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Helen Garner

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The Children's Bach: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Helen Garner (Author), Rumaan Alam (Foreword) Format: Kindle Edition

3.9 206 ratings

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The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Now in a new edition with a foreword by Rumaan Alam, a modern classic from one of Australia’s greatest writers • "It’s high time American readers knew her generous, category-defying imagination."—New York Times

"The Children’s Bach is [Garner’s] masterpiece."—Public Books

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 the Publisher

discover literature's best kept secret says fatima bhutto

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Children's Bach achieves a cumulative effect that leaves a lasting impression. There is an atmosphere of casualness, almost lassitude, about its characters, who drift in and out of one another’s existence with an ease that seems both alluring and dangerous." —The New York Times Book Review

"The Children’s Bach is [Garner’s] masterpiece." —Public Books

"Honest, unsparing, and brave."—New York Times

"Garner wears her mastery lightly―the novel never draws undue attention to its own modernist tricks. Unfolding, as the title suggests, like a halting piece of music, its effects are subtle and unexpected."―Harper's

"Garner gives a master class in her own technique...Brilliantly constructed and puzzling in a good way, the way that even our own lives can be puzzling to us."—Kirkus (starred review)

"In this new edition of Garner’s original 1984 Australian publication, American readers are afforded the opportunity to delve into the acclaimed Australian author’s signature themes in which casually caustic worlds collide and middle-class morals are eviscerated with an economy of language but an abundance of clarity" ―Booklist

"The Children's Bach is one of the greatest family novels ever written." —Andrew Ridker, author of The Altruists and Hope

“There is simply no comparison in American letters to Helen Garner’s range and depth. I could say, imagine a writer with Janet Malcom’s tarantula-like sense of crime, Joan Didion’s sensual grasp of place, and Lorrie Moore’s dark and poignant humor, and it wouldn’t be enough. Garner is also an ex-communitarian with a keen belief that society has a duty to protect its vulnerable. She is a jobbing journalist with an inky-stained respect for the writer’s duty to bring the news. She is a wisecracking columnist you read and wish were your friend. She is a contrarian who has a fearless ability to question even the most sacred elements of the status quo. It’s why when you read Helen Garner for the first time, for many the response is: I have to read everything this woman has ever written. I defy you to feel otherwise.” —John Freeman, author of Dictionary of the Undoing

“Helen Garner has written two of the greatest novels of the twentieth-century, Monkey Grip and The Children's Bach. In both her fiction and non-fiction, her writing is startling and startlingly precise, intelligent, and unafraid to look directly at the darkness that hides in the world and in all of us.” —Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers

“Helen Garner is literature’s best kept secret, but one that deserves to be shared with the world. There is no greater observer and writer of human frailty and fallibility. Whether she is writing memoir, nonfiction, or novels, Garner transcends genre and age and time and manages in some magical, mysterious way to stand as close as possible to the heart of whatever she is writing about. You always remember where you were when you read your first Helen Garner and you always regret it has taken you so much time to get to her.” —Fatima Bhutto, author of The Runaways

“I remember being mesmerized by the way Garner wrote… So real and so unsparing, and yet so heartfelt without the faintest whiff of sentimentality. It helped me get through a hard time as a writer and a person, to know that there was someone out there writing quiet, deep, serious, unpretentious, aesthetically impeccable stories about women's lives, and it also struck me how rare that still feels.” —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State

Review

"What a wonderful writer. Her prose is spare and beautiful, her stories are truthful and touching. There are very few writers that I admire more than Helen Garner."―David Nicholls, author of ONE DAY, and US --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

About the Author

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. Her book of essays Everywhere I Look won the 2017 Indie Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Ben Lerner was born in Kansas in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Howard and MacArthur Foundations. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award. His second novel, 10:04, was a finalist for the Folio Prize and was named one of the best books of 2014 by more than a dozen major publications. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry), and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Review

‘A natural storyteller.’―James Wood, New Yorker; ‘A celebration of family life in the context of the thousand natural shocks that it is heir to in modern times.’―Book World; ‘Garner’s stories share characteristics of the postcard: they flash before us carefully recorded images that remind us of harsher realities not pictured. And like postcards they are economically written, a bit of conversation is transcribed, a memory recalled, an event noted, scenes pass as if viewed from a train―momentarily, distinct and tantalizing in their beauty.’―New York Times ‘Garner can write about everything for every reader…Her tone throughout is one of considerable charm and approachability. Five minutes in Garner’s company, you feel, and you’d be telling her your deepest secrets.’―Neil Stewart, Civilian Global ‘[Garner’s] writing expresses a hard-won grace. It brings you closer to the world, and shows you how to love it.’―The Monthly --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dexter found, in a magazine, a photograph of the poet Tennyson, his wife and their two sons walking in the garden of their house on the Isle of Wight. To the modern eye it is a shocking picture: they are all, with the exception of the great man himself, bundled up in such enormous, incapacitating garments. Eye-lines: Tennyson looks into the middle distance. His wife, holding his arm and standing very close to his side, gazes up into his face. One boy holds his father’s hand and looks up at him. The other boy holds his mother’s, and looks into the camera with a weak, rueful expression. Behind them, out of focus, twinkles the windy foliage of a great garden. Their shadows fall across the lawn: they have just taken a step. Tennyson’s hands are large square paws, held up awkwardly at stomach level. His wife’s face is gaunt and her eyes are set in deep sockets. It is a photo of a family. The wind puffs out the huge stiff curved sleeve of the woman’s dress, and brushes back off his forehead the long hair of the father’s boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents’ faces; though he is holding his father’s hand, he is separate from the group, and light shows between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg.

Dexter stuck this picture up on the kitchen wall, between the stove and the bathroom door. It is torn and stained, and coated with a sheen of splattered cooking grease. It has been there a long time. It is always peeling off, swinging sideways, dangling by one corner. But always, before it quite falls off the wall, someone saves it, someone sticks it back.

~

At night, when they had put the children to bed, Athena and Dexter walked. They were ruthless about going, and would barely even check that the boys were asleep before they set out. They gossiped and reported to each other the day’s residue.

‘See that house?’ said Dexter. ‘Outside there this morning, on my way to work, I unwisely engaged in a conversation with a senile know-all. I’m glad you think it’s funny.’

Dexter walked with a bandy, rapid gait. They kept pace easily, not touching. They covered miles each night in the dark, sometimes heading east along the creek across the parklands to where it joined the Yarra River, sometimes north-west as far as the huge upturned saucer of Royal Park where the wild dogs in the zoo howled at the moon and monkeys gibbered behind the wall. Dexter pursed his lips and whistled a curly tune. He was an old-fashioned joyful whistler who loved merry trills, and as he approached the climax of the melody he stopped walking, turned to Athena and raised one crooked forefinger to alert her to his impending triumph.

‘And now,’ he announced at the crossroads outside a bank, ‘I shall sing the catalogue aria from Don Giovanni.’ He had once been told by an egalitarian friend of his father’s that he had a fine voice. He fancied himself a dramatic baritone in the Russian style, but could also turn out a creditable version, word-perfect, of ‘The Vicar of Bray’ or ‘Jerusalem’. Dexter wanted to live gloriously, and on the night walks he did, making fami-lies turn from their screens, trumpeting through the dreams of children, setting dogs to roar and scrabble behind tin fences.

‘You never sing!’ he cried, all aglow, to Athena.

‘Yes, I do,’ she said, but he had already struck up another chorus. She loved him. They loved each other. They were friends. They lived in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls were cracking, its floors sloped and its doors hung loosely in their frames. There was a piano in the kitchen and during the day Athena would shut herself in there under the portrait of Dexter’s father and pick away at Bartok’s Mikrokosmos or the easiest of Bach’s Small Preludes. Preludes to what? Even under her ignorant fingers those simple chords rang like a shout of triumph, and she would run to stick her hot face out the window. There were days, though, when her approach to the music, under the portrait with its yearning, nineteenth-century look, was so unrhythmic and lacking in melody that she was ashamed, as if she had defaced an altar, and she closed the piano and went out into the backyard with a broom. Over the back fence, nearer the creek, lived an old couple whom Dexter and Athena had never seen but whom they referred to as Mister and Missus Fuckin’. They drank, they smashed things, they hawked and swore and vomited, they cursed each other to hell and back.

~

How strange it is that in a city the size of Melbourne it is possible for two people who have lived almost as sister and brother for five years as students to move away from each other without even saying goodbye, to conduct the ordinary business of their lives within a couple of miles of each other’s daily rounds, and yet never to cross each other’s paths. To marry, to have children; to fail at one thing and to take up another, to drink and dance in public places, to buy food in supermarkets and petrol at service stations, to read of the same murders in the same newspapers, to shiver in the same cold mornings, and yet never to bump into each other. Eighteen, twenty years may pass! How strange!

Had Dexter and Elizabeth thought of each other during this time? Of course they had, Dexter more than Elizabeth, not because of any imbalance of affection, but because Dexter was mad about the past. He believed in it, it sustained him, he used it to knit meaning into the mess of everything. He recited it in anecdotes told always in the same words. He even recalled in detail dreams that other people had had years before. Elizabeth disliked the past. It was full of embarrassment. She and Dexter had never been in love, but once she lay on his bed, in college, a whole Saturday after-noon waiting for him to come back because she wanted to fuck somebody and at the time there was no-one else. She lay there all hot and impatient for hours but he didn’t come back and he didn’t come back, and she got up and leaned out the narrow window, through which a warm wind was blowing, and she heard shouts from the university oval and realised he must be out there playing cricket. She got off the bed, straightened the blanket, and went back across the garden and through the gate to her own room in the next building. She was cross. And she never told him about it. The victories she scored against his voracious memory were small.

~

In her wallet Elizabeth had a photo. On a bare wooden verandah stood a two- handled tartan overnight bag. The bag looked stable; it was packed solid. The top zip was undone. Out of it, between the two curved handles, stuck a child’s head. The face looked straight at the camera, round and unsurprised. Its hair was tangled, its skin was dark, the whites of its eyes were bright white. On the back of the picture, in their mother’s loose, frightening hand, were the words: ‘Vicki: precious cargo’. Their mother had dropped her bundle, and died. What is possible between two sisters born twenty years apart? Is the elder one to be sister, or mother?

Elizabeth was sitting up in bed at one o’clock in the morning doing her crochet and watching Designing Women on TV. The telephone rang just as the dog was about to make its appearance carrying the husband’s shoe. Elizabeth heard the pips.

‘Vicki. Is anything wrong?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘What’s the time over there?’

‘Ten o’clock in the night.’

‘I can’t come over again,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t know why you’re ringing me. The phone bill must be colossal. Have you been going to school?’

‘Sort of. Not all that much.’Elizabeth kicked the cooling hot- water bottle off the end of the mattress. The top sheet was stolen, the bottom one paid for. They made a pair.

‘You swore you were old enough to look after yourself. I warned you. I told you I couldn’t keep on coming over. Do you know what that airfare costs?’

‘I don’t want you to come over,’ said Vicki. Her voice was dull. ‘I made a mistake. I want to come over there.’

‘To live?’

I’m only seventeen.’

‘Last time we had this discussion, seventeen was adult, remember?’

The girl said nothing. The line hissed and sang. Their mother was dead and they were making a mess of things.

~ --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0BSKRBD4S
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon (October 10, 2023)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 10, 2023
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1739 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 173 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #219,481 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #284 in Marriage & Divorce Fiction
- #1,743 in Psychological Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #2,456 in Psychological Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.9 206 ratings

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Helen Garner

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Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, and was educated there and at Melbourne University. She taught in Victorian secondary schools until 1972, when she was dismissed for answering her students’ questions about sex, and had to start writing journalism for a living.

Her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977, won the 1978 National Book Council Award, and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism. Her screenplay The Last Days of Chez Nous was filmed in 1990. Garner has won many prizes, among them a Walkley Award for her 1993 article about the murder of two-year-old Daniel Valerio. In 1995 she published The First Stone, a controversial account of a Melbourne University sexual harassment case. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) was a non-fiction study of two murder trials in Canberra.

In 2006 Helen Garner received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, The Spare Room (2008), won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction and the Barbara Jefferis Award, and has been translated into many languages.

Helen Garner lives in Melbourne.

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writerdoc

a tart ode to love, family and other

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2024

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Loved this little gem of a novel, set in Melbourne, Australia. Reminds me a bit of a Janet Gardham novel. Three pairs—the mother and father of a family of four; a single rock musician and his daughter, the musican’s 30-something lover and her 20-years-younger sister; all connect and intermingle and separate in surprising ways. Garner is an affectionate but never indulgent observer of her characters, who at times behave badly but move on from even misadventures without authorly censure. And then there are the gorgeous descriptions of Melbourne as a cherry on top. Funny, original, delicious.

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gc

Literary, Australia

Reviewed in the United States on January 22, 2024

A short read that takes place during the 1970's in Melbourne. No main characters just bits and pieces from all the people mentiones as their lives are intertwined. Colorful writing, using many descriptive adjectives. Various parts reminded me of reading someone's journal.

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Chrissie

A Time-Tested Tale with a Dated Stumble

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2023

Originally published in 1984, The Children's Bach covers a lot of ground for a slim volume. With the reprinting (featuring a foreword by author Rumaan Alam) comes a new generation and a new audience. And The Children's Bach feels very much a product of its time.

Garner presents her characters like figures coming down a runway, they are action and movement with a little description of them as they pass and repass before the next character's walk demands your eye. The very nature of trying to describe the small group peopling the novella feels gossipy — like Gladys Kravitz at her most calm describing the witchery she's witnessed. Athena and Dexter are a married couple with two small kids living in Melbourne. Dexter being some version of chaotic stasis and Athena being the more malleable — either through direct willingness or a relinquishing of herself to the current. As outside forces break into their world, the pair are drawn into the world happening outside their small, contained bubble, impacting their ideals and relationship.

Part of the invasion from the outside is an old college friend of Dexter's named Elizabeth and her younger sister Vicki. Elizabeth randomly bumps into Dexter while he's out eating with his father and younger son who is mentally disabled in some way that is never clearly defined by today's standards. This is actually the area of the story that suffers the most from the current way of addressing the disabled, particularly children. The are some startlingly harsh comments made in a very offhand way about the child and his capabilities. I found it really off-putting and distracting. Despite the fact that the story focuses a good deal on how he can mainly only be reached through music, as he's nonverbal and far from neurotypical, the language used in the narrative and by the characters is dated at best and disgusting at worst.

Into Dexter's carefully contained life with Athena and their two sons, comes Elizabeth, her sister Vicki, and Elizabeth's no-good-but-still-good musician boyfriend Philip — and into the mix on occasion is Philip's pre-teen daughter, Poppy. Chaos and disruption ensue. An interesting point is that, while you'd think Elizabeth would be a main agitator to their seemingly happy married life, she proves to be just a side note and the bringer of the real turmoil as Vicki and Philip arrive in her wake.

It's difficult to pull the main themes and motifs from this work due to its style and delivery. The interwoven ideas with music at the heart of change, communication, and connection is an interesting idea, but suffers from a fenced-in narrative and rapid-fire scenes. The dialog in particular is incredibly choppy and disconnected in the staccato way Garner writes.

There's an almost dreamlike quality to the fuzzy way the events play out — like when you try and recount your dream, and you know it made sense when it was a dream, but you never quite knew how you got from Point A to Point B because in the dream, it just happened and it doesn't really matter. But in the relaying of the dream, you slowly realize it doesn't make sense — so you skim around until you get to the stuttering scenes of dialog that are most important.

In the narrative of such a short book, I wish the spaces between those moments had been better filled in and smoothed out. I do realize part of that distance was just the writing style at the time of its original publication and part is simply Garner's personal writing method, but the lack of breathing room and a concrete foundation hampered the characters' development on the page. While these characters were distinct and mostly well-developed, they could've had a bit more nuance to truly feel like fully-fleshed-out people.

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S. Mitra

Liked it but can't recommend it!

Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2023

Having just finished the Children's Bach, thought I'd dash off some immediate thoughts: This book is like an impressionist painting: You generally know what's going on but not completely. It's reality based, but not real. It starts to make sense after you spend a lot of time with it, and then it's beautiful and its impact is fierce. This book came together for me on page 151--it's only 160 pages long.

All throughout the book I found myself lost, repeating passages, trying to stay focused, trying to keep up with who said what, and what was the significance of all that was said. Still, I can't deny the impact, the mini explosion I felt in my mind as it crash landed to the end. Like an impressionist painting, despite the fuzziness, the post-reading feeling is one of heightened awareness and insight.

I cannot really recommend this book because it is so weird and abstruse, and any followed recommendation could feel like the imposition of a punishment. But if the stars align, and you're in the right mood, and if you feel like giving the book the attention it's due, you might appreciate it the way I did.

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Gail

Self Evaluation

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2023

Set in Australia, Dexter and Athena have a home with their two sons. Something is amiss with Billy. Arthur seems to also be a bit off. They attend a special center. Long lost friend of Dexter, Elizabeth and her sister Vicki reconnect. Philip is a friend of Elizabeth. Poppy is his daughter. Their lives become so entwined that lines are crossed and life is reexamined. Music, the arts, and theatre play a role in individual lives. Athena plays Bach on the piano. What does that represent? Soul searching and happiness… How will they proceed with their lives?

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