Novel Readings

A huge wave of fatigue rinsed me from head to foot. I was afraid I would slide off the bench and measure my length among the cut roses. At the same time a chain of metallic thoughts went clanking through my mind, like the first dropping of an anchor. 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.

I was not prepared for The Spare Room. It sounds like the kind of book that is sad but uplifting: one friend, dying of cancer, comes to stay with another friend, who has a spare room and lives nearer the treatment center. We know this story, right? We have cried over variations on it in many films and novels, finishing them wrung out but also restored. Death is terrible, but friendship (or family, or love) is strong. Death always wins, of course, but that harsh truth can at least be reassuring cushioned with sentiment—I think (I know!) that is part of the appeal.

The Spare Room is about the strength of friendship, but not one harsh truth is cushioned with any softer emotion in Garner’s gut-punch of a novel. Helen’s good intentions towards her terribly ill friend Nicola are tested from the moment Nicola appears at the airport, “staggering like a crone.” “How long had she been this bad,” Helen wonders, after managing with great struggle to get Nicola into her nightgown and then into bed; “Why hadn’t someone warned me?”

It turns out that worse even than Nicola’s phases of debilitating weakness is her adamant refusal to acknowledge reality. The treatment she has come for is obvious quackery, a scam perpetrated on the desperate. The “medical” staff at the clinic are unqualified, uncaring, rapacious—and even their notes in Nicola’s file show that they know she is a terminal case, though this does not stop them from taking her money for their fraudulent services. What is a friend to do, in these circumstances, when the only honest path forward is to insist on the futility of hope?

And taking care of her is so much work! Nicola is beautiful, charming, extravagant, and in complete denial, including about the burden her visit is placing on Helen, who has to change her bedding repeatedly when she sweats through it or worse; tend to her through nights of wakefulness caused by intense pain Nicola insists on believe is caused by her treatments ‘driving out’ the cancer’; drive her to appointments, wrangle medications, struggle to find food she can tolerate. What kind of life is this, for either of them? “Death was in my house,” says Helen, but Nicola will not see it.

Helen gets some help when Nicola’s niece Iris and her boyfriend come to stay for a while. The logistical assistance is welcome but even more bracing for Helen is the reassurance that she is not a terrible friend, that Nicola’s demands and expectations are truly outrageous, that the rage Helen is feeling is a perfectly reasonable response to the combination of extreme pressure and Nicola’s relentless denial of reality. “Want to hear my theory?” Iris asks;

There’s a lot of horribleness that Nicola refuses to countenance. But it won’t just go away. It can’t, because it exists. So somebody else has to sort of live it. It’s in the air around her. Like static. I felt it when she walked into the house tonight. It was like I suddenly had a temperature. My heart rate went up.

I stared at her. “You mean it’s not just me?”

It turns out that being a real friend means doing something incredibly hard and, in a way, unkind: confronting Nicola with the truth. “Wake up,” Helen finally says; “You’ve got to get ready.”

The Spare Room still does not take the easy path: there are tears, but there is no epiphany, no bedside reconciliation or moment of grace.  Or not ‘on camera,’ as it were—not while Nicola is still in the spare room, not before Helen draws the line when Nicola proposes staying even longer while she has and then recovers from surgery:

“Will you fucking listen to me?” I said shrilly. “I. Can’t. Do. It. . . . I’m worn out. I can’t go on.”

Can you even say that, to anyone, much less to your beloved friend who is the one who literally can’t go on? Can you admit that she has asked for too much, that you have no more to give? Does telling her that make you a bad friend, or, worse, a bad person? Garner brings in, proleptically, a glimpse of the future that helps us answer this question kindly, thanks in part to some unexpected generosity from Nicola—who does not die in Helen’s spare room (as I’m sure the Hollywood version would want) but later, after Helen has taken her back to the airport and “left [her] place at Nicola’s side.” “It was the end of my watch,” Helen says; “and I handed her over.” After all they and we have been through, that seems like enough.

I haven’t read Garner before. I picked up The Spare Room at the library after listening to Claire Lowdon talk about her recently published diaries on the TLS podcast (which I always enjoy a lot). Lowdon confessed herself not a huge fan of Garner’s fiction, but she singled out The Spare Room as exceptional. I can see why. If any of you are Garner enthusiasts, which novel would you recommend I try next?