Stories: The Collected Short Fiction by Helen Garner (review)

Helen Garner needs no introduction. Likewise her stories in this collection emerge on the page without guide, without preface, with no prologue, no opening referential epigraph. Garner's table of contents, like a menu of courses, displays fourteen curated tales. Each story—depicting separate sets of lives, people, ranging literary points of view, and diverse dialects—may stand alone, and yet the collection's sequence makes a perfect complement. While no overt analysis need be made of the presented order, its unfolding progression satisfies by occasional return to familiar inflection, texture, flavor, pang.

"I turn forty-one. I buy the car. I drive it to the river-bank and park it under the tree. The sun is high and the grass on the river-bank is brown. It is the middle of the morning" (3). These five declarative statements open the collection. I immediately feel as though I am reading Garner, the nonfiction, "real" Garner. I trust this is because of her first person "I," and I feel that sense of camaraderie fostered when brought into confidence with truth. But this is fiction, I remember. Garner's deft candor and rhythmic lines guide me inside. Her self-aware prose—"Even as I write my story I am aware that I am nowhere near the point of this"—is reassuring (168). Garner's fiction wields a kind of abandon that dips into reflexive mirrors. Unlike the naked stare of the black-and-white photo of the author behind a camera, caught in a full-length mirror on the first page of her nonfiction True Stories, Garner's fiction reveals glimpses, reflections of her from smaller, darker sections of glass—the rearview, the compact.

Emerging as a companion to Stories is Helen Garner's True Stories: The Collected Short Non-Fiction (2018), with nearly one hundred essays written over a period of almost fifty years, and filling eight hundred pages. That cover is blue. When reading those essays I am aware that the words unfolding are observations, experiences, recounted events of Garner's life, and she and I are at coffee, wondering together how to make sense of them for ourselves. By contrast, in Stories: The Collected Short Fiction, which fills less than two hundred pages, I am aware that Garner's images are crafted—lifted from the "real" and hung for me to make something of their surfacing. Daily objects, faces, voices rise up in her fiction as if in relief of their signifieds, floating beyond memory, framed into planets that hang in their own parallel universes. This cover is red. I love the photos on its jacket flaps of Garner looking out on the world alone, in her car, in laughter, in glasses, in a dress, by the surf, in rooms of her own with a desk, bare-shouldered with a window, roses.

Stories opens with two of Garner's well-known pieces, "A Happy Story" and "Postcards from Surfers," both of which invite readers into an intimate, first-person narrative. "Happy" ushers in a tension that becomes familiar throughout the collection, allowing readers to consider the value of faking, the dance of regret. In "Postcards from Surfers," the second story of a family heading to vacation at the beach, daily tasks fix the mother, the aunt, and the narrator in place, in body; as well, they render their limbo: "The women wash up" as if on a shore—an edge of disappearing and becoming (15). Garner's characters ebb and flow with a tide of belonging and isolation, peeking through personal barriers, boundaries, buffers from sensation, and the safety of pretense. The brick-and-mortar institution of father stands affirmed in a manhandling of cold cuts, bread, and knives at the bench in a world where sandwiches are filled with comfort and cringe. The narrator's liberation at tossing stories, lines, letters into a rubbish bin is not lost on me. As a matter of course, Garner curates her details, inflections...