What gives Helen Garner’s writing its power is that she is unsparing, in equal measure, of her subject and of herself.
“The First Stone” quickly became controversial enough that the author felt compelled to write a formal reply to her critics. The two victims refused to speak to her, a decision hardened by the revelation of Garner’s letter to Shepherd. It is a refusal that Garner returns to with mounting frustration; her book takes on a curiously blocked, repetitive, almostquality, as if she were herself responding to a violation. She attacks modern feminism as if it had put her on trial.
In similar ways, Garner’s most recent full-length work of nonfiction, “This House of Grief” , makes its complexity out of an honest vulnerability. It recounts the two murder trials of Robert Farquharson, who was charged with murdering his three small children, in 2005. On the way to return the kids to his ex-wife after a Father’s Day visit, he swerved off the road into a deep pond.
At the heart of the Robert Farquharson case is a large narrative question that frequently abuts but finally diverges from the smaller legal question before the jury: Why? Attracted and repelled, Garner circles around the unspeakable, abysmal horror. Can any story “explain” why a man might murder his children? She doesn’t pretend to possess the explosive answer, and frequently confesses appalled stupefaction, but her book walks us along an engrossing and plausible narrative fuse.
Some of Garner’s prejudices are less conscious than others, but I suspect she understands perfectly well that narrative truth—what Elena Ferrante calls “authenticity” —proceeds from a kind of dangerous honesty that is not always conscious but is, rather, half disclosed, imperfectly controlled. Garner’s gradual awakening to her unadmitted anger is what gives her best book, her novel “The Spare Room” , much of its shattering power.
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