Everywhere I Look is a new collection of essays and other nonfiction pieces by Helen Garner, a fantastic Australian writer whose work I’ve praised here before (it was, in fact, because I felt that her brilliant 2014 account of a murder trial, This House of Grief, had not been sufficiently widely reviewed that I began this column in the first place). They’re mostly short: bus ride or waiting-for-the-pasta-to-cook short. But since one is never going to be enough, take heed: stops will be missed, tagliatelle left to congeal on the plate.
And another warning. On the page, Garner is uncommonly fierce, though this usually has the effect on me of making her seem all the more likable. I relish her fractious, contrarian streak – she wears it as a chef would a bloody apron – even as I worry about what it would be like to have to face it down.
In an essay called The Insults of Age, for instance, she describes a visit to a bar with a friend, during which a waiter makes the mistake of asking her how her day’s shopping has been. “Listen,” she tells him. “We don’t want you to ask us these questions. We want you to be cool, and silent, like a real cocktail waiter.”
The book includes several essays about literary friendships, on which she is good, and honest. She adores a certain rather famous writer young enough to be her son, but can she help being cranky with him? No, she cannot. “I was jealous because everybody loved his book, and nobody loved mine,” she writes in Eight Views of Tim Winton, out of which he emerges as rather saintly.
But so far, the piece I’ve liked most is the one in which she defends from snootiness the remoter suburbs of Melbourne. “I say… what’s a Moonee Pond?” asks Christopher Logue, the late poet and translator of Homer, on seeing the sign for what was famously the home of Dame Edna Everage (Garner and Logue are travelling together by car). Uh-oh. In the back, his colleague’s blood pressure is now rising sharply: “The way he picked up the word in ironic tweezers made me want to … garrotte him.”
Everywhere I Look is published by Turnaround (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.65
