A slow and sometimes disjointed read. The premise sounded interesting and I love that it is set in Australia in the 80s but overall it took me a while to get through as I was just not invested in any of the characters.

Rating: 2.75

A fascinating novel with vivid characters and sharp writing. I really loved this book and can imagine teaching in a graduate class at my university.

Set in Australia, Dexter and Athena have a home with their two sons. Something is amiss with Billy. Arthur seems to also be a bit off. They attend a special center. Long lost friend of Dexter, Elizabeth and her sister Vicki reconnect. Philip is a friend of Elizabeth. Poppy is his daughter. Their lives become so entwined that lines are crossed and life is reexamined. Music, the arts, and theatre play a role in individual lives. Athena plays Bach on the piano. What does that represent? Soul searching and happiness… How will they proceed with their lives?

I was glad to read this book by Helen Garner, and important Australian writer, and I loved that this was originally published decades ago. I really like delving into books from a while ago that are rediscovered or reintroduced. And Garner's writing is lovely. That said, I had a hard time connecting with this book. There were many characters, and I had trouble figuring out where the story was going and what I was to pull from it. Some may really love it, and maybe I'll try again. I wanted to love it, but just didn't. Thanks to the publisher for giving me the opportunity to read this book.

Helen Garner's " The Children's Bach" is a fascinating short novel with beautiful attention to small details in the lives and homes of a group of people navigating their lives in 1980s Australia. The reader is pulled into the story of the characters, some of whom don't make the best choices, but most of whom find some meaning and purpose in the sometimes messy existence they're living. Unfortunately, I didn't care about any of the characters as I watched them going through each day. I'm glad, however, to have been introduced to Helen Garner who's been an important author in Australia for many years. Thank you to #NetGalley and #PenguinRandomHouse for sending me the ARC of "The Children's Bach."

The Children's Bach is a 1984 novella written by Helen Garner, an author revered in Australia. It's a sliver of life, a deep yet slight sliver that leaves the reader wanting more.

There's a family - husband and wife, sons, an ex-kind-of-girlfriend, her sister, her kind-of-boyfriend, his daughter - who am I leaving out? It doesn't matter. We jump right into a day in the life, live with them for a few weeks, and jump right out. It's set in 1970s Melbourne, but could be 1970s anywhere. Garner's prose is dense and descriptive of the physical world (inanimate object, body parts, trees, doesn't matter) and by circling around that world we get to know the characters. The story is messy, they're messy. It's life.

The way that Garner describes the ordinary was intriguing. The jumping around between scenes in the narrative was less so, making the action hard to follow, jumping between scenes and characters with zero transition. This seemed to be exacerbated by the format of the copy I received. Just a heads up that even though it's short it's not the easiest book to track. I also have Garner's This House of Grief in the queue, will be interesting to compare/contrast.

My thanks to NetGalley and Pantheon Books for the ARC. The Children's Bach was published in America in October 2023.

Thank you to the publisher for inviting me to review The Children's Bach (and apologies for a late review, work is very busy in Oct). I wanted to love this book, the themes and approach are my go to book vibes, but I struggled to connect with the storytelling/characters in this book, I was left feeling like I didn't quite get into the story even as the themes about music and the soapy family drama should have sucked me in. For me it's a writing style issue, it did not work for me and left me wanting a different way to read what is underneath a great story.

Genre: Literary Fiction
Publishers: Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor
Pub. Date: November 9, 2023

Mini-Review

Eighty-year-old Helen Garner, one of the most respected Australian authors, has a gift to cut to the heart of things easily seen in “The Children’s Bach.” According to NPR, she’s not out to wow us with a fancy style. The novel is set in Melbourne in the 1980s. An ensemble of characters is introduced to us immediately, which is initially confusing. There’s the wife, Athena, and her husband, Dexter. They have two sons, Author and Bill. The younger brother has a developmental impairment that is never explained. Unintentionally, Dexter meets up with Elizabeth, his college girlfriend, and her younger sister, Vicki. Philip, Elizabeth’s sort of boyfriend, and his daughter, Poppy, also join the roster of characters. It took me a while to piece them together, especially as Helen Garner doesn’t tend to overexplain. She assumes her readers are intelligent and writes accordingly.

Each character has a unique approach to music in its various forms, reflecting their personality and relationships with the other characters. For example, Dexter’s booming dramatic baritone demands an audience and dwarfs Athena’s attempt at musical expression. The novel has the vibe of a literary soap. Ian McEwan’s “The Atonement” comes to mind, though “The Children’s Bach” is a novella and not a lengthy book. Concisely, Garner sets up a powerful contrast between the solid, righteous Dexter and the amoral, unreliable Philip. Additionally, as we see, Athena and Elizabeth’s friendship becomes more complex as their relationships with men change. Domestic spaces of intimacy sit at the core of this novel. Interestingly, a story that can be soap-like can still lack urgency. Although this is a well-written family drama, I recommend this novel only if you know the story can be difficult to follow.

This was a very challenging book for me to get into.
I just didn't care about any of the MC,
I also felt the narrative style did not draw me in.
Cannot recommend- this one just wasn't my cup of tea.

I enjoyed this book! The prose was lovely, with many details and phrasing choices that really set scenes and gave a clear mental picture of what was happening. With many different characters written very similarly, it, at times, felt a little hard to follow, and the plot didn't feel compelling. I enjoyed the writer's style and look forward to reading other titles from her.

Helen Garner's writing is both beautiful and lyrical, but the storyline for The Children's Bach left me confused and dissatisfied.

Set in Melbourne, Australia during the mid-1980s, the story centers on the Fox family -- husband and wife Dexter and Athena along with their two sons, Arthur and Billy. Their somewhat mundane life is jolted when an old friend of Dexter's -- Elizabeth -- runs into him at an airport. This accidental meeting between Elizabeth and Dexter is life-changing for all involved.

While I admire Garner's writing, this is not a plot-driven story as much as an exploration into relationships. A different type of read for me.

Thank you to #NetGalley and Pantheon for this ARC of #TheChildrensBach.

I did finish this short read, only because it wasn't any longer. It was confusing and definitely hard to follow. Not sure I related to 70's Australia.

This book jumps around abruptly between characters and makes it difficult to follow. I felt lost and confused while I was reading it. I was so confused that I had to stop reading it and walk away.

Because this is so short, I figured I could just power through, despite it being kind of boring. A week later, I wasn’t even at the halfway point, and decided “nah.” DNF and moving on.
Thanks to #netgalley and #pantheonpublishing for this #arc of #thechildrensbach in exchange for an honest review.

Whoa…this read was difficult for me. In my humble opinion it felt so disjointed, full of characters that don’t gel together and are mostly unlikeable, except for Billy, who stole my heart. Hopefully this is truly a novel and Billy was never treated this way in his real life.
There were passages with beautiful flows of words but I kept rereading them as more often than not I struggled to make sense of what Helen Garner wanted the reader to walk away with. Some of the snippets of stories had such promise.
Thanks to Helen Garner and NetGalley for providing me with an arc of this read, recently rereleased.

THE CHILDREN’S BACH by Helen Garner was definitely not what I was expecting based on the title but it was a unique and interesting read.

At its core, Dexter and Athena and their children live a very hum-drum life in 1980’s Melbourne. It seems like they do the same things day in and day out. Sounds familiar, right? Dexter seems quite oblivious to his surroundings and the people who eventually share the same address while Athena dreams of life outside her insular bubble. Then, throw into the mix Dexter’s longtime friend dragging her other half and children and then HER sister…it goes on and on. I hope all these people are paying rent!

Anyway, this one IS an interesting study of human behavior. I’ve known a few Dexters in my day and a few Athenas, well a few of everyone in here I suppose. I had a tough time getting used to the style but did appreciate the brevity of the story. There are just a few too many people in the story to keep track of., so bring your dance card. That threw me off at times. And since there weren’t really chapters, I never knew when to take a break.

Overall I’ll give it 3 stars but I am willing to read others by this author to see if anything changes.

Thank you to Netgalley and Pantheon Books for this ARC opportunity. All opinions are my own and given voluntarily.

This little book was published in the 1980s but is being reissued as a classic now. And I can see why. The writing is BEAUTIFUL. A couple of my favorite examples:
- All the objects in the room looked liked cartoons of themselves.
- Other graves were quite abandoned; their headstones were weathered wordless, their slabs split and tilted as if cloven by lightning or from beneath by some minor, unpublicised resurrection.
- They pointed out these eventlets to each other.
The characters and the story are harder to describe. They revolve around two old friends and their families, who form new connections with each other in surprising and often alarming ways. I somethimes felt that I had a fairly setted understanding of a character and suddenly they will do or say something disconcertingly shocking and distasteful. It certainly wasn't boring.
I am recommending this for the writing. If you get joy from a beautifully constructed sentence - please read this.

A reissue of a novel from 1984 that is disjointed and confusing. Several characters interplay in a series of short plots, barely related and just plain strange. I cannot say I enjoyed the book as I plodded through it wondering if it was going anywhere and if the author even had an ending. Very disappointing.
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

As a domestic fiction enthusiast, especially foreign domestic fiction, I enjoyed this novel! It is a quiet yet beautiful study of individuals in Melbourne navigating personal challenges and relationships. I recommend this to fans of vibes over plot and Australian culture.

I will not give feedback on this book because I don’t think I could do the book justice. I could not get interested in the story, and I tried multiple times. It’s not a long book, but it wasn’t for me, and I don’t want to insult the publisher.