Advanced Search

Related News

Home » Sunday

Dealing with dying

By Liesl Schillinger | February 22, 2009, Sunday | Print Edition

IN "The Spare Room," her first novel in 16 years, the writer Helen Garner wrestles with a conscience-battering test of the limits of mercy, recounting the un-sugarcoated experience of an Australian grandmother who takes in a friend with a terminal illness.

Free-spirited Nicola, a wealthy, childless bohemian relic of the 1960s is riddled with cancer, which she believes aloe vera and vitamin-C drips may cure. In Sydney, Nicola has presumed upon the kindness and care of her niece Iris, like a sick cowbird who beds down in an alien nest.

"She hasn't the faintest clue what she asks of people," Iris complains. Seeking the dubious treatments of high-priced doctor in Melbourne (offering ozone saunas with electrodes and coffee enemas), Nicola calls her Melbourne friend Helen - "Hel" for short - and invites herself over for a three-week stay. "You go to your family" when you're sick, a friend of Helen's tells her. But Nicola has no family: she "believes in freedom." At least, in her own.

Compassionate and gracious by nature, Helen is a doting grandmother and a seasoned member of the literary community, burdened, despite her good intentions, with writerly detachment and an overly critical eye. She agrees to the visit, flattered to be relied upon, to be sought in a crisis. ("How competent I was! I would get a reputation for competence.")

To prepare for Nicola's arrival, she puts great thought into readying her spare room, choosing sheets in a pale pink that is flattering "even to skin that has turned yellowish," realigning the bed for good fengshui, buying a rug patterned with "blossoms of watery green and salmon twining on a mushroom ground," faded in color so Nicola won't suspect the extravagance of a new purchase.

And yet, like the laetrile-laden apricot kernels (part of Nicola's bogus regimen) that Helen later stows in a glass jar, the room must have "radiated a meaningless glamor, like a photo in a lifestyle magazine." Hospital corners may boost morale, but they can't relieve the rigors of "lamp-lit labor" by the sickbed or prettify serious illness.

Picking up her friend at the airport, Helen realizes, too late, what she has taken on: "Her back was bowed right over, her neck straining as if under a heavy load. She was stripped of flesh, shuddering from head to foot like someone who has been out beyond the break too long in winter surf." At night, Nicola drenches the spare room's sheets with her sweats; time after time, Helen checks on her, providing clean linen and priding herself on her thoughtfulness. "This was the part I liked," she thinks, "straightforward tasks of love and order that I could perform with ease."

Helen remembers her own childhood, thinks of "my mother, how she would clean up after me when as a child I had what she called 'a bilious attack.' I remembered her patience in the middle of the night, the precious moments of her attention ... In a trance of gratitude I would watch her spread the clean sheet across my bed."

But gratitude does not occur to Nicola, who refuses to recognize her own distress. She awakens in high spirits, greeting Helen with exasperating sunniness: "'Hello, darling!' she caroled, in her blue-blood accent. 'What a glorious morning'!"

Garner's narrative makes it clear that Iris and Helen are also in denial. What's at issue is not how to live but how to die - and how Iris and Helen can survive Nicola's fatal decline.

It's honest, understandable and brave of Garner to lay bare such stark, painful dynamics, especially since she is known for writing from her own experience.

Her first novel, "Monkey Grip," about the intersecting lives of Melbourne hippies in the 1970s, was adapted from her diaries, and her later novels, "The Children's Bach" and "Cosmo Cosmolino," also have biographical elements.

The character of Nicola in this new book is based on Garner's late friend, Jenya Osborne, whom the author nursed for a time during her final illness; and the main character, Helen, shares the author's name and circumstances - she's a literary lady in her 60s, living in a house next door to her daughter and grandchildren.

"The Spare Room" reads like an unsparing memoir in which flashes of dark humor and simple happiness (a magic show, a grandchild's flamenco dance, a shared joke) lighten the grim record of an overwhelmingly difficult chapter in a woman's life, a chapter whose meaning she still struggles to decipher years on, whose sharper entries still stab her conscience, but can't be erased by time.
Sunday


 

Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.

沪公网安备 31010602000204号

Email this to your friend