Cirrus@Austlit

'I had never heard of the Australian writer Helen Garner when I started reading her novel “The Children’s Bach,” and the book puzzled me at first, before I got into the scatty, nonlinear rhythm of its prose. We are immediately introduced to a cluster of characters: Dexter; his wife, Athena; their two little boys, one of them developmentally disabled; the adult sisters Elizabeth and Vicki; Elizabeth’s lover Philip and his adolescent daughter, Poppy. How, I wondered, were the characters connected to one another, and why did Garner’s sentences seem to float through the air like random thoughts?' (Introduction)