Reviewed by Michael Washburn
What We Have Lost
Stories: The Collected Short Fiction
by Helen Garner
Pantheon Books
March 2026, 208 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0553387476
“I love the Australian flag,” says a character in “Civilization and Its Discontents,” one of the fourteen stories in the new collection of Melbourne-based writer Helen Garner’s short fiction. “Every time I see it I get a shiver.”
That may sound like a sweet, even cloying, sentiment, but the emphasis here is very much on the latter of the two nouns in the story’s title. The speaker of the above line is a married man named Philip, with whom the narrator, also married and the mother of a teen boy, is having a secret tryst. They are typical of the sad, broken men and women who fill the pages of Garner’s collection, and whose dramas play out against the background of a society where radical upheaval and contempt for longstanding mores have only added to the misery. Her Australia is a nation of promises unkept.
Garner, a successful novelist, screenwriter, memoirist, and true crime raconteur as well as an accomplished spinner of short stories, has courted controversy in her native land, and made enemies, for her ambivalent public statements about feminism and the changes it has wrought. The tales in her new volume offer a tour of the wreckage left in the wake of supposedly liberating new ideologies and ways of life. When the two protagonists of “Civilization and Its Discontents” are not discussing how to pursue their sordid business behind people’s backs, they have a bitter row about a public controversy involving a woman who agreed to be a surrogate mother for a couple who could not have a child of their own, and then, after giving birth, did an about-face and refused to give up the baby as agreed. Garner does not share why the couple in question could not have a biological child, but, if they are like other characters in many of the stories in this book, they put off starting a family for years as the demands of work impinged and the notion of traditional roles for men and women grew ever more passé, not to say shunned.
In that respect, “Civilization and Its Discontents”—originally published in 1986, in the collection Postcards From Surfers—eerily anticipates the 2009 film The Waiting City, in which Joel Edgerton and Radha Mitchell portray a couple traveling through India in search of a child to adopt. That film, too, avoids an explicit explanation of why the couple could not have their own kid, but no one will forget the image of Mitchell lying in bed in a hotel room with her laptop propped on her lap, writing emails. It is a perfect example of the absence of any line of demarcation between public and private life in a world remade by feminism.
Though voicing unfashionable truths has earned Garner her share of detractors, not one but two of the stories in the new volume, “The Life of Art” and “What We Say,” found their way into The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories. The first of those tales is also about a complex relationship, in this case between the protagonist and her female friend of twenty years. They have both traveled widely and now live in Melbourne. The friend, whose name we never learn, is a painter who was once engaged, but never went on to find marital fulfillment. Interspersed among anecdotes and vignettes from their doings in Melbourne are chronological signposts and updates about the course of social mores. At the time of the short lived-engagement, the two friends were students who liked to go out dancing at a club in South Yarra. They flirted with boys, had fun, and pursued a carefree existence. “This was in 1965: before feminism,” we are told. Later chapters in their lives contrast painfully with those earlier ones. “My friend was lonely,” the protagonist relates, and the sale of some paintings does not alleviate the malaise or fill the void at the core of the friend’s life. “This was in the 1980s; after feminism.” A liberating ideology has not made life better. In a deeply sad passage at the end of the story, the friend openly laments the absence of a man in her life, without quite reckoning with the influence of feminism and the dogma that made women, young women especially, believe that they needed a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
In “What We Say,” three friends, a pair of women and a male friend, engage in a deep discussion about some women’s fear of male predators, and the assumption, in some quarters nowadays, that men are the bad guys. But at the end, after the narrator cuts her hand on a glass shelf, it is the male friend who applies her expertise to dress the wound and save her from an infection. Make of that what you will.
Forthrightness is a widely regarded as a quintessential Australian trait, but the bright bursts of honesty amid the gloom and bleakness of Garner’s tales are unlikely to alleviate the reputational harm she has courted with some of her recent remarks. To return to “Civilization and Its Discontents,” the story—mild spoiler—concludes with the protagonist, who has been arguing with Philip about the surrogate mom who refused to fulfill a contract with the childless couple, taking in a sight on the street: a pregnant woman, very close to giving birth. “And I envied her,” the protagonist tells us, speaking in what may be Garner’s own voice. “I could have cried out, Oh, let me do it again! Give me another chance! Let me meet the mighty forces again and struggle with them! Let me be rocked again, let me lie helpless in that huge cradle of pain!”
Some ideologies have little use for such sentiments, but Garner’s new collection hearkens back to themes that came across even more powerfully in the work of Australia’s first Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick White, who contrasted the sedate, not to say dysfunctional, existence of wealthy suburban Sydneysiders with the bold, tough character of explorers who set off into the Outback to grapple with life on the most elemental level, without concern for fashionable dogmas, changing mores, or social acceptance. Garner shares their once-vaunted traits, and her work will endure.
About the reviewer: Michael Washburn is the author of The Uprooted and Other Stories, When We’re Grownups, and Stranger, Stranger. His short story “Confessions of a Spook” won Causeway Lit’s 2018 fiction contest, and another of his stories, “In the Flyover State,” was named a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2014 by Best American Mystery Stories.