Students playing football, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

At the first footy practice she attends with her grandson, Helen Garner doesn’t know how to act. She is surprised to hear herself greeting the coach, who is twenty, with “Hey, boss.” She has never paid more than “token attention” to Amby’s athletics, but she needs something to write about, and she wants to be near her youngest grandchild. So she keeps showing up to his training and games, paying attention, seeing what happens. She is open to being amazed, or even just interested. 

In her new nonfiction book, The Season, which came out in Australia last year and will be released in America this month, Garner, the low-key doyenne of Australian letters, whose body of work includes many novels, nonfiction books, diaries, and screenplays, writes with her signature immediacy, an elegant right-there-with-her-ness: “There are no seats. Wait, there’s one.” Soon, she starts to feel like part of the team, too: “We’ve won,” she reports, when they have. 

The book tracks the team over the course of seven months, as the boys brawl, lose, win, and physically grow. The “Under-16s,” whose names and nicknames include Angus, Silas, Meth, Seany, and Boof, are “poised trembling on the cusp of manhood,” Garner writes. She observes the way gathering in groups makes the boys seem more like men and how opposing teams of teenagers hurt each other. But she sees “up close, oh, their soft faces and special haircuts, their pimples, their nascent moustaches.” The specter of suburban violence, a persistent concern of Garner’s work, hangs over “our” team. Her own sweet Amby, who confides in her about girls and daps her up, also pantomimes throttling and punching with his swelling arms, admitting, “I feel like that all the time.” 

The Season is a wonderful book about sports that doesn’t try to make sports do too much work. Garner uses the world to elucidate footy, lavishing attention on the game and its players. The sport is likened to dance, to Wagner, Virgil, and Homer, to the Indonesian puppet tradition Wayang, and to “an ancient common language between strangers.” Players resemble “twisting supplicants in a Blake print” and “Milton’s mighty angels.” But Garner largely resists the impulse to extract sweeping insights about oneself and others from what happens on the field; she lets footy, and the boys, breathe. She takes it all in. 

Garner bears witness in a mode that is mischievous but sincere, fresh but almost wholly free of snark, illuminated by a roving interest in the random, illustrative, unsettling, and profound: a man on the 59 tram carries a hundred and twenty eggs. A hand, having punched someone, gets infected from the bacteria of the victim’s teeth. She appreciates a dad who is “deeply and benevolently sunk into the social fabric of the suburb,” and she heeds the “Zumba-mad, cricket-tragic psych nurse” who lives nearby. 

When Garner said she was writing a book about Australian football, friends assumed she was writing a polemic about sport and society. That’s not it at all, she demurred, modestly but firmly. She just wanted to write a “little life-hymn” about her grandson and his footy team, “a record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.” 

Lora Kelley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.