Customer Reviews

The Spare Room: A Novel

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Spare Room is a short novel, and it can easily be read in one sitting. But just because it's short doesn't mean it doesn't pack a big punch - it does.

Summary in a nutshell, no spoilers:

The bulk of the story takes place over a 3 week period of time. Nicola, 65 years old, is near death from cancer and comes to visit her close friend Helen. Nicola is desperate for a cure and goes to a clinic with dubious credentials just because they promise her what no one else will - that they will rid her of the cancer.

Helen wants to help her friend but grows more and more frustrated with Nicola's refusal to face reality, both because she wants Nicola to be able to end her life well and say good-bye, and because Helen is stuck with round-the-clock care of Nicola because of the sick woman's refusal to get real help.

This is a touching, beautiful novel. We not only get to examine the relationship of these two women - one who raised a traditional family and one more bohemian - but we also see how they reflect on their lives and the choices they made. We also become observers of the aging and the existential angst of a generation that thought it would be forever young and vital.

I highly recommend this novel. It is short but not slight, and when you finish, you will feel like you've just read something much longer. I know I had a lot to think about when I turned that last page, as I examined my personal thoughts on my own aging and mortality, and the duty and true meaning of friendship.

The subject matter is serious and somber, yet the story is told with humor and wit.

Brava.

I was impressed by how efficient this book was. It is a short novel and it seems almost purposefully so. The brevity of the story seems like a powerful tool for the author. The book spans a timeframe of about 3 weeks. Short, of course, yet also interminably long for the book's main character, Helen, who has willingly offered up her whole self, her whole life for these 3 brief weeks to come to the aid of a dying friend.

Helen begins the story with a resolute and positive attitude, hoping to do anything that she can to help her friend, Nicola, who is dying of cancer. She gives Nicola her spare room, shuttles her to cancer treatments, gets up continually in the night to help with the pain, the dirtied linens, etc. Yet soon, the three weeks begin to seem unbelievably long to her, and she wonders how she'll make it through. It's not just the exhaustion of being up all night with her friend day after day, though that is part of it. It's also the fact that her friend seems unwilling to accept that she is dying and insists upon undergoing treatments that seem to hurt rather than help. The two friends begin to have trouble communicating, and Helen begins to wear and sag under the burden of it all.

The author does a wonderful job of providing a sense of place and lifestyle for Helen before her friend comes to stay. I could really feel her longing for the simplicity and sunlight, the laughter and innocence of her grandchildren she had so recently enjoyed. Nicola's character, too, is strongly drawn....she almost seems like the person we almost wish we could have been. Yet who would want to be her now ?

The author not only shows us quite clearly the pain and angst that the cancer causes - not only for Nicola, but for those around her, but also provides us with a disturbing sense of guilt for not wanting to deal with it all. Helen is torn. She wants to help, yet she wants to be rid of it all and get back to her own life, too. I was disturbed by how selfish she sometimes seemed....after all, she only really had to deal with this for 3 weeks, and suddenly that seemed like too much. At other times, I related quite strongly to Helen, and wanted, with her, to shake some sense into the dying woman.

This disturbing pull of guilt vs. empathy, of selfishness vs. love, of the effect of cancer on everyone it touches, is exactly, I think, the author's intention, and is well crafted in such a small space. She didn't need more space to tell the story, and that seemed to be one of the book's charms.

A terminally ill woman stays with a friend while undergoing medical treatment. This is the basic story of The Spare Room. Similar themes are the core feature of many chick flicks, the stuff that makes men wince. The Spare Room is not, however, a formulaic portrayal of female friendship. It is a painfully realistic examination of the havoc that disease plays on patients and caretakers. The novel touches on everything from minute details like selecting a rug for the patient's room, to broader issues, such as, accepting the inevitability of death.

Packed into this slim novel is a harsh look at the drastic measures a sick patient will take to rid herself of disease. Her near-delusional rationalization overrides common sense. The charlatans who profit from her desperation are portrayed unapologetically. The Spare Room is as much about medical ethics as it is about love. Author Helen Garner handles hot-button issues with grace and accuracy.

I was fascinated to read about the ways patients are treated in Australia. In some respects, the Australian medical system is better than that available to most Americans. For example, a new patient in a new city is able to schedule a same-day appointment with a specialist. In other aspects, some negative components are found in both countries. Jaded staff simply don't care that patients sit in waiting rooms for hours. Alternative therapies are outrageously expensive. Throughout the novel, one is reminded that the great doctors are those who actually pay attention to their patients.

The Spare Room is a must read for anyone caring for a loved one who has a serious illness.

Helen Garner masters the challenges of conflicting emotions in her new novel, The Spare Room. Protagonist Helen prepares the spare room in her Melbourne home for the arrival of her friend, Nicola, who will arrive from Sydney for three weeks of cancer therapy. Three weeks could be the blink of an eye, but caregiving turns Helen's life upside down, and when she feels Nicola is being treated by charlatans, her anger overflows. Nicola surrenders to Helen and other friends while maintaining confidence that she will be cured. Nicola's expectation of what friends will do seems misplaced, but Helen proves that friends can be true to one another. Any reader who has experienced hospice care or cared for a loved one will likely recognize the range of conflicting emotions that Garner's characters feel on these finely written pages.

Rating: Three-star (Recommended)

In Helen Garner's short novel THE SPARE ROOM, Helen, the narrator, takes in her sixty-five-year-old friend Nicola from Sydney for a three-week-stay while she undergoes alternative treatment for stage four cancer at a clinic in Melbourne. That treatment wil consist of massive intravenous doses of Vitamin C that leave her bent over with pain, coffee enemas-- but only organic coffee-- and eventually twenty apricots a day. In simple, transparent prose, Ms. Garner has crafted a novel that a fellow Australian Peter Carey describes as perfect. I am inclined to agree. There is not a misplaced or superfluous word here as these two friends, each in her own way, live with the specter of death: "Death was in my house." Helen is convinced and diagnoses accurately the so-called specialists at the Theodore Institute, where Nicola receives "treatment"-- she describes one of them as "in his tight suit and slip-on shoes he looked more like a salesman or a preacher"-- as crooks and charlatans. Nicola, on the other hand, of course has to trust them. "I don't have a choice." Their two competing attitudes provide much of the tension as Nicola gets progressively worse and Helen becomes more and more frustrated as her nightly vigil over her friend becomes a "lamp-lit labour."

Ms. Garner contrasts beautifully the dying Nicola with Bessie, Helen's five-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter who plays on a trampoline and dances with only the energy of one so young. She views Nicola with "fascinated panic" and asks her granddmother-- as she confronts death for the first time-- with the honesty of children, "Is Nicola going to die?"

Both women share a roller-coaster ride as they go from one emotion to another in this story that has universal implications: anger, which is exhausting, fright, hope, despair, a modicum of pleasure-- they do watch "Million Dollar Baby" alhough the narrator reminds us that "Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love."

The author raises touchy subjects and asks hard questions: Like Helen, which one of us has not grown weary of caring for the termally ill and wished they would die--"I had lost control of my life"-- and then be wracked with guilt for harbouring such a thought? Or like Nicola, would we, staring down death-- that literally becomes a character in this novel that you will finish in one setting-- not re-examine our faith or lack of it? Or would we not say as Nicola that we have wasted our lives?

One of my favorite passages in this exquisitely nuanced novel is that one when Helen meets her "churchy" sister Lucy over grilled flounder and the two have a conversation as only family members can: "Gee, you look like Mum," Heln tells Lucy who reminds her that Nicola trusts her, that that is probably why she chose her to stay with while undergoing "treatment" and that "maybe . . . unconsciously or otherwise. . . she came to your house to die." In a surprise move, Helen, who never attends church, asks her sister to bless her. Passages like this are the stuff from which perfect novels are made.

I almost gave up on this book. Just could not handle one more "friend with cancer" book. But when I gave this book one more chance, I realized that this book of fiction reads more like a memoir - from the point of view that sometimes when a person is battling for their life, it can really annoy the crap out of you. And that's ok.

We meet Helen as she is preparing her spare room for a friend that is coming to town to undergo three weeks of cancer treatment. How hard could that be, just provide some support and comfort and then Nicola will go home to be with her family. As Helen accompanies Nicola to the Theodore Institute she realizes that her friend of 15 years is being swindled by charlatans. How do you convince a friend that she is being harmed when she herself feels that if she just holds on a little longer a miracle will happen?

Helen must now make the choice between her personal opinion and supporting her friend. How do you hold yourself in check and watch your friend make a truly life threatening decision? Told in a soul searching and at times very funny way, Helen helps her friend live her life and prepare for her death. And to learn that sometimes you can't make choices for others and you just have to hang on and cherish what little part of themselves that they are willing to share with you.

The story and author asks, "How much of ourselves are we willing to give up to help a friend?" This is the crux of the story...two good friends, one happy and moving through life, the other dying of cancer. The sick friend asks to stay a while, which turns out to be more than our heroine ever imagined. Heroine? Yes, heroine.

This wonderfully written story of the intertwining of lives of two good freinds brings the reader face-to-face with the reality of late stage cancer in all its horror. But it doesn't have to be cancer; it's just death and the anger, sorrow, denial, loss and all other emotions that goes with it. Our heroine, Helen, says, "I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger." This is just one of the many gems in the story about the hard parts of saying good-bye.

Filled with wit and humor, sadness and terror, and lovely writing, this is a quick read that will stay with you for a long time.

Garner has crafted a powerful paean to friendship, the profound generosity of an Australian woman, Helen, who welcomes her dear friend, Nicola, into her home for three weeks of alternative cancer treatment at the nearby Theodore Institute. Helen attends to the most intimate details in her preparation for the free-spirited Nicola's visit. Rescheduling other responsibilities, Helen anticipates the hours ahead with some trepidation- Nicola does have a cancerous tumor- but has done everything she can imagine to make Nicola's stay comfortable. Meeting Nicola's plane, Helen is shocked by her friend's condition, the woman barely able to navigate without assistance. Back at home, Helen realizes Nicola is sicker than she has realized, terribly thin, assaulted by chills and unrelenting pain. This is Helen's first glimpse of the rigors ahead, the night sweats, the all-consuming pain, Nicola's extreme reaction to massive infusions of Vitamin C. But the indomitable Nicola will not be deterred, steadfastly clinging to her faith in the Theodore Institute in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Alone with Nicola's stubborn refusal to accept the truth of her predicament, Helen is soon overwhelmed, emotionally and physically exhausted by sleepless nights and long days at the clinic, drained by Nicola's refusal to request appropriate pain relief. It is Nicola's rigorous spirit that eventually fills the practical Helen with a rage that consumes her as the days pass: "I was sick with shame, raging at myself... raging at death... for being so slow with her and so cruel." This friendship is built on confidence, a shared sensibility that finds humor in every situation and a mutual respect that has allowed the two women to bond so deeply. But this desperate, brittle Nicola has been altered by her disease, fueled by an unflagging will to survive, enduring harrowing, pain-wracked nights only to soldier on the next day, a rictus of a smile plastered on her face. The more pragmatic Helen is unsettled by her friend's denial, finally undone by her helplessness in the face of Nicola's refusal to surrender to necessity. Garner describes Helen's agonizing unraveling from generosity to rage: "Anger is the most exhausting of emotions."

What might have been maudlin and depressing becomes transcendent in the hands of a compassionate author who artfully dissects the many layers of human suffering, a subtle balance of good intentions and the terrible burdens demanded by such care. This is primarily Helen's journey, Nicola engrossed in her own private battle against death, an overwhelming need to dominate a condition that strips her caretaker of hope in the face of a ravaging disease. These two women in their sixties face mortality armed with their enduring affection for one another, neither expecting the emotional rollercoaster that confronts them as death asserts itself. While Helen's internal struggles are deeply painful, she aligns herself on the side of reason, her love for Nicola undiminished, albeit limited by the seriousness of the situation. This wonderful book is a repository of small epiphanies and the elastic boundaries of friendship: "It was the end of my watch and I handed her over." Luan Gaines/ 2009.

You have got to read this book. The writing is exquisite and so economical - not a word is wasted.

"The Spare Room" is a short and deceptively simple novel about a woman (Helen) whose friend (Nicola) comes to stay with her for 3 weeks. Nicola is in the final stages of terminal cancer and is pursuing alternative treatments in the hope of finding a cure. Helen welcomes her friend and intends to be supportive and nurturing, but conflict rears as she feels increasingly uncomfortable with the treatments that Nicola is enduring and the toll that they are taking on her. Nicola is clinging to hope and desperate to avoid self pity, so rejects nurturing. While this is fiction, it reads with all the truth and realism of non-fiction - this is increased by the many similarities between the narrator, Helen, and the real life author, Helen Garner.

The synopsis sounds like this will be a depressing book (and it is sad, but in the best way). However, it is beautifully written, simply and precisely. It doesn't talk down to the reader with lengthy explanations or back stories, but instead lets the history between the characters emerge naturally. You are able to feel sympathy and understanding for both of the main characters. It is a fine piece of writing and one of the best books that I have read this year.

You might not think that a novel about a woman dying of cancer could be entertaining and even funny, but Helen Garner manages this miracle in THE SPARE ROOM. The cheerfully primitive cover painting of tulips in a jug does not seem out of place, even when the story itself gets harrowing. For it represents the loving concern with which the narrator (a writer in her sixties named Helen) prepares to receive her friend Nicola, who has come to Melbourne to undergo "alternative treatments" for her stage-four cancer.

The word "alternative" is important here. For while there may be unconventional treatments that can offer some relief, it is clear that the outfit which Nicola attends, the Theodore Institute, is run by charlatans. "The room within was painted a strange yellow, the color of controlled panic. Jonquils had dried in a vase on the reception counter, behind which a female attendant flustered at a computer." But Nicola is in denial; the terrible rigors that beset her after each treatment are just "the toxins fighting their way out." However low she sinks, she bounces back with a defiant smile so brittle that there is no pushing past it. The chronicle of these absurdities and contradictions is frankly comic, but never facile. You read with anxious hope, not that Nicola will get better, but that she will recognize and accept her death. "Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love."

We know very little of Nicola when she first arrives, and she frustrates closer acquaintance by hiding so effectively behind her upbeat facade. But as that crumbles, we discover more about her as a person: a charismatic nature spirit living in a house accessible only by boat. We see that Helen's sacrifice is only a small return for the generosity that Nicola has showered on her. "A friend who has never been known to bear a grudge," Helen calls her. "The way everything you touch becomes beautiful. When people are with you they feel free." There is a radiance that enters the book at this point, more effective for the previous denial, a tight bud bursting into blossom. Only in the very last chapter of all did I feel that the natural flow of the novel was diverted, but it is a small flaw.

Garner occasionally reminds me of other writers. Comparisons will be made to the clarity of Joan Didion's THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, though I find Garner a good deal warmer. There is a wonderful sequence at a magic show that might have almost come out of THE MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT by Ann Patchett, another writer who can wring sunshine out of grief. And the final journey of this remarkable woman made me think of another recent novel about death from cancer, BADLANDS by Cynthia Reeves, an extraordinary achievement that ought to be much better known.