Empty Hiss

The short story form is an uneasy vessel for Helen Garner’s particular intensity.

By Max CallimanopulosMarch 16, 2026

• Fiction

HELEN GARNER’S FICTION has a Philip problem. We’re first introduced to him in Monkey Grip (1977) as a “hesitant and slightly nonplussed” guitar-toting hippie hovering in the novel’s background. He comes into sharper focus in her follow-up, The Children’s Bach (1984), having evolved into a feckless musician who proves irresistible to Athena, the housewife at the novel’s center. Philip, Garner writes, offers her “a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences.” Athena runs off with him, only to realize that such an amoral world might not be very hospitable to her. “I can’t help you with that one,” Philip tells Athena when her husband comes to retrieve her. “You’ll have to handle that one on your own, I’m afraid.”

With the new Pantheon reissue of Stories: The Collected Short Fiction, three new Philips have been added to the Garnerverse, none of them much of an improvement on their shiftless predecessors. Who are these men? What are they like? Garner rarely bothers to describe their looks closely, but skinniness seems the defining feature: “He was sickeningly thin; his legs and hips were thin past the point of permission,” she writes of one Philip, as if he might just melt away entirely. Their faces remain out of view. “[H]is features performed,” she writes simply, italics all her own, in “The Psychological Effect of Wearing Stripes.” They’re nearly always musicians—rockers, whose facility with a guitar belies their emotional inarticulacy. But most importantly, these lanky, alluring men are maddeningly unavailable, standing just out of reach, seeming to possess all the freedom and space Garner’s women so long for. They soon enchant and just as quickly bedevil her hard-pressed heroines.

Garner has not been coy about her fondness for these fellas. In 1991, interviewer Ray Willbanks asked her—already one of the most famous writers in Australia—what was going on with all her Philips. “Philip has turned into an archetype in my work now,” she admitted freely. “He’s the sort of man who is very attractive to women for the very reason that he is unreliable. […] He’s charming, talented, kind of seductively independent.” But the 14 stories collected in this book make it clear that men like Philip, in Garner’s fiction, are more than a trope. Each time they appear, they inaugurate a conflict—between erotic freedom and domestic responsibility, between the art life and the workday grind, and between what is afforded a man and what is expected of a woman.

Although Garner has been probing these tensions in her novels and nonfiction since her career began, it has taken American audiences nearly 40 years to catch up to her. Pantheon started importing her books to the United States in 2023, when they republished The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief (2014); 2024 saw the publication of Monkey Grip, and the year after that brought How to End a Story—her diaries, 800 pages of them. Stateside critics have received each of these books rapturously. Nathan Whitlock praised Garner’s “open, playful, and spacious” work, Merve Emre claimed that Garner’s novels presented “an alternative to the cloying metafiction of the late 20th century and the washed-out realism of the 21st,” and James Wood described Garner as “a natural storyteller.”

I agree with these critics. Garner’s writing is salutary; if you’re heartsick or world-weary, you’ll feel better after a few pages of it. She’s just as good at describing the aftermath of a cocaine bump—“as I left her house the coke turned around, gave a twist and a wriggle, and fled away, dumping me unceremoniously in a limbo, skew-whiff and desolate”—as she is the literary technique of D. H. Lawrence, who “uses the same word over and over till he makes it mean what he needs it to.” Always, she is precise, unfussy, bracing, and appealingly vernacular (“skew-whiff”); reading her sentences, one feels oneself in competent hands.

So it was surprising to drop into Stories and find myself confronted with a different Garner: coarser, colder, and dismayingly hemmed in by the short form. The stories gathered here are skittish and draft-y, and often seem closer to outlines or character sketches than to fully fledged pieces of short fiction. They’re recognizably Garner—the same inexhaustible preoccupation with “dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles between people who love each other,” as she has described her writing—but the polish applied to her novels and long-form nonfiction is thin here. Something harsher shows through.

Take, for example, “A Thousand Miles from the Ocean,” in which a woman travels to Germany to meet a lover, knowing she shouldn’t. Once there, all her fears are confirmed:

I am in the wrong country, the wrong town. When I heard the empty hiss of the international call I should have put down the phone. In the middle of his night he took the pills that no longer worked. He cried on the phone. For me, though, it was bright day. I was on the day side of the planet where I had a garden, a house, creatures to care for. I should have hung up the phone.

She flees him and takes a train south, finding herself, like Hans Castorp, among “mountains whose tops were crisp.” The story ends with an earthy, maternal vision, in contrast to the bare comforts of her miserable tryst: “She turned back to the compartment and it was full of the scent of sleeping children.”

This is familiar terrain for Garner: a frigid, distant man; an acute, sensitive woman; a hopeless attempt to traverse the “bombed-out minefield between men and women,” as she puts it in her diary. Yet the story’s compression seems to harden the material. Here, insight precedes experience rather than emerging from it. She knows she shouldn’t go to Germany; she knows he isn’t worth it. Once there, she is only ever proven right in her foreknowledge. And the ending, with its faintly therapeutic symbolism, feels like an effort to supply the memorable image the story itself has not quite earned.

As one works through Stories, a pattern emerges. Those written in the first person are typically far more successful than those written in the third. “In Paris” reads like a draft of “A Thousand Miles from the Ocean” with the action transposed to France. “Little Helen’s Sunday Afternoon” is a girl’s coming-of-age that turns depressingly obvious (“‘You want to know about blood?’ said Noah”). “All Those Bloody Young Catholics,” a barroom screed delivered by a leathery old Aussie boozer, is just confusing (too Australian, I suspect, for American readers—including myself).

In these stories, Garner’s characters appear as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope—the scale is off, the detail is lost, and the warm sense of life that so vividly charges her account of a friend’s battle with cancer in The Spare Room (2008), or Nora and Javo’s heroin-racked love affair in Monkey Grip, is missing. When she slips back into the first person, the effect is immediate: “I met my husband at the airport, and there he told me some things that wiped the smile off my face.” The sentence has voltage; we lean forward anxiously, and are rewarded with “My Hard Heart,” one of the better entries in the collection. “Civilisation and its Discontents” opens with similar urgency: “Philip came. I went to his hotel: I couldn’t get there fast enough.” But two pages later, Garner’s guilty narrator is unable to fall asleep next to her Philip, “with his wife’s forgotten dressing-gown hanging behind the door like a witness.” In both cases, the “I” restores a thrilling specificity lost elsewhere in Stories. Our faith in her candor is renewed. Insight, wisdom, her sharp wit—all seem wrestled out of long experience, hard-won rather than engineered.

Garner may have felt challenged to forgo the I in her writing following the publication of Monkey Grip. The book was an enormous success in Australia, but critics attacked its autobiographical elements upon release. “Helen Garner,” the critic Peter Corris thundered, “has published her private journal rather than written a novel.” Twenty years later, she replied to him in the Australian journal Meanjin: “Why the sneer in ‘All she’s done is publish her diaries’? It’s as if this were cheating. As if it were lazy.” Garner quite rightly points out the discipline and creative energy that a diary-keeping habit demands, but the critical salvos over Monkey Grip, with their rank whiff of misogyny, certainly stung. A reproachful diary entry from the time attests to their impact: “I am not good at constructing major pieces of work. I have a short concentration span. I can work only in small, intense bursts.”

Forty years on, reading this collection of small, intense bursts, any question about the use of I in Garner’s writing seems slightly embarrassing. To assume that the I on the page is the author, her undiluted and authentic self, is a mistake. Writing in the first person requires the creation of a persona every bit as careful and controlled as any third-person narrator. Nor is it a choice born out of “audacious” hubris, as Corris claimed in his review of Monkey Grip. We might leave it to Stendhal, who offered what remains the tidiest defense of the first person in Memoirs of a Tourist (1838): “It is not out of egotism that I say ‘I’; it is simply the quickest way to tell the story.” In Garner’s case, it is also the most exacting. The short story may not be the ideal vessel for her particular intensity, but when she finds her way back to the I—as she does most winningly in her Philip stories—the results remind us of the power of the form.

“Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner once told The Paris Review. In “Civilisation and its Discontents,” having realized she’ll never have a real relationship with her Philip, our narrator sits in her garden, musing: “I thought about practising: how it is possible to learn with one person how to love, and then to apply the lesson learnt to somebody else: someone teaches you to sing, and then you wait for a part in the right opera.” It’s possibly the loveliest sentence in this collection, and the one that best displays Garner’s particular gifts—her ease with metaphor, the swing of her prose, her ability to make a reader stop and reach for their highlighter. The bend in the story is slight, but with it comes a clearing of emotional weather. Philip has left, the self-pity has burned off, the excuses have been laid aside, and what remains is an I fully in focus, prepared at last to live with what she knows.