Book Notes: Helen Garner’s This House of Grief

A working-class man drove the car with his 3 children into a river. The kids died but the father survived. He had recently been left by the mother of the kids who’d found a better husband. He was demolished, unable to process a sudden loss of his family.

Did he murder the kids to spite the unfaithful wife? Was it a terrible accident?

Helen Garner attended the two murder trials the accused father underwent and wrote a book about it. This is a very shocking case, and Garner’s writing is as good as ever. Yet I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The first of the two trials it describes was very boring due to a large volume of technical information. Garner made sure that her readers got a full fill of the tedium she experienced in that courtroom, retelling every expert witness statement in unnecessary detail. As a result, the book is mostly a slog until the last 80 pages when it suddenly starts to shine like the sun bursting through heavy clouds. Those last 80 pages are so good, though, that the slog is totally worth it.

We’ve been talking about beautiful writing here on the blog recently. If you want beautiful writing, read Garner. I’ve only been able to find her true crime books so far but my library should deliver a novel of hers soon, and then we’ll see if she was good at fiction, as well.