{"id":171643,"date":"2025-09-12T10:00:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T14:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=171643"},"modified":"2025-09-11T15:46:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T19:46:08","slug":"fall-books-on-helen-garners-the-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/09\/12\/fall-books-on-helen-garners-the-season\/","title":{"rendered":"Fall Books: On Helen Garner\u2019s The Season<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Students playing football, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

At the first footy practice she attends with her grandson, Helen Garner doesn\u2019t know how to act. She is surprised to hear herself greeting the coach, who is twenty, with \u201cHey, boss.\u201d She has never paid more than \u201ctoken attention\u201d to Amby\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In her new nonfiction book, <\/span>The Season,<\/span><\/i> 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: \u201cThere are no seats. Wait, there\u2019s one.\u201d Soon, she starts to feel like part of the team, too: \u201cWe\u2019ve won,\u201d she reports, when they have.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The book tracks the team over the course of seven months, as the boys brawl, lose, win, and physically grow. The \u201cUnder-16s,” whose names and nicknames include Angus, Silas, Meth, Seany, and Boof, are \u201cpoised trembling on the cusp of manhood,\u201d 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 \u201cup close, oh, their soft faces and special haircuts, their pimples, their nascent moustaches.\u201d The specter of suburban violence, a <\/span>persistent concern of <\/span>Garner\u2019s work, hangs over \u201cour\u201d 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, \u201cI feel like that all the time.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Season<\/span><\/i> 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 \u201can ancient common language between strangers.\u201d Players resemble \u201ctwisting supplicants in a Blake print\u201d and \u201cMilton\u2019s mighty angels.\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s teeth. She appreciates a dad who is \u201cdeeply and benevolently sunk into the social fabric of the suburb,\u201d and she heeds the \u201cZumba-mad, cricket-tragic psych nurse\u201d who lives nearby.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When Garner said she was writing a book about Australian football, friends assumed she was writing a polemic about sport and society. That\u2019s not it at all, she demurred, modestly but firmly. She just wanted to write a \u201clittle life-hymn\u201d about her grandson and his footy team, \u201ca record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lora Kelley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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