THE CHILDREN'S BACH, reintroducing Helen Garner to the US market

THE CHILDREN'S BACH
HELEN GARNER
Pantheon Books
$25.00 hardcover, available 10 October 2023

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: from Netgalley
Set in suburban Melbourne in the early 1980s, The Children’s Bach centers on Dexter and Athena Fox, their two sons, and the insulated world they’ve built together. Despite the routine challenges of domestic life, they are largely happy. But when a friend from Dexter’s past resurfaces and introduces the couple to the city’s bohemian underground—unbound by routine and driven by desire—Athena begins to wonder if life might hold more for her, and the tenuous bonds that tie the Foxes together start to fray.

A literary institution in Australia, Helen Garner’s perfectly formed novels embody the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. Drawn on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, The Children’s Bach is “a jewel” (Ben Lerner) within Garner’s revered catalogue, a beloved work that solidified her place among the masters of modern letters, a finely etched masterpiece that weighs the burdens of commitment against the costs of liberation.

from Goodreads
Helen Garner has been a literary institution in Australia for decades. Her perfectly formed novels embodied Australia’s tumultuous 70s and 80s, and her incisive nonfiction evokes the keen eye of the New Journalists. Dubbed “the Joan Didion of Australia.” Now, the beloved work that solidified her place among the masters of modern international letters, is available in a new US edition.

The Children's Bach follows Dexter and Athena Fox, a husband and wife who live with their two sons in the inner suburbs of early-1980s Melbourne. Dexter is gregarious, opinionated, and old fashioned. Athena is a dutiful wife and mother, stoic yet underestimated. Though their son’s disability strains the family at times, they appear to lead otherwise happy lives.

But when a friend from Dexter’s past resurfaces, she and her cast of beguiling companions reveal another world to Dexter and Athena: a bohemian underground, unbound by routine and driven by desire, where choice seems to exist independent of consequence. And as Athena delves deeper into this other kind of life, the tenuous bonds that hold the Fox family together begin to fray.

Painted on a small canvas and with a subtle musical backdrop, is “a jewel” among Garner’s revered catalog (Ben Lerner), a finely etched masterpiece that weighs the burdens of commitment against the costs of liberation.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How times have changed in forty years! Athena's bald, bold statement, referring to her "retarded" son, "'I’ve abandoned him, in my heart,' said Athena. 'It’s work. I’m just hanging on till we can get rid of him.'" is so very, very out of step with modern sensibilities that I suspect it will cause some readers to bail out on the read.

I think that's a pity. The writing of this polyvocal récit (yes yes yes, Gotcha Gang, I know so please just put a sock in it) is as modern as Modernism itself, is as pure and imagined with such honesty that it should not be ignored over some nasty, unkind thoughts by a mother about her child.

It WILL bother you. I suspect, without proof, that it's meant to. I know no one in this story is meant to be a comfy PoV character like you fans of Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge like to have. The Children's Bach is certainly in that domestic story genre. The characters are married, the events of the tale are within the marriage, the tone and tenor take little to no notice of anything outside the interests of the married partners. The others who appear in story are not interested in things outside Athena and Dexter's purview. It's a very closed world.

It doesn't exactly narrate itself to you, either. It's like song lyrics are, or some of the less-unbearable poetry is: Elliptical in the way it leaves you to go on the ride then build the tracks afterward. I really enjoy that in a read, though not in a LONG one, which makes this under-200-page story of domestic reality exactly the best length for the technique to be interesting and involving without overstaying its welcome.

What appeals to me the most about the read is the very unlikeability of Athena and Dexter. I know where I realized, like Rumaan Alam says in her Foreword, that I remember always where I was when I read, "She washed, she washed, she washed," though her moment was different from mine; but this is, like other Helen Garner books, the kind where the quotidian and the internal are polished well past the point of brummagem shininess into the glint of the knife that flenses you.

No, they aren't nice; they aren't pleasant; they aren't, by my standards anyway, good people. They're interesting, they're unbearably shallow and pretentious. Everyone in this story fails as a person in catalogable ways. This is proof if one needs it that the dismissive, condescending label "domestic fiction" is toothless in the face of Helen Garner's violent assault on domesticity, her ramming-into of the delimiting front door od The Family Home with her well-aimed ute/pickup truck.

But what a glorious car-crash it is.

THE TOWN OF BABYLON, coming-of-(middle)-age story set in familiar suburbia

THE TOWN OF BABYLON
ALEJANDRO VARELA
Astra House
$27.00 hardcover, available now

Shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction! Awards will be presented on 16 November 2022.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this contemporary debut novel—an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity —Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This is a debut novel.

I wanted to get that out there now, because while it's not perfect...it was going to be a three-and-a-half-star read until a certain point...it's got the extra insight and clarity to lift the read to the next level. A polyphonic novel that travels back and forth between the 1990s, when Andrés left Babylon, and now, when his return is less an actual return than a retreat from the mess in his present-day life enabled by his sudden discovery that his mother needs help caring for his gravely ill father.

Andrés is a first-generation American, his parents immigrants whose relationship to the USA is fraught with the usual complexities and exacerbated by their closeted-but-clearly-queer son. His unhappiness, his entire life being spent trying to hide and not to call attention to himself, impacted them...but we're not really, despite the set-up, here for them. And that would've made things a lot more agreeable to me had we been let into that experience...but that isn't Andrés's story to tell. So, no sense blaming the story for not delivering something it didn't promise me.

As Andrés spends time with the awful US health-care system, he also decides whether his marital issues might be contextualized by a trip to his twentieth high-school reunion. (I've never been to a high-school reunion...leaving that place was a joy, going back seems perverse.) It's here that I begin to think, "oh boy, here we go down Bad-Memory Lane" and I was vindicated. A homophobe that Andrés strongly suspects was involved in an act of lethal anti-gay violence? A preacher now! His first love? Married with children! Tick, tick, tick as the expected dominoes fall. What saves the story is the anti-capitalist anger of it:

The suburbs are where people go to preserve their ignorance, in service of a delusion they've mistaken for a dream. They tired of the more interesting human experiment and fled. Cowards, the lot. Working class, middle class, and one-percenters alike.
–and–
There are places in this world where people worry less intensely and with less frequency. Places where the hierarchy isn't stretched tall and people aren't perched high above their loved ones. Egalitarian places, where families don't have to be self-contained battalions constantly defending against their neighbors and other strangers. But not here.

I completely concur. I, in fact, would go far more into the area...which is why we're reading Author Varela's book, not mine. It's a very interesting story for the middle-aged multitudes, this review of the past to come to some peace with the present. But honestly, I'm past middle age and I was getting more than a little antsy with a storytelling technique that I myownself feel works best in stories about younger people, eg The Prophets.

Then I read this:

Going home makes it impossible to forget the past, but it also ushers the past into the present, reconstructing it, making it easier to face.

And the view snapped into focus, I added that half-star back, and am recommending the read to you whole-heartedly.

THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT, a truly excellent book about conformity's immense costs

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT
Sloan Wilson
Da Capo Press
$10.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Universally acclaimed when first published in 1955, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit captured the mood of a generation. Its title—like Catch-22 and Fahrenheit 451—has become a part of America's cultural vocabulary. Tom Rath doesn't want anything extraordinary out of life: just a decent home, enough money to support his family, and a career that won't crush his spirit. After returning from World War II, he takes a PR job at a television network. It is inane, dehumanizing work. But when a series of personal crises force him to reexamine his priorities—and take responsibility for his past—he is finally moved to carve out an identity for himself.

This is Sloan Wilson's searing indictment of a society that had just begun to lose touch with its citizens. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a classic of American literature and the basis of the award-winning film starring Gregory Peck.

My Review: 1955. That is, if you're math-challenged, 65 years ago, and the year that Simon & Schuster published this book. So Wilson was writing it in, it's safe to say, 1953 (67 years ago). And this is what Sloan Wilson said:

Money, I need money, {Tom} thought. If they don't build a new public school, I should be able to afford a private school. I should get everything but money out of my head and really do a job for Hopkins. I ought to be at work now....
Money, Tom thought. The housing project could make money, but it depends on re-zoning, and Bernstein says we shouldn't ask for that until they vote on a new school.
A new school, he thought—so much depends on that! ... I should work for a new school, and I should work harder for Hopkins, and I should be making plans for our housing project. Where did I ever get the idea that life is supposed to be anything but work? A man's work should be his pleasure—I shouldn't expect anything more.

Tom Rath has just been to see the overcrowded public school his daughters have to attend because, unlike his own father, he can't afford to put them in a private school. He muses on these thoughts while waiting for a late commuter train into the city, where he will take on a lowly personal assistant's position and, in the process, displace a number of female employees from their physical space.

Sixty-seven years...eleven legitimate Presidencies...since Author Wilson was penning these words, and not that much has changed. Now, of course, it could easily be a mom having these platform reveries, because we've been sold the bill of goods that nannies and au pairs are plenty good enough to raise the kids we've had but don't feel like raising even if it means NOT having a home theater, six DVR-equipped TVs, and each kid with an unshared Xbox. If mom's better at business, dad, YOU stay home and raise those people you engendered. Read to them, make them a snack after carpool, help with their homework. Hiring out parenthood sorta makes it pointless, doesn't it?

Ahem.

Me and my rants.

Author Wilson's book analyzes the sources of Tom's inner discontent as disconnection and materialism. I agree. The alarm bell sounded by this, and by the 1956 movie, went unheeded despite the fact that both were hugely popular and successful in their own spheres. (The movie was popularly supposed to be as good as the book, for once.)

At every turn, MONEY the getting and spending of, obsesses and defines Tom. His wealthy grandmother is being cared for by a greedy granny-nanny, and the hijinks appertaining thereto are most instructive for today's audience. Tom's boss, the venal and piggish Hopkins, plays out before Tom's increasingly revolted gaze his own probable future of alienated kid (extra probable because his three are TV obsessed brats), estranged wife, and grasping mistress(es). Then things get complicated when a wartime indiscretion with an Italian lass provides a surprise to Tom's unsuspecting wife.

Sloan Wilson wrote of his own time. Change the props, update the clothes, and make it about Betsy the wife, and nothing much has changed.

I'm sad about that. So much needless hurt caused in this world from sheer, wasteful greed for MORE when there's more than enough right in front of these hungry-souled people.

About the 1956 film, well...I can only offer as my not-inexperienced opinion that it was turgid, slow-moving, and in the end not up to the bar set by the novel. Gregory Peck was damned good and dull as Tom; Jennifer Jones was much better as Betsy. And can you *even* with the way this went through the studio system! A bit less than a year between publishing on 18 July 1955 to Nunnally Johnson's writer/director's chair for release 12 April 1956! I really want to know the story behind that one.