MIDDLE AGE SPREADING The Feel of Steel. By Helen Garner. Sydney: Picador, 2001. Reviewed by Cath Darcy. Helen Garner's work has always drawn heavily on her life, and The Feel of Steel is no exception. In its 31 non-fiction pieces, a picture develops of the state of mind of this woman author nearing sixty. But Helen Garner's world view is more than just her own: it is the voice of a particular generation of artists and social activists who have now reached middle-age. As in all of Garner's books, her prior history as a radical in Melbourne's 1970s counter-culture underlies the narrative and places her current observations in a socio-historical trajectory. Her passing references to 'long-ago acid trips', her 'old hippie instinct', and to bringing up her daughter 'with her own bare hands, back in seventies Fitzroy when people slung their kids on the back of their pushbikes and zoomed away' remind us that Garner exists in Australian public culture as a talisman of that social and historical milieu. The narrator of The Feel of Steel is less the private individual Helen Garner than Monkey Grip's Nora, twenty-four years on. Throughout her career Garner has been candid about the relationship between her life and the world within her fiction. Her books chart the development of a certain type and generation of feminist through life. Through her female protagonists we can trace the shifts within her feminism, from the idealism of the 1970s, through the disillusionment of the 80s, to the self-blame of the 90s when feminism was seen to have contributed to the emotional barrenness of the forty-something double-divorcee: 'What have you women done to yourselves?' asked a male character in The Last Days of Chez Nous. 'You're like husks' (54). This frustration with feminist ideology found its way into The First Stone where, despite her clear struggle to resist attacking the young women involved in the Ormond case, Garner nevertheless accused them of puritanism, punitiveness and naivety. The author constructed herself as a 'feminist pushing fifty' who had learnt a compassion and sympathy from life that was foreign to young university feminists. The extensive commentary on The First Stone made it clear that not all of those who shared Garner's milieu in the 70s shared her politics in the 1990s. The author is nevertheless commonly seen as an icon of that era, particularly by other former hippies who have achieved similar levels of cultural cachet in the contemporary cultural and political mainstream. Although it continues heavily to inflect her reputation in 2001, Garner has left The First Stone and its difficult engagement with contemporary feminist politics behind in The Feel of Steel. A consciousness of gender relations underlies the narratives as always, but it is expressed passively here, through gentle observation. In 'Tower Diary', for example, she writes of her friend's observation of Greek dancing, where one dancer supports the weight of another's 'gyrations': 'Yes,' says A.G. later, 'but I've seen women doing the supporting. You see them –' (she mimics a small person, teeth gritted, eyes squinting, shoulders bent sideways under a weight) ' – while the bloke – ' (mimes a carefree, vain, casual frolicking and leaping). 'It's an image of the whole man/woman thing, in Greece.' Not only in Greece. The experience of ageing as a social phenomenon is a newer concern in Garner's work. She writes prolifically of her newfound status as 'nanna', and of encounters with young people: drunken boys at a train station who respectfully tone down their language and raucous behaviour in her presence; entertaining her nine year old nephew waiting in the Fracture Clinic at Melbourne's Alfred Hospital with her old and demented mother; a trio of young women in her apartment building replying to Garner's greeting 'mechanically, without even glancing up'. She fights against the expectation that women of her age will 'drop their aesthetic bundle', and continues to wear light-coloured and 'feminine' designer dresses on special occasions, to learn fencing, attend a 'Male Revue' where she finds herself scrambling onto a table for a better view, and partake of fasting and colonic irrigation at a Thai health spa. She feels like a 'daggy bodyguard' in the foyer at opening night of the Melbourne Film Festival while she babysits her granddaughter for her actress daughter, but she is joyous at the realisation that although she and friends of her age 'are not old yet, our youth has been over for a long, long time.' The disgust Garner experiences regarding her mother's slow decline adds a further dimension to this thinking about the process of ageing. She unselfconsciously describes her inner struggle to deal with her mother's emotionally draining illness, expressing feelings that most people would be too restrained to make public: There are days when she grumbles so relentlessly that the drone of her voice gets into my bones and drains the joy out of everything. Then it's all I can do not to smother her with a pillow, or tip her out of her wheelchair into the lake and hold her head under with my boot. She is as unaware of my mutinous fury as if she were an empress on a throne. Her children confess these murder fantasies to each other, and double up in silent spasms of relief: without laughter it would all be completely unbearable. In her characteristic way she makes, in passing, pertinent social comment on the 'ludicrous staffing levels' at her mother's aged care facility, which 'leave her, at times, neglected in the physical squalor of her condition'. She also rails against the 'indignities' to which the old woman is subjected as someone takes advantage of her dementia, stealing not only her knee rug and spectacles, but also her false teeth. While the narrative voice of these stories might appeal primarily to the generation whose life experiences have often paralleled Garner's, The Feel of Steel's allure is not limited to this. The experiences recounted are not all age or gender specific. Stories about the pain of a broken heart, the intense jealousy sometimes involved in loving deeply, the cultural ritual of the football grand-final and the preparation for being a bride, speak to a wide range of readers, as do Garner's musings about a sense of place and the 'appalling infiniteness' of email. As with the rest of Garner's oeuvre, however, the narratives are heavily middle-class, heterosexual and white. As I struggle to make ends meet at the age of twenty-six, working at low-paying casual jobs and engaging in a fortnightly battle with Centrelink, I feel far removed from the world of grandmas in designer dresses and custom-made shoes, tripping to the Opera. But the stories in this collection do speak to me. The chronicle of Garner's elderly mother's slide into Alzheimer's resonates as I watch my partner's grandmother slowly being devoured by a similar dementia, and 'Tess Bows Out' drew tears as I remembered my own dog's death from baiting. I shared the experience of Susan Wyndham reading this book, who was 'knocked out by the power and beauty of her writing, often about subjects as flimsy as a pair of gold sandals. In her hands, the death of a dog is as moving as her mother's decline, and her seduction by an optometrist into buying a pair of blue glasses is excruciating' (Wyndham, SMH Spectrum 18-19 August 2001, 7). There are some moments, however, where the endings to the stories seem forced, when Garner appears to feel obliged to end 'on a point'. Perhaps this is a side-effect of the form – many of these pieces were originally published in the author's weekly column in The Age. Or maybe Garner is playing with genre. The clichéd conclusion to 'Who Spilt the Wine?' suggests that the author is emulating the fable form. Above all, this is an optimistic book in which Garner appears to have recovered from the trauma she experienced in the wake of The First Stone, including the demise of her third marriage (to writer Murray Bail). Although it is the third book published since 1995, it is the first to include any work written after that year, and suggests the possibility that Garner will continue to produce quality writing about the everyday well into the future. Cath Darcy is a postgraduate in the Department of Humanities and International Studies at University of Southern Queensland. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis on the reputation history of Helen Garner.