46 The New York Review
Misbehaving Like Adults
Nathan Whitlockdescribing the warrior majestically ar-
rayed and riding off to battle. He doesn’t
understand that he has just glimpsed a
whole continent laughing. And what
does “before our tent” suggest? Was it
possible that the Oglala hero and his
brother were laughing at... him?
The famous portrait photographs
of Native Americans taken by Ed-
ward Curtis in the early 1900s were
intended to preserve a record of this
people before they died out. Theodore
Roosevelt, who wrote the foreword to
an edition of Curtis’s book The North
American Indian, said that soon the In-
dian would disappear and join his van-
ished ancestors. The subtext suggested
that this development would be all for
the best, merely part of the march of
progress, and that nobody, not even
the already- silent Native people them-
selves, need feel too badly about it.
The racism of the whole notion paral-
leled the reduction of Black people to
racist caricatures in public imagery at
about the same time. The mute and
vanishing Indian helped excuse land
theft and treaty- breaking and neglect,
as the anti- Black images spuriously
justified Jim Crow. But human beings,
when not totally exterminated, tend to
survive—and survive as themselves,triumphantly. In 1900 about 237,000
Native Americans remained in the
present- day United States. According
to the 2020 US census, 9.7 million peo-
ple now identify themselves as Native
Americans.
Humans are resilient, and the risky
exhilaration of making one another
laugh helps them to be. Again and
again in We Had a Little Real Estate
Problem, Native people describe how
comedy sustained them, and how seeing
comedians who looked like themselves
lifted them and changed their lives.
Nesteroff writes about a few comedians
who worked partly in Yiddish and somewho work partly in Navajo. Chances
are that members of such small catego-
ries will never reach the mainstream.
I like to think of the Navajo Vincent
Craig, whom most people never heard
of, performing stand- up for sold- out au-
diences of two thousand in the remote
Four Corners region of New Mexico. Or
the 1491s finding inspiration in Charlie
Hill and Mel Brooks, making kids on
reservations laugh; and if a wider au-
dience likes the group’s work, that’s
great, too. As Bobby Wilson, another
of the 1491s, says, “I’m not saying we’re
saving the world or anything like that,
but it’s just a solid contribution.” QYellow Notebook:
Diaries Volume I, 1978 –1987
by Helen Garner.
Melbourne: Text, 253 pp., AUD$29.99
One Day I’ll Remember This :
Diaries Volume II, 1987–1995
by Helen Garner.
Melbourne: Text, 297 pp., AUD$29.99
Making new friends as an adult can be
difficult. During a time when almost
any social interaction not conducted via
webcam was a potential super- spreader
event, when most of us were forced to
use Zoom to do minimal upkeep on
all but our closest relationships, it be-
came nearly impossible. And yet, over
the past year or so, my wife and I ac-
quired a new mutual friend: a brilliant,
charming, irascible oversharer we call
Helen. We spent hours in the company
of Helen, laughing or nodding in admi-
ration at the things she does and says,
shaking our heads at the romantic and
social messes she gets herself into, get-
ting angry at the terrible behavior she
endures. (As well as some she is party
to—Helen is no saint.)
Our Helen is, and isn’t, the renowned
Australian author Helen Garner, who,
at seventy- nine, is something very close
to a literary institution in her coun-
try—a fact I’m fairly certain she both
cringes at and sees as her due. I can
only guess what the real Helen Garner
is like, but the one who appears in these
two published volumes of her diaries,
Yellow Notebook and One Day I’ll Re-
member This, is a person I’ve come to
know intimately.
Helen is loyal and committed as a
friend, though somewhat less so as a
romantic partner, rarely in a swoon,
and often logging evidence for why a
relationship is doomed when it has only
just begun: “Being in love makes me
selfish and mean, puts blinkers on me,”
she writes in an entry from 1987. Hav-
ing spent her young adulthood living in
neo- hippie communal households in
Melbourne, she is politically progres-
sive and empathetic: when a friend of
hers undergoes sex reassignment sur-
gery, she writes, matter- of- factly, that
“one is already to use the word she.
This is not difficult.”
She does occasionally exhibit impa-
tience with militant identity politics:
during a radio interview, the host be-
comes “almost manic” in her conviction
that something Garner wrote has “set
feminism back twenty years.” Garner
decides to keep quiet and “and let the
girl pour out her spleen.” But she is just
as willing to admit her own failings as a
feminist writer: “I’ve been tagging along
on men’s coat- tails, watching for their
approval, and look where it’s got me.” She
considers herself “old- fashioned”—her
evidence: “I believe that children should
be strictly brought up”—and yet, when
she overhears some male academics gos-
siping about a famous woman who was
reported to have had “sixty- four lov-
ers,” she thinks, “You call that a lot?”
Helen is always ready to spill the
beans or to judge others witheringly,
but she is just as quick to admit whenshe has no idea what she’s doing. She
says exactly what she’s thinking, no
matter how bad it makes her or anyone
else look. As a journalist friend tells
her in 1981, “What’s attractive about
you is a very charming... nastiness.”Helen Garner is underrated outside
of Australia, though she enjoys pock-
ets of devoted fandom in the UK and
North America, and certainly the pub-
lication of her edited diaries is a liter-
ary event. These two volumes—a third
volume, How to End a Story, was re-
cently published in Australia and will
be available elsewhere in 2022—come
from Text Publishing in Melbourne,
which has been reprinting almost all ofGarner’s work, including her original
screenplays for the films Two F riends
(1986), directed by Jane Campion, and
The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992),
directed by Gillian Armstrong. (In the
latter publication, Garner restored ele-
ments that had been cut from the movie
because of budgetary constraints, stub-
bornly reclaiming the script of a film
that came out thirty years ago.) Text
also recently published gorgeous hard-
cover collections of Garner’s complete
short fiction and essays—Stories (2017)
and Tr u e S t ories (2018), respectively.
Garner’s literary reputation is hydra-
headed, resting both on her nonfiction,
which tends to focus on true crime
and high- profile trials, and her fiction,
which is far more domestic in its set-
tings and scenes, and where the only
plot- driving crimes tend to be of the
interpersonal variety. This split in her
oeuvre means that some of her books
have devoted readers who might never
bother with others. (Perhaps inevitably,
her true crime books have sold more,
though like most such books, they’ve
had a shorter shelf life.) For those who
venture on both sides of the divide,
however, the differences are mostly su-
perficial. The same curious, funny, mis-
chievous narrative voice animates all of
her work. The seeming chasm is a line
drawn with chalk.
I first came to Garner through The
Spare Room (2008), her masterful,
brief, and highly autobiographical
novel about a middle- aged woman
named Helen helping an eccentric
friend through her last months of stage
4 cancer. As the narrator exhausts her-
self acting as nurse, chauffeur, health
advocate, and confidant, growing ever
more frustrated with her dying friend’s
unwillingness to face the truth about
her condition, the novel posits that this
exhaustion and frustration is a signifi-
cant part of how we love others:Three times that night I tackled
the bed: stripped and changed,
stripped and changed. This was the
part I liked, straightforward tasks
of love and order that I could per-
form with ease. We didn’t bother
to put ourselves through hoops of
apology and pardon.The writer who calls out “hoops of
apology and pardon” is self- evidentlyHelen Garner; illustration by Fien Jorissen