirely with the above, but it's interesting.

[genevieve]

I am very slow to respond here - I was less interested in the non-fiction/fiction issue than in the issues raised by Peter Rose over the kind of ethical dilemmas covered in The Spare Room, and I'm still wrestling in my head with those.

But this is a great post, El, and the reading you've done on the non-fiction matter sounds great - I'm going to get hold of the Gornick book. Though I think like Garner, I'm more interested in whether the product is 'a little machine that runs'.

But I have noticed recently that I'm tired of boring people in novels, of the same people I've met in too many novels, and most of all, of being promised all sorts of things by the profiling, reviewing and interviewing surrounding a novel; and I don't know how much this has to do with the fall of narrative you describe, the rise of mass culture, or the sheer lack of tonal range amongst the many travellers in the fiction writing pack.

Just quickly, I loved The Spare Room, because it is its own 'thing', dare I say it, its own person from go to woe. I absolutely adored Hanif Kureishi's latest novel just because of the voice and story running alongside each other companionably, in a muscular, sweaty, occasionally fractious jog from start to finish. It was such a pleasure, and I'm finding it less often, and can't help wondering why. Think I'll go read some history, reread some faves, watch some movies!! and come back to fiction.