THE CHILDREN’S BACH, by Helen Garner

THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF: The Story of a Murder Trial, by Helen Garner

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?

I felt I had walked into a room where little was coming into focus, until, quite suddenly, it did. Garner’s style is laconic and wayward, reminding me of other writers whose gift is the art of artlessness, like Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles and Paula Fox. Nothing is put forward to entice the reader to take an interest in what is taking place on the page — no dramatic events or abrupt plunges into emotion. Everything is a manifestation of Garner’s sensibility rather than a plot point, which can make for a certain opaqueness regarding her character’s motives. Yet “The Children’s Bach” seemed truer to the way we experience life than most other novels I’d read.

Now 80, Garner is one of those versatile writers who can move from genre to genre — fiction to nonfiction, including true crime, screenplays and diaries. “The Children’s Bach” was first published in 1984 and is now being reissued with a foreword by the novelist Rumaan Alam, who allows that, though he has recommended the book to several people, “I rarely describe what it’s about. … In a sense, the novel has no main character, and is less about a single person than a single period of time. Things happen, which I won’t spoil, so my synopsis boils down to this: This is a story about how life happens to all of us.”

“The Children’s Bach” is set in suburban Melbourne in the early 1980s; there is an atmosphere of casualness, almost lassitude, about its characters, who drift in and out of one another’s existence with an ease that seems both alluring and dangerous. Dexter, the anchor of the group, and also its most astute observer, is a contented husband and father; he is the sort of porous, cultured person who reacts badly to “awful modern clothes” and “spiked” hair, sticks a photo of Tennyson with his wife and two sons on the kitchen wall (“Tennyson’s hands are large square paws, held up awkwardly at stomach level”), and breaks into an aria from “Don Giovanni” when he is out walking with Athena.

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When Elizabeth, a once close friend of Dexter’s from college, bumps into him at the airport, where she is meeting her younger sister, Vicki, both of them aimless and given to a kind of unconscious destructiveness, Dexter’s family begins to lose its footing. Vicki attaches herself to the pacific Athena with an eye toward arranging her own life along the lines of Athena’s ordinary routines — ironing, preparing food and practicing Bach’s “Little Preludes” at a piano in the kitchen.

Elizabeth, elegant and regal, has long been intermittently involved with Philip, arock musician who dabbles in casual sex and drugs, and occasionally attends to his self-sufficient, seemingly motherless daughter, Poppy, while also pursuing a fling with Athena. “This hotel is a dump,” he says of the place he checks into with Athena, after she has left the safety and comfort of her life with Dexter for Philip’s glamorous detachment. “I love it.”

Elizabeth, who seems cynical beyond her almost 40 years, looks on wearily, seemingly unperturbed by Philip’s latest dalliance: “He’s always looking for new blood. Something new. A little thrill for that amusement park he calls his mind.” Athena, protected and naïve, imagines that Philip might lead her to the sort of adventurous life that she and Dexter have intentionally not chosen: “Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves clearly from all notion of consequences. Perhaps this never-quite-present Philip might be that mythical creature, a man who was utterly scrupulous and who was yet prepared to do anything. Perhaps she too might never apologize, never explain.”

By the end of “The Children’s Bach,” havoc has been wrought, and even the roving-eyed Philip has caught a glimpse of the void that lies beneath his antic, restless connections: “I will grow old and die, he thought, without moral consolation.” But the final note belongs to Dexter, who believes in rules and the fleeting possibility of beauty. Athena goes back to him and the house “fuggy with the smell of children.” She opens windows and doors, puts the trash in the incinerator and the sheets into the washing machine, scrubs and mops, and empties the fridge. Order, fragile but real, is restored: “Someone will put the kettle on” and Athena will return to practicing Bach.

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Garner ventures into wholly different territory with “This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial.” Originally published in 2014, it was compared to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and helped earn her a prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize two years later. The book follows the 2007 murder trial of Robert Farquharson, whose three sons drowned after his car swerved off the highway close to their home not far from Melbourne and plunged into a dam. Farquharson, embittered by a recent separation from a wife who not only got to keep the newer of their two cars but rapidly found a new man, insisted that he had blacked out at the wheel after a coughing fit and that his sons’ deaths were tragic accidents. “The coughing fit story,” Garner observes early in her account, “provoked incredulity and scorn. The general feeling was that a man like Farquharson could not tolerate the loss of control he experienced when his wife ended the marriage.”

Much of the book revolves around the disputatious inquiry that constitutes a courtroom trial, the back-and-forth between the prosecutor and the defense lawyers, the questioning and cross-examination of witnesses for both sides. This part is gripping, as we watch Farquharson, a window-washer at a resort — who reminded me of the hapless Charles Bovary, unlucky in love and life — come into focus as a passive, well-meaning man and devoted father (“a softie,” his ex-wife calls him).

He may have been driven by rage and vindictiveness to do the unthinkable — on Father’s Day, no less. He sits “in a glaring white shirt with a stiff collar and tie,” hunched and humiliated in the dock, frequently sobbing and scrubbing at his face with a handkerchief. He is a person Garner alternately pities and condemns but never condescends to.

Farquharson’s former wife, Cindy Gambino, who originally backs up his story, is a figure of dignity, grief-stricken by what has occurred but also not one to embellish or deny the facts that led up to her ex-husband’s actions. She admits to his being “a very good provider” but also that she was not in love with him and eventually asked him to leave. “He went to live with his dad,” she explains. “He was devastated. It was a case of you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” She is clearly the smarter and more ambitious of the two, and the couple emerge as a mismatch from the start, one with fatal consequences.

There is also a certain amount of tedium that is part of any trial, especially when it involves granular details, such as which way the car swerved, the exact placement of the tire tracks and whether the front passenger door was opened underwater by one of Farquharson’s sons. Garner is good at capturing it all, the longueurs as well as the suspense: “As the hours and days ground on, the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom. The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns. Their heads swayed, or dropped forward on to their chests.”

Garner brings to the tragic accommodation Farquharson has made with the disappointments and failures of his life her curiosity and empathy, along with a rigorous regard for the truth. Toward the end of the book, after having listened closely to the “mighty barrages of fanatical detail” and having been “battered by the apparatus of so-called reason,” she still wavers on the issue of Farquharson’s guilt, stirred by the painful gray aspects of a situation that keeps being painted, the better to come to a verdict, in black and white. “What was the point?” she wonders. “What was the truth? Whatever it was, it seemed to reside in some far-off, shadowy realm of anguish, beyond the reach of words and resistant to the striving of the intellect.”

Helen Garner is a prodigiously gifted writer, one with many quivers in her bow. “This House of Grief” is the sort of book Joan Didion might have written if she’d had more of a heart, while “The Children’s Bach” achieves a cumulative effect that leaves a lasting impression. Another novel by Garner is scheduled to be republished next year, which is cause for celebration. It’s high time American readers knew her generous, category-defying imagination.

Daphne Merkin’s most recent book is the novel “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love.” She is currently at work on a memoir about psychoanalysis.

THE CHILDREN’S BACH | By Helen Garner | 160 pp. | Pantheon | $25

THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF: The Story of a Murder Trial | By Helen Garner | 300 pp. | Pantheon | $27