Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal and has lived in Paris since 1950. Her Collected Stories came out in 1996.
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
Helen Garner 1942–
1984 The Children’s Bach
The late twentieth century is Helen Garner’s stamping ground. Her novels, short stories and brilliant journalism are marked by an incisive intelligence and an exact command of language. Her writing is spare and sharp, like a sequence of photographs of sour city streets, her characters snatched in celluloid for just one second. In a line or two she captures intimately the habits of the young in the city, and the disorders of adult love. She is at her best in this mordant tale of urban family life in which her wit and singular dialogue are imbedded in an elegant threnody of Bach, Mozart, and a tangy mix of rock and soul.
Athena is married to Dexter, a man who wants to ‘live gloriously’ and who wears shirts that look like pyjama tops. They have two children, Arthur, and Billy, who is not quite right in the head and about whom Athena, at least, nurses no delusions. Elizabeth erupts from Dexter’s past, bringing with her Philip, the cool rock musician, and her younger sister Vicki. Matters and persons rearrange themselves, to the accompaniment of Philip’s rock rhythms, Dexter’s curly whistling and Vicki’s cacophony of vomiting after too much Campari and orange. But really this is the story of Athena’s search for her own music, for more than the city sounds, the burble of children and the distant chatter of neighbours. Through it all, Helen Garner’s offbeat humour adds wonderfully and contrapuntally to this story of the encounters, adjustments and confrontations of ordinary life.
Helen Garner was born in Geelong and lives in Melbourne. Her award-winning fiction includes Monkey Grip (1977), Honour & Other People’s Children (1980), Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), The Spare Room (2008) and short stories, Postcards from Surfers (1985). Her classic reportage on political correctness in action, The First Stone, was published in 1995.
Age in year of publication: forty-two.
William H. Gass 1924–
1968 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
(revised edition 1981)
The five stories in this book have different themes and settings, but there is something distinctive about the tone and the voice; Gass’s signature in these stories sets them apart. The style is poetic and at times gnarled. The sentences are worked on and sculpted. Gass is clearly as interested in language as he is in things; he gives the impression that the words he uses were cut out of stone. Yet he manages in the first long story, ‘The Pedersen Kid’, to give the reader a vivid sense of the fierce cold and the fierce distrust between the characters, to give a sense of danger and mystery to the journey the boy has to take across the freezing landscape with his father and the farm help. In another story, ‘Icicles’, the tone is more manic, close to William Gaddis perhaps, or even Virginia Woolf. And then the title story is a piece of pure, calm, poetic writing.
It is told in short sections. The narrator is alone in a small town in Indiana: he describes the town and the weather (Gass is brilliant on weather): ‘Sometimes I think the land is flat because the winds have levelled it, they blow so constantly.’ He writes about houses and neighbours and cats, the mood is meditative and oddly dislocated, as though this was a brilliant translation from the French. And all the time, in stray references, but stitched carefully into the fabric of the story, is an absence, a missing loved one, longed for, loathed (in one section), remembered, brought to mind.
William H. Gass was born in North Dakota and has lived in St Louis since 1969. His novels include Omensetter’s Luck (1966) and The Tunnel (1996). He is also a well-known critic.
Age in year of publication: forty-four.
Maurice Gee 1931–
1978 Plumb
‘I have never wished for comfort, but for thorns, for battle in the soul’s arena. I have had what I wished for.’ So speaks George Plumb, a stiff-necked New Zealand clergyman whose story begins in the 1890s and continues through the first half of this century.
Plumb’s fanaticism leads him by the nose from Presbyterianism to Unitarianism to pacifism until no religion is good enough for him. But he’s a worthy soul and a loving man, one of those men who are always right and like other such paragons considers constant impregnation of his slaving wife Edie ‘— in her weariness, in her pain, she praised: scouring pans, mopping floors’ — to be his Christian duty. And so the novel reaches out to trace the erosive effect of mindless righteousness on their ten children, centring most of all on the homosexual Alf. George’s fundamentalism, pinched and sour, placidly overshadows and shrivels all those in his care.
There is a tenderness and charm about Gee’s writing, and an understanding in his onslaught on the Puritan tradition — flourishing vigorously in New Zealand — which manages to be compassionate yet deadly. Redolent with the atmosphere of an antipodean world reconstructed with fidelity and warmth, this is a novel thoroughly satisfying in the traditional manner, engraved with the lore of family life.
Maurice Gee was born in Whakatane, North Island, New Zealand. Plumb won the New Zealand Fiction Award and the Wattie Book of the Year Award, and was followed by two sequels: Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983).
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
Kaye Gibbons 1960–
1987 Ellen Foster
There is music in the language of the American South. The sounds come from the words Southerners choose, the dialogue, the laying down of words in a particular order — the nearest to it, when listened to, is Irish.
Kaye Gibbons writes in the cadence of the South, which she puts into the voice of Ellen Foster, whose opening words, ‘When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy’, drop us into the company of a terrified little girl who knows too much about what’s going on. Daddy drinks, Mummy is sick to dying; Daddy likes to beat up both of them. Her only place of safety is the coloured house down the road with her friend Starletta, but how can she eat a coloured biscuit or walk down a coloured pathway? She can though, and more, as she is soon to learn.